Weekly Venture Highlight: 1/31

BuiltWorlds tracked 50 venture deals completed across 16 countries driving more than $960M in early-stage capital inflows across our three venture categories in the first 30 days of 2023, surpassing the booming fundraising environment this paper-trailing startup ecosystem saw in 2022.

International innovation in the built environment is providing a healthy buoy to global entrepreneurial efforts with more than half of 2023’s VC inflows coming from outside US borders.

At the same time, the US economy has illustrated extraordinary resilience to the Federal Reserve’s most hawkish rate hike cycle in over 4 decades with inflation-adjusted Q4 GDP growth coming in marginally above expectations at +2.9%, while employment data continues to support a robust economic narrative.

New ventures exploded in 2022, with the number of small businesses doubling to 33 million, generating millions of new jobs while supporting healthy digitally empowered B2B resilience. Inflationary pressures have been decelerating for 6 months now, and now the Federal Reserve is looking towards a rate reversion in mid-to-late 2023.

Below depicts the Fed Fund's projected rates hike schedule with each date representing an FOMC meeting (Fed policy decision). These projections are driven by big banks via Fed Fund futures contracts (hedging mechanisms that depict traders'/bankers' forecasts for the Fed Fund rate). These probabilities can be understood as the minimum expected rate following each preceding FOMC meeting throughout 2023.