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Welcome to the Unicorn Club, Atlanta. This morning, Atlanta-based lending tech startup Kabbage announced $135M in new funding, led by Reverence Capital Partners, at a valuation reportedly above $1B. For those of you who are counting unicorns, Kabbage is the 154th unicorn, according to the CrunchBase Unicorn Leaderboard, and the 95th in the U.S. On the heels of Salesforce Ventures' $100M European fund announcement yesterday, and less than a month after both Mosaic Ventures and Octopus Ventures launched twin $140M funds, Europe's tech scene is getting yet another boost in available capital. This morning, London- and Geneva-based Highland Europe announced a new £332M growth-stage fund for internet, mobile and software startups. CrunchBase has tracked 17 investments out of Highland's first, £250M fund and no exits to date. In the U.S., meanwhile, investors are still sounding the warning bells of hard times to come. Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures explains why Twitter's layoffs are a harbinger of what we will see in the private markets very soon. Although, when you dig into the data, fears about the venture market's decline have yet to materialize. According to Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint, 2015 is on pace to be another record-setting year of investment in terms of both aggregate dollars invested and number of rounds.
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