Good morning, Bay Area. Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) on Thursday announced $300 million in new climate-related commitments, $200 million of which will personally come from Marc and Lynne Benioff. Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. (Nasdaq: FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected Thursday to offer a more fleshed-out vision of the metaverse, an online virtual moonshot that he believes will attract younger users. Here's what else you can expect in local business news this Thursday morning.
Hotel workers strike
Hotel workers are demonstrating this morning at the DoubleTree by Hilton Berkeley Marina and will continue this afternoon with a march through San Francisco starting at Union Square. The workers — who represent jobs in hospitality industry such as hotel housekeepers, cooks and servers — are demonstrating as part of a larger strike across the U.S. and Canada, according to union Unite Here, which said the Berkeley DoubleTree hotel is increasing responsibilities for workers — many of whom make minimum wage — while attempting to cut jobs. (KRON4)
Luxury senior living
Two national developers, Related and Atria Senior Living, have teamed up to form Coterie, a senior housing development company whose first two offerings will be in San Francisco and New York. In San Francisco the company is building a 13-story, 208-unit apartment complex at 1001 Van Ness Ave., which will open in March of 2022. The Van Ness Avenue building is on the site of the former KRON-4 studio and will offer residents three meals a day prepared by a team of Michelin-rated chefs. Two-bedroom units start at $16,600 and range up to $27,000 a month. (San Francisco Chronicle)
Renovation money repurposed
San Francisco’s school board this week reallocated $40 million of bond funding — which would have gone to renovate a historic Civic Center building into a new campus for a public arts school — to instead address repairs at the Mission District’s Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School. A 2016 measure approved by voters authorized $744 million in bonds for facilities improvements, including the $100 million for the art school, which remains vacant. The total project would cost about $400 million and require seismic upgrades to the Spanish Colonial Revival building at 135 Van Ness Ave. (San Francisco Chronicle)
People on the Move
San Francisco-based Real Chemistry, a global health innovation company, announced that Jennifer Gottlieb has been appointed to the Ad Council’s Board of Directors. Gottlieb has 30 years of healthcare experience with several major pharmaceutical and biotech companies. (News release)
Funding Watch
Hinge Health is now one of the most valuable healthtechs after it announced Thursday a $400 million Series E funding round that pushed the San Francisco company's valuation of $6.2 billion. Tiger Global and Coatue Management led the round, with Alkeon and Whale Rock acquiring ownership as part of a $200 million secondary investment. (News release)
Online analytics startup ClickHouse Inc. has raised $250 million in new funding at a $2 billion valuation. The San Mateo County-based database management business, which was started at Russian web giant Yandex NV, was spun out of that firm, which remains an investor in ClickHouse and retains two board seats. (Bloomberg)
San Francisco-based Alchemy Insights Inc., whose technology powers projects ranging from decentralized-finance startups to NFT platforms, said it closed a $250 million funding round that was led by Andreessen Horowitz Crypto. The investment values the four-year-old company at $3.5 billion, up from about $500 million only six months ago. (Bloomberg)
InCloudCounsel, an S.F.-based legal management platform, raised $200 million in Series B funding. Blackstone Growth led, and was joined by Battery Ventures and Mile Paulus. (Axios)
Palo Alto-based Drip Capital Inc., a startup that finances cross-border trade by small and medium businesses, raised $175 million from equity and debt investors, including $40 million in equity funding led by San Francisco-based TI Platform with participation from existing backers including Accel, Sequoia Capital and Wing VC. It also obtained $135 million in debt facilities from Barclays Investment Bank and East West Bank, bringing the total funds raised to date to $525 million. (News release)
Yugabyte, the leader in open source distributed SQL databases, said Thursday that it has closed $188 million in a Series C funding roun, led by Sapphire Ventures with participation from Alkeon Capital, Meritech Capital, and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital. The round, which comes seven months after its previous round, brings the Sunnyvale-based company’s total funding to more than $290 million and values it at about $1.3 billion. (News release)
Fifty Years, an S.F.-based "deep tech" VC firm, raised $90 million for its third fund. (Axios)
Coronavirus Watch
The CDC announced that the agency may need to update the definition of "fully vaccinated" in the near future as boosters are becoming more widely available.
Final thought …
San Francisco-based Instacart said it's teaming with Dollar Tree, Inc. to offer same-day delivery in as fast as one hour. One small detail, though, is that Dollar Tree outlets don't exist in S.F. — you have to go to the North Bay, Peninsula or East Bay to find one.
Bay Area: Combined total square feet
| Rank | Prior Rank | Company name/Prior rank |
|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | WeWork |
2 | 2 | Industrious |
3 | 5 | Werqwise |