A year ago, crypto was reaching ever new highs, and I was talking about whether ICOs would supplant the VC funding round and warning about Kim Jong Un’s crypto trading operations.

And then the world turned upside down.

Crypto prices are near rock-bottom prices, with Bitcoin hanging around $4,000 and Ethereum around $113, down from their highs earlier this year of around $16,600 and $1,400, respectively.

While that has put a dampener on the enthusiasm of a lot of cryptocurrency retail investors, the bigger question is how do institutional players work through this market? What’s the strategy for finding value in this technology sector long-term?

I chatted with Alexander Liegl, who may just have at least part of the answer. He’s the founder of Layer1, which announced a $2.1 million fundraise this week from Peter Thiel, Digital Currency Group and Jeffrey Tarrant.

Liegl saw a huge challenge in the blockchain and cryptocurrency spaces: too many good ideas and not enough developers working on product development work. So he decided to create an “activist fund for cryptocurrencies” that would “take concentrated bets on protocols that we think have a need in this world.” Layer1 then supplies developers and other experts to provide “infrastructure and support,” he explained. “An operating entity like us can have a lot of influence in moving the needle.” He describes Layer1 as “a combination of Polychain and Blockstreet” and “the Rocket Internet of crypto.”

That might sound vaguely similar to ConsenSys, the loosely coupled group of startups and infrastructure engineers trying to build out Ethereum, which has run into very hard times recently. Unlike ConsenSys, which was founded by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin and is directly focused on that ecosystem, Layer1 isn’t wedded to one blockchain or ecosystem, and instead selects a single project at a time through a mix of financial analysis and thesis development.

With capital in the bank, Layer1 has backed Grin as its first cryptocurrency. Grin is designed to be a completely private and censorship-resistant transaction medium, and Liegl says that “conceptually it really reconciles with our view in the space.” He particularly liked that Grin has an anonymous founder like Bitcoin, as no founder controls the governance of the project. Grin is intending to publicly launch in mid-January.

I asked Liegl how he was responding to the crypto crunch this year in the markets, and he considered it far more of an opportunity than a detriment to his work. “I’m really pumped about all of this,” he explained. “A lot of the bad actors have to be flushed out.” He noted that the low of the bear market may not be reached yet, but that Layer1 was in a good position to take advantage of the timing. “We raised the newest dollars, so we are not suffering from any of these ICO-induced problems,” he said.

Liegl, who graduated from Stanford in 2015 and briefly worked at Stanford’s endowment, has certainly seen the vagaries of the cryptocurrency markets. He learned about Bitcoin during its first popular run-up in 2013, even convincing his parents to invest in the budding project.

Now, he has his eyes set on Grin, and then additional projects. He thinks Layer1 will invest in a new project roughly every six to nine months, which will accelerate over time with additional capital.

While these “platform” models have struggled a bit in the venture world, I think it’s reasonable that blockchain projects, which often suffer from a lack of attention from developers and end uses, could use a strong engineering and popularization boost. Layer1 isn’t the first in the blockchain world to take this approach nor I am sure will it be the last, but it might be just the ticket forward for a world that has struggled to pay its employees and bills in a crash.

Meet Spot, a beautifully designed mobile app to control your cryptocurrencies. Spot looks like a portfolio-tracking app. But the company has built a strong foundation to add more features in the coming months. Spot wants to be your unique gateway to the world of cryptocurrencies.

“Spot’s vision isn’t to build a portfolio tracker — we went a bit overboard with this feature,” co-founder and CEO Edouard Steegmann told me. “Eventually, we want to become the app to manage all your cryptos, a sort of Revolut but with a crypto DNA.”

When you first install the app, you can connect it to your existing wallets by adding public addresses. Even if you store your tokens on a hardware wallet, Spot can read the public details of your wallet to show them in the app.

“We have our own nodes on Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Stellar and others to recover the amount on your wallet,” Steegmann said. Data is also cross-checked with third-party services to make sure that everything is fine.

