Ranking startups by the biggest venture capital funding rounds as of 2017

Funding and the Startup Fever…
2017 is rife with the startup fever. Young entrepreneurs are coming up with crazy new ideas to start businesses and implementing them with panache! But surely you need something more than just creative, out of the box ideas to start and run a business. If anyone’s wondering if that “something” is capital, you’re right. Capital is the sine-qua-non of any business which is why there’s a lot of hue and cry for funds especially in the initial stages of building a startup.
Luckily, for entrepreneurs of this age, there’s no dearth of investors. From angel investors to seed funds and venture capitalists, all provide handsome sums of money to people with brilliant and feasible ideas for business. So let’s find out startups that have gone through highest venture capital funding rounds and bagged them too!
1. ‘Laurel & Wolf’
Funding: $25 million
Venture Capitalist: Charles River Ventures’ Saar Gur
This wonderful startup does a wonderful thing- it connects you with the most amazing designers in the field of Interior Design. You could turn your living space into a scene from a fairy-tale just by the click of a button. They also let you specify your room’s dimensions and your preferences and they connect you to a designer. You can even choose your designer. And all this at a price you just can’t refuse.

Investor Gur predicts that soon this idea would become mainstream and we have no doubts that it will. The funding it received surely puts it as one of the highest venture capital funding round winners!
2. ‘Discord’
Funding: $29 million
Venture Capitalist: Sequoia’s Matt Huang and Kleiner Perkins’ Eric Feng
This one’s for gamers. The gaming community is gaining traction at an unbelievable speed. Discord only enables this further. No need to Skype. No need for Team Speak. You have Discord connecting you with gamers from all over the world in a jiffy. It creates a unified platform for the gaming community.

For Feng, this startup definitely has scaled incredibly which explains the huge funding. Does it make Discord one of the highest funded startups? Surely!
3. ‘Hollar’
Funding: $49 million
Venture Capitalist: Kleiner Perkins’ Eric Feng
Holler is for all those bitten by the online shopping bug. You get cheap, credible goods online. Holler is basically a dollar store i.e. a store that sells you good stuff at the cheapest possible price. Only Hollar is online! Saves you time and energy and of course, a lot of money.

If you have to figure out startups having received the highest venture capital funds then this sure is one. Venture Capitalist Feng says that holler is becoming increasingly popular owing to the ease and convenience it provides to shopping lovers.
4. ‘Houseparty’
Funding: $69.5 million
Venture Capitalist: Science’s Peter Pham
Houseparty is an app that lets you chat in groups. It offers group video chats with enormous ease. It has had the most amazing venture capital funding rounds and the list of investors is huge. Furthermore, it lets you connect with almost eight people at once. Quite interestingly, it is also responsible for shutting down MeerKat, an app allowing live video streaming.

Peter Pham, the big venture capitalist who granted Houseparty $69.5 million in funds, fell for its uniqueness in terms of facilitating “socializing”. This definitely puts the startup within our most successful funding category.
5. ‘Zipline’
Funding: $85 million
Venture Capitalist: Sequoia’s Matt Huang
You could be living in a remote, treacherous and inaccessible terrain. Crooked roads, impassable mountains, blinding forests- without any access to basic medical supplies. But Zipline will reach you. Because it has mastered the tech game. It is the world’s first medical delivery service- delivering its services via drones to distant lands. No wonder, its services are becoming a hit in Rwanda where such supplies have become a dire need.

And no wonder it is also amongst those startups that have received the highest venture capital funding rounds. Matt Huang sees huge potential for growth in the startup and its amazing cause.
6. ‘Minted’
Funding: $89 million
Venture Capitalist: Canaan’s Maha Ibrahim
Weddings. Stationary. Art. Home. Minted lets you design all by connecting you with the most relevant and brilliant designers pertaining to each field. What more, it’s affordable! And no, they don’t impose their designs on you. Customers can easily vote on what they want and make suggestions which makes it a truly customer-friendly business.

Needless to say, the enormous $89 million funding makes it a good contender in the game of startups as ranked by the highest venture capital funding round. For Ibrahim, this creative startup is here to stay and here to grow.
7. ‘The Real Real’
Funding: $123 million
Venture Capitalist: Canaan’s Maha Ibrahim
Located in the San Francisco Bay area, this brilliant startup does a wonderful job. It authenticates products by luxury brands and resells them at a much lower price. You can get all your dreamy Gucci and Versace and Louis Vuitton at quite an affordable price here. It accords its rapid growth to its no-fake policy.
For Ibrahim, this startup has done wonderful by scaling rapidly in a short span of time. It has actually tapped into a very dynamic space and thus redesigned the shopping space. It definitely figures amongst those that have received highest venture capital funding round.
8. ‘Opendoor’
Funding: $320 million
Venture Capitalist: Charles River Ventures’ Saar Gur
Obviously this startup figures as one of the highest funded startup ventures. $320 million is huge. But what is it doing? Well, it’s redefining the real estate arena. It makes selling houses a “hassle-free” process. Basically it removes all the uncertainty, repairs and showings involved in making a decent sale by buying homes directly.

Gur is positive that this startup is going to scale real good in the coming future. It is already reinventing the local real estate space. Growth is certain. No wonder it has had one of the most successful funding.
9. ‘Affirm’
Funding: $520million
Venture Capitalist: Andreessen Horowitz’s Alex Rampell
This is one startup that’s trying to reinvent the finance industry space. By providing cheaper, more accountable and transparent products to people, it aims to improve their lives drastically. Extremely customer oriented, it’s giving new shape and form to transparency in matters related to consumer credit. And barely does it shy away from taking responsibility for its actions.

No wonder it figures amongst startups that have passed and won highest venture capital funding rounds. Rampell is awed by Affirm’s reinvention of the finance industry. The simplicity of its solutions and services is certainly worth the enormous funding it has received.
10. ‘Social Finance’ (SoFi)
Funding: $1.58 billion
Venture Capitalist: Andreessen Horowitz’s Alex Rampell
Wow. Let’s just take a minute to digest this. 1.58 billion! That’s a whooping amount of funding. And this is precisely why this ranks at the top of the startup game in terms of the highest venture capitalist round. Wondering what it does? Well, this novel startup is redefining the loaning industry. Their website welcomes you by “Welcome to a new kind of finance company”.

For Rampell, funding SoFi with such an incredible amount wasn’t very difficult simply because SoFi is tackling a complex issue with creative and novel solutions. Furthermore, refinancing student debts hasn’t been easier than what they’ve turned it into! Does it come as a surprise that it is one of the highest funded startups? The answer is pretty simple, isn’t it?
