In a year where just about everything in venture capital is going up and to the right, we wanted to look at which verticals are heating up the most in terms of valuation growth.
It may not surprise anyone following the VC ecosystem that crypto/blockchain is the vertical with the largest valuation step-up so far in 2021, according to PitchBook data. One of the most impressive valuation jumps in this area went to OpenSea. The operator of a marketplace for digital assets, OpeanSea was valued at $1.5 billion in its Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz in July, more than 19 times the value the company garnered just four months earlier, according to Pitchbook estimates. Other notable valuation leaps in this area that promises to transform the internet were Element Finance, CoinList, and MobileCoin, each surging more than 10x in value.
Valuation leaps for cybersecurity startups were the second most prominent out of all major verticals tracked by PitchBook. Investments into cybersecurity have exploded amid a spate of high-profile cyberattacks, producing a string of deals with noteworthy valuation lifts, including those for Horizon3.ai and Lacework, which advanced by more than 10 and 15 times from their previous values, respectively.
While digital health came in last on our vertical step-up rankings for the year, the area is amassing unprecedented interest from investors. Reify Health, a company that facilitates decentralized clinical trials, leapt 12.4x to a valuation of $2.2 billion. Meanwhile, the weight loss management app Noom‘s value jumped almost 11x to $4.24 billion.
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