Spot also lets you connect to an exchange account using API keys. Right now, the app supports Binance, Kraken, Bitfinex and Poloniex, but the company already plans to add more exchanges.

The app then gives you a detailed overview of your holdings across all services and wallets. You can see detailed charts, and discover which token is performing better than the rest. It’s also one of the most well-designed mobile apps I’ve seen this year — the animations and interactions are gorgeous.

But Spot doesn’t rely on an API to get pricing information for each token. “We’ve rebuilt CoinMarketCap from the ground up, and we’re one of the few companies that have done it,” Steegmann said. The company stores pricing information for dozens of tokens across 150 exchanges. That’s a lot of pairings.

If you tap on the Spot logo at the top of the app, you can see the maximum value of your portfolio if you cash out on exchanges with the highest prices for your tokens. The company makes sure that there’s enough volume to show you coherent prices.

Spot thinks that controlling your own data is too important to rely on API calls. When you have your own data, you don’t have any API rate limits, you don’t have a major dependency and you can scale more calmly.

Up next, you’ll be able to trade directly in the app. The company isn’t going to build its own exchange, but you can expect to buy and sell tokens on a third-party exchange without having to visit the website.

“We think that many things will be tokenized and that there’s no user-friendly interface to transfer, receive, buy and sell,” Steegmann said.

The company raised a $1.2 million round (€1.056 million to be exact) from Kima Ventures and business angels, including Eric Larchevêque and Thomas France from Ledger, Jean-Daniel Guyot, Thibaud Elzière, Eduardo Ronzano, Nicolas Steegmann, Sébastien Lucas and Nicolas Debock.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

A new startup using AI to look after elderly people at home has raised a new round of funding to apply its platform to detect changes in gait or behavior, falls or stumbles. In other words, it could start to predict changes in long-term health.

CherryHome, the home AI security system created by startup Cherry Labs, has raised $5.2 million in funding from GSR Ventures to drive the technology’s use for in-home senior care. CherryHome uses its proprietary computer vision algorithms to interpret camera data into virtual “skeletons.” These are used by the AI to understand and analyze home events and people’s behaviors, such as how someone might develop a limp over time, for instance.

The startup competes with Safely You, which sends alerts in response to very obvious falls; Nest and Lighthouse, which tend to only offer very basic AI over its imaging; and Amazon’s Ring, which only offers outdoor security.

With CherryHome, all information is processed locally, so the video doesn’t leave the house, while the senior citizen is replaced in the video with a virtual “stick-person” to preserve their privacy. This last aspect, in particular, is a really good idea.

With this new round of funding, CherryHome has signed pilot deals with TheraCare in-home care-giving service and TriCura, a tech ecosystem for care agencies. Both are based in the Bay Area.

Max Goncharov, CEO and co-founder of CherryHome says: “Understanding human behavior has a long list of applications, from home security to in-home senior care to the overall goal of making smart homes totally autonomous. But improving senior care is arguably one of the most important areas for technological improvement.” He says seniors currently make up 15 percent of the U.S. population, and by 2030, one in five Americans will be of retirement age. Several studies show the majority of those people wish to remain at home, as opposed to moving into an assisted-living facility.

We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups, so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off.

The event will be held at Work In Progress, 317 South 6th Street on Wednesday, January 9, 2019 between 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM PST.

There are only 200 tickets, so if you want to come please pick one up ASAP. The meetup is open to everyone, so head over if you’d like to talk tech. You can pick up a ticket here.

If you’d like to pitch at the event I’ll be picking 10 companies that will have three minutes to pitch without slides. Because this is a hardware event I recommend bringing a few of your items to show off. If you’d like to pitch, fill this out and I will contact those who will be coming up on stage.

See you in Vegas!

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Social game developer Zynga has entered into an agreement to acquire Small Giant Games, the startup behind the popular mobile game Empires & Puzzles, in a deal expected to total $700 million.

