|
April ended with a week flush with M&A and funding deals. Last week, there were 113 M&A deals and 117 funding, a ~ 20% increase from the previous 3 weeks in April.
Nearly half of the U.S. will reopen in some form beginning this week. About a dozen states tentatively returned to public life on Friday, the first mass reopening of businesses since the coronavirus pandemic brought America to a standstill six weeks ago. However, capacity limits put business owners in a tough spot.
In the hardest-hit industry- restaurants, new businesses are still opening even during the shelter-in-place order. It certainly provided signs of hope for the industry despite the long road to recovering still.
Ground travel in China is now back to pre-coronavirus level, almost 4 months after the lockdown. However, air travel still lingers at a low level, only at 40% of the January levels. Could the rest of the world see a similar v-shaped recovery?
While layoffs from later stage startups have been all over the news, the picture is different at the early stage. Teams are typically small and there isn’t much excess headcount to begin with. 41% of startups aren’t making any changes to their teams. The most common actions taken by startups that need to cut headcount expenses are hiring freezes (32%) and reducing salaries (21%). So far, layoffs and furloughs have come into play to a lesser extend.
|
