Venture funding slowed in February, but is still up big year over year

For the first time in many months, this monthly funding roundup is not a broken record.

In February, global venture funding saw a slowdown after a blistering back half of 2021: Startups raised, uh, *just* $52 billion, per Crunchbase. That’s down $10 billion (17%) from January, and the lowest total since August 2021.

• Even still, VCs aren’t turning the spigot off completely—last month’s total was up $10 billion (24%) from a year prior, and it’s significantly more than what was raised in any single month of 2020.

Here are three of the most notable emerging tech rounds from the last month:

KoBold Metals, which uses AI to try and locate mineable EV battery materials, raised $192.5 million in a Series B last month. KoBold was founded in 2018 and is backed by Bill Gates’s climate fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The startup says its metal-seeking algorithms analyze a combination of publicly available data and information shared by partner companies.

Synthego, a startup that attempts to make it easier and cheaper to use CRISPR for drug development research, raised a $200 million Series E in the middle of last month. The company applies machine learning and automation to certain aspects of the gene-editing process to accelerate drug development, and says it will use the new $$$ to expand these capabilities on its existing research platforms.

Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, an offshoot of Sidewalk Labs—the beleaguered smart-city group owned by Alphabet—raised $400 million in early February, bringing it to a $1.25 billion valuation. SIP is working on a wide range of smart-city projects, including a highway between Detroit and Ann Arbor that is purpose-built for connected and autonomous vehicles, which will reportedly open in part this year.