Zynga, which has tumbled since its 2011 Nasdaq initial public offering, will initially acquire 80 percent of Small Giant Games for $560 million, composed of $330 million in cash and $230 million of unregistered Zynga common stock. Zynga will fund part of the transaction with a $200 million credit facility.

“We’ve been impressed by the quality and momentum of Empires & Puzzles as we add another Forever Franchise into Zynga’s portfolio,” Zynga chief executive officer Frank Gibeau said in a statement. “Small Giant has created an innovative game that delivers a unique player experience that engages over the long term.”

The deal is expected to close on January 1. Zynga will purchase the remaining 20 percent of Small Giant over the next three years “at valuations based on specified profitability goals.”

Helsinki-based Small Giant Games had raised $52 million in equity funding from EQT Ventures, Creandum, Spintop Ventures, Profounders and others since it was founded in 2013. The company reported $33 million of revenue for Empires & Puzzles, its most popular game, 10 months after its launch in 2017. Small Giant, which is also behind Alliance Wars and Season 2: Atlantis, says they exceeded 2017’s revenue just four months into 2018.

“Our studio was founded on the idea that small, skillful teams can accomplish giant things, and I am confident that partnering with Zynga is the right next step in our evolution,” Small Giant CEO Timo Soininen said in a statement. “We will now operate as a separate studio within Zynga, maintaining our identity, culture and creative independence. By leveraging the expertise and support from the wider Zynga team, we will amplify the reach of Empires & Puzzles and the new games in our development pipeline.”

Zynga, founded in 2007, is the developer of FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Words with Friends and several other mobile games. The company reported revenues of $248.88 million for the quarter ended September 2018, failing to meet analyst estimates.

Zynga expects to bring in $243 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018.

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Before Ram Palaniappan founded Earnin, he developed a system for employees at a payments company called UniRush, where he spent eight years as president. If you needed money before payday, he would write you a check from his checking account and when payday rolled around, employees would reimburse him.

Despite being paid what Palaniappan thought were fair wages, his workers often found themselves in a bind, needing access to wages they couldn’t expect to see in their own bank accounts for days.

“This is such a core pain point,” Palaniappan told TechCrunch. “Over three-fourths of the country live paycheck to paycheck … It’s an issue of fairness. We all have gotten used to getting paid every two weeks, but most employees would rather be paid before they work.”

Palaniappan decided to transform what he had been doing as a favor to employees into a real business with Earnin (formerly known as Activehours), a startup that helps hourly, gig and salary workers track their earnings and transfer them to their checking accounts in real time using a mobile application. Today, the company is announcing a $125 million Series C funding from top-tier investors DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Matrix Partners, March Capital Partners, Coatue Management and Ribbit Capital. Palaniappan declined to disclose the valuation.

Here’s how it works: An employee signs up on the Earnin app and connects their bank account. Earnin infers the person’s pay cycle and debits their account the amount they’ve borrowed on their payday. Earnin charges no fees or interest; instead, it operates on a pay it forward revenue model some would balk at. Earnin users have the option to “tip” the app after each transaction and that tip, in turn, is used to fund the next user’s withdrawal. If a user tips more than Earnin thinks is reasonable for the given withdrawal, it will notify the user and give them the option to dial back the tip amount.

What the company has found is that users are usually more than happy to contribute to the Earnin community of workers.

“So often, people are trying to help each other out,” Palaniappan said. “That’s the most powerful piece — how much support the community is providing to each other.”

Earnin was launched in 2014 and has previously raised $65 million in venture capital funding. With the latest investment, it will expand its engineering and product teams across its offices in Palo Alto — where it’s headquartered — as well as in Cincinnati and Vancouver.

The app, often among the App Store’s top 10 financial apps, has more than 1 million downloads, the company says, and is used by employees at more than 50,000 companies — many of which check the app every day. Palaniappan says its users are working more than 15 million hours per week. If each user works an estimated 40 hours per week, that means the app has roughly 375,000 weekly active users.

