What’s Possible: 24th September, 2021

We hope you enjoy this week's hand-picked selection of important and interesting stories from the frontiers of tech.

Sorare raises a record $680 million Series B round to build the next sports entertainment giant, leveraging NFTs.

New investors have backed us with a record-breaking fundraising round of $680 million, the largest in the history of French Tech and the largest in Europe for a Series B.

U.S.’s Binance probe expands to examine possible insider trading

Though it’s not based in any one country, Binance runs a massive trading operation where everyday clients buy and sell digital tokens worth tens of billions of dollars outside the oversight of government watchdogs. That gives the exchange a view into millions of transactions, and U.S. authorities are questioning whether the firm exploited that access, including by trading on customer orders before executing them.

Robinhood to launch cryptocurrency wallets

The start-up debuted cryptocurrency trading three years ago, but it has become increasingly important to the company’s top line. More than half of Robinhood’s transaction-based revenue last quarter came from cryptocurrency trading. That’s up from just 3% a year earlier.

Alternative seafood sector raised record $116M in first half of 2021

Aside from raising record-breaking funding in 2021, the alternative seafood space has seen sales skyrocket, with US sales data from January 2020 to December 2020 indicating a 23% surge to reach $12 million. Currently, alternative seafood products on the market are dominated by plant-based players, with cell-cultured seafood products yet to be commercially available.

Lithium prices are soaring thanks to EVs and this start-up has a more sustainable way to extract it

As consumers, we rely on lithium-ion batteries to power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles. Demand is soaring, and automakers can't secure partnerships fast enough to keep up.

35-person start-up, Lilac Solutions, has developed an alternative, and more sustainable, method for extracting lithium, a key ingredient in electric car batteries.

Hexagon Bio raises $61M to continue efforts to turn fungi into drugs

Hexagon is trying to apply new technology to an old fashioned approach: deriving drugs from fungi and other microbes. Historically, many of the key breakthroughs in the 20th century were found this way, including penicillin and other antibiotics, and the groundbreaking organ transplant drug cyclosporine.

Antibiotic levels measurable in breath for first time

The team’s biosensor – a multiplex chip that allows simultaneous measurement of several specimens and test substances – will in future enable personalized dosing of medicines against infectious diseases on-site and help to minimize the development of resistant strains of bacteria.

Investment in Biopharma is Reaching an Inflection Point

It is oncology that continues to dominate financings through later-stage deals. Cancer therapeutics were among the top indications with Series A funding, with 25 deals valued at $497 million sealed during the first half of 2020. As for the full year 2020, 44 deals were struck at $1.3 billion, and the first half of 2021 accounted for 34 deals at $1.1 billion.

Airwallex raises $200M at a $4B valuation to double down on business banking

“We want to own the whole ecosystem. We want to be like the Apple of business finance.”

That seems to be working out so far for Airwallex. Revenues were up almost 150% for the first half of 2021 compared to a year before, with the company processing more than US$20 billion for a global client portfolio that has quadrupled in size.

VC Mark Suster: ‘The bet we’re making now is on founder skills,’ instead of customers or products

Fast-forward a decade, and $5 million is a seed round, and now there are pre seed rounds and “day zero” companies and seed extensions and A rounds and “A prime,” there’s B … But the pressure on me is, I now need to make faster decisions. I need to be involved with your company earlier. So I’m taking a little more risk in terms of not being able to look at customers. You may not even have customers.

NASA reviews private space station proposals

The International Space Station is expected to be retired by the end of this decade. NASA is turning to companies to build private space stations in orbit and anticipates saving more than $1 billion per year as a result.

Interesting adjacencies

• Packy McCormick: What Would Bezos Build If He Were Starting Out Today? (link)
• Tomasz Tunguz: GitLab S-1 Analysis - How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up (link)
• Casey Newton: Why these Facebook research scandals are different (link)
• All the Biomass of Earth, in One Graphic (link)
• The BNPL flippening is coming (link)
• How lasers could soon power our energy (listen)
• Nine charts that show who’s winning the U.S.-China tech race (link)
• Netflix: Fantastic Fungi - delve into the magical world of fungi (watch)

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