Hacker News Reader

Comment by haaen | Hacker News Reader

With a post money valuation of 14.6 billion dollar, Cruise surpasses Dropbox as the third most valuable company that YC has invested in. The valuation of Airbnb is 31 billion, Stripe 20 billion, Cruise 14.6 billion, Dropbox 11 billion.

YC doesn't hold shares in Cruise anymore, since the company as a whole was sold to GM for 1 billion in 2016. After the acquisition, GM invested another 1.1 billion, Softbank Vision Fund invested 2.25 billion and now Honda invests 2.75 billion. So more than 7.1 billion dollar has been invested into Cruise. It's the best capitalised YC company. Airbnb has raised 4.4 billion, debt financing included.

View on HN

The cruise valuation is pretty suspect, as reported by The Information [0].

> When SoftBank agreed to invest $2.2 billion in Cruise, the self-driving unit of General Motors, most of the attention was on the valuation of $11.5 billion. But a closer look shows that could be inflated by terms. SoftBank’s initial $900 million investment in the firm is at a lower valuation of $8.3 billion; it is only if products are ready to be commercially deployed that it has agreed to invest more money at a higher valuation.

With unicorn-scale deals, the topline number is sometimes not reliable, as it may come with high liquidation multipliers or other restrictive agreements.

[0] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/softbank-asserts-mor...

Honda only invested $750 million in Cruise itself, the 2.5 billion is the total amount of what they are investing in the project, which includes the development of a new vehicle. As per the linked article.

That's a pretty insane multiple on the acquisition price in 2 years, is there anything you can read into that or is it pretty meaningless because of all the post-acquisition investment money being pumped in?

Almost exactly half of its value is represented by the money that's been pumped in (7.1B was the sum GP arrived at). The rest...

> It's the best capitalised YC company.

"YC doesn't hold shares in Cruise anymore, since the company as a whole was sold to GM for 1 billion in 2016.".

It's no longer a YC company.

Contextually, it's pretty clear that they're defining "YC company" as "a company that YC invested in".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com