He added that the startup’s growth in the last four years has been “quite remarkable.” Given the investor support it’s received, it’s likely to step into “unicorn” territory soon. Ribbit Capital, for example, is a leading fintech investing firm with capital invested in Coinbase, Revolut, Gusto, Wealthfront, NuBank, Brex and more.

Boosted has scored some serious cash as it looks to move beyond the world of electric skateboards to conquer new forms of personal transportation.

The startup announced today that it has closed a $60 million round of Series B funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and iNovia Capital. Stanford-StartX Fund and Bay Meadows also participated in the round. Boosted has now raised north of $70 million.

Founded in 2012, the company is the most recognizable name in the growing field of electric skateboards, but Boosted is now looking to grow its ambitions to new personal transportation verticals in the “light vehicle type” category.

So, does this mean Boosted is building a scooter?

Well, that certainly seems like a serious possibility, though we mainly just have a statement from Khosla Ventures partner Samir Kaul to go off of at the moment.

“From day one, Boosted has been built as a scalable light electric vehicle company that can expand its portfolio to all kinds of vehicle form factors, including perfecting the vehicle types we see on the street today, and introducing others that are more novel,” Kaul wrote in a release. “We’re very much looking forward to 2019 and sharing what is coming next.”

The company’s bread-and-butter has long been their longboards, but they switched things up a little bit this year when they introduced the $749 Boosted Mini S. The shortboard shrunk the company’s form factor, but more critically lowered the cost of entry to their line of products.

The company also pushed further into the high-end with the $1,599 Boosted Stealth. More interestingly, the new line of hardware started being built entirely in-house. The wheels, the decks and the trucks are all Boosted-built.

With $60 million in fresh funding, investors are obviously channeling some of their newfound excitement in bike and scooter transportation platforms into the Boosted brand. While the on-demand platforms have largely been the ones gathering venture cash to date, Boosted has developed a pretty solid brand name for itself in the electric skateboard space, one that can probably step into new vehicle verticals with a certain level of prestige already attached.

After a long year fighting underage use of its products, Juul Labs has today struck a deal with Altria Group, the owners of Philip Morris USA and makers of Marlboro cigarettes.

The deal values Juul at $38 billion, according to Bloomberg, and injects the company with a fresh $12.8 billion in exchange for a 35 percent stake in Juul Labs.

Here’s what Juul Labs CEO Kevin Burns had to say in a prepared statement:

We understand the controversy and skepticism that comes with an affiliation and partnership with the largest tobacco company in the US. We were skeptical as well. But over the course of the last several months we were convinced by actions, not words, that in fact this partnership could help accelerate our success switching adult smokers. We understand the doubt. We doubted as well.

He goes on to explain the strict criteria Juul Labs had for a potential investor, particularly one from the Big Tobacco space. For one, Altria entered into a standstill agreement that limits to 35 percent the company’s ownership in Juul. Altria also must use its database and its distribution network to get out to current smokers the message of Juul.

For the past year, many have seen Juul as a dangerous toy for teenagers. In November, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced new measures for the e-cig industry meant to keep the products out of the hands of teens. One of those measures includes restricting the sale of flavored non-combustible tobacco products beyond the usual cigarette flavors of tobacco and menthol.

But after nearly a year of playing defense, this new deal marks a bit of an offensive push from Juul Labs. The company has always stressed that its main goal is to give smokers a meaningful alternative to combustible cigarettes. Partnering with Big Tobacco may not seem like the best way to do that, optically speaking. But Altria has agreed to a few measures that would get into the hands of actual smokers information about Juul, including:

providing Juul with access to its retail shelf space, meaning that Juul’s tobacco and menthol products will be merchandized right alongside Altria combustible cigarettesAltria will include direct communications about Juul to adult smokers through cigarette pack inserts and mailings via Altria companies’ databasesAltria will support Juul via its logistics and distribution networks, as well as its sales team, which works with more than 230,000 retail locations

In the release, Altria said that part of the reason for the investment is simply that the organization understands change is coming to the tobacco industry.

