Carbon announced a Series D funding round today, and it’s a whopper.
The company has apparently raised USD$200M from a consortium of investors. This adds to their previous funding rounds, which had totaled USD$222M, according to Crunchbase.
The new round brings their total public investment to an astonishing USD$422M – that’s almost half a billion USD$! It is not known what percentage of the company was sold, but if we did we could back-calculate the effective valuation of Carbon. For example, if they had bought 50% of the company at that price, then the valuation would be USD$400M. However, there is no way 50% of the company was acquired, it was certainly far less than that.
This means the current valuation of Carbon is absolutely sky-high. Let’s say, for example, that 20% of the company was acquired for USD$200M. That implies a valuation of USD$1,000. One billion dollars.
Why is that considered big? It’s because as of this writing, the “industry giants” of 3D Systems and Stratasys are publicly valued, according to their stock exchange prices, at USD$1.09B and USD$1.14B respectively.
One doesn’t know the current valuation of Carbon, but this development almost certainly places their value at, near or perhaps even ABOVE those of 3D Systems and Stratasys.
We have a new “giant” among 3D printing companies.
This money will be used, according to the press release as follows:
The company will use the additional capital to accelerate its momentum in disrupting traditional analog injection molding production techniques with connected, software-first, digitally-enabled design and fabrication capabilities. Specifically, Carbon intends to use the funds to fast-track its global expansion plans and product roadmap, and will double down on its deep commitment to enabling customers to move to real-world, mass digital production at scale.
What’s also interesting about this announcement is that the group of investors is somewhat different than previous rounds. In their last round, there were a number of investing companies that could likely become actual users of the technology.
But this round includes a substantial number of venture capital firms. These are firms with big cash that want relatively short term gain, and they know where to find it. Thus it seems that the VC investment community has now realized that Carbon will be a success as they strongly expect the value of the company to grow significantly. How strong do they believe this? USD$200M, that’s how much.
Via Carbon
