Hola, 

Although Warren Buffett has been investing in the insurance industry for decades, there’s a growing part of it he’s described as too complex and opaque.

Yet, as our client-only research shows, “cyber risk” insurance policies written to protect businesses against losses from data breaches and cyber attacks  have grown into a $3.6B market.

Is Buffett being too cautious about cyber? Is this the 1% of today’s insurance market that will in a few years become much larger and potentially extremely profitable to boot? 

Emerging product categories such as cyber risk are coming along more frequently as the effects of software and connectivity ripple into mature industries.

Our research will continue to dig into this.

To counter Buffett's provocation: who does know what they’re doing in cyber? Will the Fortune 500 and beyond adopt cyber-risk insurance? Will insurance giants and new entrants find a competitive edge through cyber-risk product strategies?  

We love our coders

One of Stripe's distinguishing traits is its early commitment to developers. 

Check out our teardown of Stripe's business strategy, product suite, and recent strategic initiatives here.

Livin’ la vida loca
 

Latin America-based fintech cos received a record $2.1B across 129 deals last year, up from just $50M in 2013. 

Have a great rest of the week.

P.S. In the spirit of Valentine's Day, buy a ticket to the Future of Fintech (June 14-16, SF) here in the next 24 hours and we'll email you a special code for $1,000 off a ticket that you can share with a friend or colleague. 

• $12.4B: Cloud data platform Snowflake raised $479M at a $12.4B valuation — 3x its valuation at the time of its last funding round just over a year ago. The investors in the mega-round were Salesforce Ventures and Dragoneer Investment Group. 
   
• 480x: Semiconductor company Arm Holdings announced 2 new AI-focused chips, which it claims can perform machine learning tasks 480x faster than its previous designs. AI is advancing quickly and gaining traction across a broad range of industries. From quantum AI to deepfake celebrities, find out what’s coming next for the space in our 2020 AI trends to watch report. 

• $293M: Direct-to-consumer marketplace Brandless closed down. The SoftBank-backed startup had raised $293M in disclosed equity funding and was last valued at $500M in 2018. SoftBank has made plenty of other big bets: we look at what its 110 investments over the last 2 years tell us about its greater strategy in  this client-exclusive analysis. 

• +2 unicorns: Edtech startup Course Hero and entertainment company Skydance Media became the latest unicorns after raising funding rounds at $1B+ valuations. Check out all 449 unicorns — which have a cumulative valuation of over $1.3T — on our real-time tracker.

• $26B: A judge approved a $26B merger between US mobile carriers T-Mobile and Sprint. The companies hope that the combined entity will help them take on the largest US carriers, Verizon and AT&T. Meanwhile, the US Federal Trade Commision (FTC) moved to block Edgewell’s takeover of shaving company Harry’s and said that it would examine big tech’s past acquisitions. We previously mapped out the biggest acquisitions of Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple.  

• 3 patients: A clinical trial studying the effects of treating 3 cancer patients using CRISPR-edited immune cells found the approach to be safe. The results could help open up new avenues for treating cancer. Learn how the gene-editing technique works in our explainer, What Is CRISPR? 
   

• $53.8B: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation turned 20 years old, with the organization saying that it had spent $53.8B — mostly on development work and healthcare — in that time. Bill Gates was one of the top investors in companies featured in our 2020 list of game changing startups. See what tech he's backing in this report.  

• $201M: The US FTC warned that the amount of money lost to “romance scams,” where victims are tricked into sending money to people posing as romantic interests, had increased 6x over the last 5 years to reach $201M in 2019.
   

• 825 mph: A British Airways flight is thought to have set a new record for a subsonic flight from London to New York after strong winds helped it reach a top speed of 825 mph. The aircraft completed the transatlantic journey in just under 5 hours, shaving almost 20 minutes off the previous record.  

The latest extreme sport is “Everesting” — scaling more than 29,000 feet (roughly the elevation of Mount Everest) in just 36 hours. 

But instead of having to face the altitude sickness of actually hiking up Everest, participants haul themselves up a black diamond ski slope, take the gondola down, and repeat that 16 times.

Oh, and it costs a cool $4,000.