Howard Willard, Altria’s chairman and chief executive officer, had this to say in a prepared statement:

We are taking significant action to prepare for a future where adult smokers overwhelmingly choose non-combustible products over cigarettes by investing $12.8 billion in JUUL, a world leader in switching adult smokers. We have long said that providing adult smokers with superior, satisfying products with the potential to reduce harm is the best way to achieve tobacco harm reduction. Through JUUL, we are making the biggest investment in our history to achieve that goal. We strongly believe that working with JUUL to accelerate its mission will have long-term benefits for adult smokers and our shareholders.

Altria has made a few big moves lately, including acquiring a 45 percent stake in cannabis company Cronos earlier this month. The company also announced this month that it would discontinue its own e-cig products, including all MarkTen and Green Smoke e-vapor products, and VERVE oral nicotine products.

“This decision is based upon the current and expected financial performance of these products, coupled with regulatory restrictions that burden Altria’s ability to quickly improve these products,” read the press release. “The company will refocus its resources on more compelling reduced-risk tobacco product opportunities.”

Now we know that those opportunities look like an extra-long thumb drive called Juul.

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Gamelearn, which develops video games to deliver corporate training, has scored $5 million in Series A funding. Participating in the new financing round is previous backer Kibo Ventures, along with Oak3Capital, All Iron Ventures, UL Invest, and Inveready.

The Madrid-based startup says that will use the new capital to boost the company’s production of “serious games” and reinforce its international presence. It currently has customer base of 2,000 clients, spanning 50 countries. Those clients include LG, Thyssen Krupp, UPS, Hyundai, P&G, KPMG, Tetrapak, and Merck&Co.

Founded in 2007, Gamelearn is attempting to shake up the corporate training industry via its in-house developed game-based learning solutions and gamification for corporations. Its video games and simulators are designed to “train, communicate, inform, raise awareness and engage” employees. The company’s founders are Ibrahim Jabary, Mai Apraiz and Eduardo Monfort, each of whom has experience in corporate training.

Their take is that the startup’s bespoke video games and simulators can be used to meet a plethora of corporate needs, such as internal communication, digital transformation, management of change, leadership training, negotiation, time management, customer service, product training, project management or compliance.

“Corporate training is boring and non-engaging,” Gamelearn co-founder Mai Apraiz tells me. “Only 30 percent of e-learning courses are completed, meaning 3 out of 4 dollars invested in e-learning are wasted by corporations around the world. We create fun and engaging training experiences that allow our clients to achieve a 93 percent completion rate”.

Apraiz says these experiences are delivered through high-quality content, gamification, and simulation in a single product, which, she claims, no other company does. “The quality of our games is the best in the market. You can compare our products by checking our competitors’ websites against our own. That’s why we are the most awarded game-based learning company in the world”.

Proof that European tech companies are increasingly thinking globally, including pan-European, Gamelearn not only sells its products globally, but offers “Customer Success” support in 4 different languages, and the startup’s games are translated into a dozen different languages.

On Gamelearn’s business model, Apraiz says the company sells licenses to play its games on the Gamelearn platform or on other commercial Learning Management Systems that it integrates with. “We sell projects as well as subscriptions,” she adds.

If you’re concerned about what you eat, there’s a good chance you’ve looked at the food in the supermarket, or in your fridge, and wondered where it actually comes from. Now urban farming incubator Square Roots is introducing a new way for you to check full history of the produce that you’re about to purchase.

To do so, you just scan the QR code or type in the lot number that the company says will be included in the packaging of all its produce moving forward. Either way, you’ll be taken to to what Square Roots calls a Transparency Timeline. You can actually try this out on the QR codes included in the announcement — the timelines show where and when the produce was planted, grown and harvested, and when it was delivered to the store.

To do this, Square Roots says it’s taking advantage of its indoor growing system, which involves refurbished, climate-controlled shipping containers, as well as “software that enables us to monitor and control every aspect of the process” — that’s supposed to help the farmers who are being trained at Square Roots, but apparently it gives the company data that it can package for consumers too.

In the announcement, Kimbal Musk (who founded Square Roots with Tobias Peggs) laid out the reasoning behind the Transparency Timeline:

Consumers across the world are demanding greater transparency into where and how their food is grown — and with good reason. As mentioned above, this past Thanksgiving, another ecoli outbreak resulted in the recall of all romaine lettuce grown in the US. This was the third such outbreak in the last two years. It put millions of consumers at major risk of foodborne illnesses. The situation was compounded by opaque supply chains in the Industrial Food System, making it ridiculously difficult to accurately trace the source of guilty pathogens. To their credit, the big lettuce producers did eventually react, and agreed to start labeling their products with a mark of the state in which their products are grown. But that’s not enough. Consumers demand — and deserve — to know more.

Musk acknowledged that some companies are trying to use blockchain technology to introduce more transparency to the food supply chain, but he suggested that the results have been “underwhelming,” and that the solution is more straightforward: “What people want to know, simply, is where and how was my food grown and who grew it? With that information, they can make their own informed choices about whether to trust the food and whether to buy it.”

Square Roots produce is only sold in select New York City locations, so the rest of you probably won’t get a chance to try this out in your own supermarket anytime soon. But it sounds like Musk has expansion plans, and he said, “As we scale, we will keep building local farms in the same neighborhood as the consumers — so we can always own the supply chain end to end.”

It was several years ago, at a tech conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., that the venture capitalist Bill Gurley issued one of what would become repeated warnings that startups were staying private too long. Comparing companies that refuse to go public to undergrads whose college careers extend several years past the point that they should, Gurley suggested they should be embarrassed, not proud, for keeping their shares in private hands. “Until you get liquid, you really haven’t accomplished anything,” Gurley said.

Whether Gurley was referring to Uber at the time, only he knows. Though his firm, Benchmark, eventually forced out Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Uber, the tipping point was seemingly not Kalanick’s determination to keep Uber privately held as long as possible, but rather an investigation into sexual harassment investigations and the employee misconduct that was discovered in the process.

Either way, it’s looking increasingly like Gurley had a point. As you may have noticed if you care anything about the public markets, they took a nosedive today. In fact, they fell to a new low for the year this afternoon, a reaction in part to the Federal Reserve’s decision earlier today to raise its benchmark overnight lending rate for the fourth time in 2018.

The Fed also signaled minimal rate hikes for next year — forecasting two rate hikes instead of three — but investors were apparently hoping for even better news.

It’s hard to blame them for seeking out more of a silver lining, given everything else that’s going on. Tech stocks are getting battered, with the FANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google) down meaningfully from their share prices of six months ago. (Amazon has held up the best.)

The economy of China — the U.S.’s third largest export partner and its largest import partner — is slowing sharply, which is expected to have an impact on the U.S. and world economies. Add trade tensions into the mix, a sprinkling of uncertainty about regulations, a splash of a possible government shutdown and the growing prospect that Donald Trump will be impeached, and you start to appreciate why the market is finally going off the rails.

Despite so much uncertainty, Uber, Lyft, Slack and now Pinterest, among many others, are racing to become publicly traded at long last. According to Dealogic data quoted in today’s WSJ, 38 unicorn companies went public this year, and more are expected to test the market in 2019.

Their venture backers will tell you it’s because the markets recognize a strong growth company when they see it, and that each is finally positioned well to tell their story, aided by some dazzling metrics. Yet it seems just as likely that they see the window, which flew open this year, starting to swing back in the other direction. And if this month is any indicator, it could be hard to pry it open again, at least in the first quarter or two.

“The market is basically closed between now, and the start of a new year is always slow because companies don’t start roadshows [until the markets re-open],” says Kathleen Smith, a principal of Renaissance Capital and the manager of its IPO exchange-traded fund. Pre-IPO companies like Uber are also waiting on their audits to close before they put any numbers in a public document, she notes. But it could be far from smooth sailing after that, suggests Smith. “In normal times, late January and February and March become very active, but we aren’t in a typical market. I can predict from other times that we’ve seen a bear market like this that it will have an impact on IPO activity.”

It’s all part of a vicious cycle, Smith suggests. As public market shareholders begin to feel less affluent and more risk averse, they start redeeming their public market shares. That leaves fund managers who might otherwise gamble on new issuers with less capital to invest, and less flexibility. “Investors are just not going to want to take on any risk positions when market has [taken a turn for the worse],” says Smith.

Put another way, if the markets are as crummy early next year as looks to be the case, it’s too bad, too sad for unicorn companies. “They made the choice to stay private and get capital,” says Smith. “I’ve stated many times that they should be getting while the getting is good. The pain can happen if money dries up, and it will dry up when the public market dries up.” 

That doesn’t mean tech’s favorite unicorn companies are doomed, of course, especially those that can show strong fundamentals. For her part, Smith notes that what often happens in a downturn is that offerings get heavily discounted. “Valuations will be chopped if the companies want investors to participate. They’ll have to be sure to make money.”

Even if they don’t get the rich prices that ambitious bankers might pitch them (or that their VCs assigned them before that), they can always grow into the valuations their investors want to see. One need look no further than Facebook to remember why a bumpy offering doesn’t mean all that much longer term.

“Just because a stock crashes below its IPO price isn’t a sign of a bubble,” says Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser. “You also have to keep in mind the dynamic of companies going public,” he says. “You expect IPOs to be overvalued. Investors in these companies are necessarily selling to the greatest fool.”

Still, there may be fewer fools willing to buy what they are selling than there might have been this year or last, and if those numbers really change, today’s unicorns will look like tomorrow’s donkeys.

They’re certainly going to face more scrutiny than they might have had they moved sooner.

“Maybe we’ll roar into 2019 and all will be well,” says Lise Buyer, the founder of Class V Group, an advisory firm for IPOs. “But to the extent that investors will be more selective, they’ll look at path to profitability, and they’ll look at the valuations these companies took when they were private.” Then they’ll do their own math, suggests Buyer.

If the market is truly shifting, public market shareholders “won’t care what valuations companies achieved when they were private,” says Buyer. “They’ll only be willing to pay what they are willing to pay.”

Pinterest may follow Lyft and Uber to the public markets in the first half of 2019, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The visual search engine and shopping tool is expected to tap underwriters in January and complete an initial public offering as soon as April. The company was valued at just over $12 billion with its last private fundraise, a $150 million round in mid-2017, and is on pace to bring in $700 million in revenue this year.

The company, founded in 2008 by Ben Silbermann (pictured), is also in talks to secure a $500 million credit line, per the report, not an uncommon move for a pre-IPO giant like Pinterest.

To date, the company has raised nearly $1.5 billion from key stakeholders such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, Fidelity and SV Angel.

Pinterest recently reached 250 million monthly active users, up from 200 million in 2017.

This year, it launched several new features to make it easier for passive Pinterest users to actually buy products on the platform, and introduced the “following” tab, where users could view only the content from brands and people they follow. It also added the Pinterest Propel program as part of an effort to create more local content for its users, and implemented full-screen video ads to beef up its advertising options — an area where it competes directly with Facebook and Google.

2019 is poised to be a banner year for venture-backed IPOs. Both Uber and Lyft are in IPO registration, filing privately to go public within hours of each other earlier this month, and Slack, too, has reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to lead its 2019 float.

Pinterest declined to comment.