Credit Karma, which once started as a simple credit report system and is now looking to expand into a true financial assistant, announced today it is getting a massive $500 million secondary investment from Silver Lake.

As part of the investment, Credit Karma says it is getting a 23% bump in the valuation from its last secondary round, which was around $3.25 billion. That means the company is now going to be worth roughly $4 billion altogether, while founder and CEO Kenneth Lin will remain the company’s largest shareholder. That, in the end, is likely important for investors and early employees even as they look to get some liquidity as many look to these founders to ensure that they intend to see the company all the way to the end. Silver Lake’s Mike Bingle is joining the company’s board of directors as part of this deal.

As companies stay private longer, those early employees that spend years at a startup before it hits that huge exit may have to wait longer for some kind of payout for their work. Investors, too, face the same dilemma, especially as the early bets are often just taken on a founder and an idea. And compensation packages early on also typically include equity as a significant portion as companies try to use the financing they raise for growth or other purposes. That makes these kinds of secondary rounds important as it shortens the window for at least some liquidation, which could help employees and investors be a little more patient.

Silver Lake is buying common stock in the company, which is now more than a decade old. But it does mean, with some kind of liquidation for shareholders, that it can likely hold off on an IPO for a little longer. It’s still building out it’s cachet as a financial advisory tool, so it may be that they sought to stay private and not be beholden to the quarterly pressures of a public company while they continue to build out that suite of tools.

Credit Karma is increasingly trying to build a suite of tools that will help it expand just beyond a simple credit score notifier. Late last year, Credit Karma rolled out a tool to be the hub for handling everything related to your cars. All of this sums up to its goal to be a financial assistant, and not just a credit report.

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After an Ars Technica report that Facebook surreptitiously scrapes call and text message data from Android phones and has done so for years, the scandal-burdened company has responded that it only collects that information from users who have given permission.

Facebook’s public statement, posted on its press site, comes a couple of days after it took out full page newspaper ads to apologize for the misuse of data by third-party apps as it copes with fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal (follow the story as it develops here). In the ad, founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg wrote “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”

The company’s response to the Ars Technica story, however, struck a different tone, with Facebook titling the post “Fact Check: Your Call and SMS History.” It said “You may have seen some recent reports that Facebook has been logging people’s call and SMS (text) history without their permission. This is not the case,” before going on to explain that call and text history logging is included with an opt-in feature on Messenger or Facebook Lite for Android that “people have to expressly agree to use” and that they can turn off at any time, which would also delete any call and text data shared with that app.

Ars Technica has already amended its original post with a response to Facebook’s statement, saying it contradicts several of its findings, including the experience of users who shared their data with the publication.

“In my case, a review of my Google Play data confirms that Messenger was never installed on the Android devices I used,” wrote Ars Technica IT and national security editor Sean Gallagher in the amendment to his post. “Facebook was  installed on a Nexus tablet I used and on the Blackphone 2 in 2015, and there was never an explicit message requesting access to phone call and SMS data. Yet there is call data from the end of 2015 until late 2016, when I reinstalled the operating system on the Blackphone 2 and wiped all applications.”

In its statement, Facebook said “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with. This was first introduced in Messenger in 2015, and later offered as an option in Facebook Lite, a lightweight version of Facebook for Android .”

When people first sign up for Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android or log into Messenger on an Android device, they see a screen giving them the option to continuously upload contacts as well as call and text history. Facebook added that on Messenger, users are then given three options: to turn the feature on, “learn more” for more information or “not now” to skip it. On Facebook Lite, they get two options: turn it on or skip. If users who opted in change their minds later, Facebook said they could turn it off in the app’s settings, with the option of turning off continuous call and text history logging while keeping contact uploading enabled or deleting all contact information they’ve uploaded from that app.”

Facebook emphasized in bold text that it “never sell this data, and this feature does not collect the content of your text messages or calls.”

Even though the opt-in screens do state that granting permission will “continuously upload info” about contacts and call and text history, it is arguable that many users don’t really understand what that means and that instead of saying “this lets friends find each other on Facebook and helps us create a better experience for everyone” (a message sweetened with a saccharine cartoon of a figure texting a little heart), Facebook should really be giving more details about what exactly will be recorded and why.

With the Cambridge Analytica scandal still fresh on everyone’s minds, Facebook’s apparent willingness to place the onus for protecting personal data on users who already feel victimized is unlikely to help them regain any goodwill. But even people who truly understand the implications of the feature and chose to opt-in anyway did so assuming that their data would be guarded as Facebook promised. As the Cambridge Analytica fiasco threw into sharp relief, that hasn’t always been the case.

The American Midwest has a long history of making stuff. During the 20th century, it was the manufacturing center for the nation, and indeed much of the world. It’s still where a surpassing majority of agricultural commodities are grown and processed. But is it also a major producer of technology startups? Maybe not as much as the coasts, but the Midwest’s bustling metropoli and vast expanses of rural land prove to be fertile ground for quite a bit of startup activity.

And that’s what we’re going to take a look at here. In a similar vein to our recent analysis of startup fundraising in the South, we’ll break down the region into its constituent parts, assessing deal and dollar volume trends in the Midwest’s two primary sub-regions, some of its individual states and the most active metropolitan areas in the U.S.’s midsection.

And, to be clear, this is not Crunchbase News’s first foray into the region. We’ve covered the region’s seed-stage interest in AI and hard tech, a few notable rounds and have always included the Midwest in all manner of data-spelunking expeditions. And to this, we’ll add a deep dive into the numbers.

Defining the midwest

Borders and boundaries are a deep well of disputes. To preempt debate, we use the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of the Midwest region which, unlike its definition of the South, shouldn’t be too controversial. If you have something against Kansas or Ohio being included in this group, take it up with the Feds.

The good folks at the Census Bureau split the Midwest into two distinct — and rather unimaginatively named — sub-regions: the West North Central and East North Central states, which are separated by the Mississippi River. We’ve included the map below.

By splitting the Midwest into two distinct parts, we’ll be able to see where most of the startup and funding activity is concentrated. Spoiler alert: The farther west you go, the startup population (and the population itself) grows more scattered.

Capital flows into Midwestern startups

Based only on reported data in Crunchbase, the Midwest appears to be affected by the same phenomenon as the rest of the country. Crunchbase News has previously found that the number of seed and early-stage deals has gone off a cliff in the U.S., resulting in a top-heavy market featuring many large, late-stage deals. And this wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for a shortfall in new startups to fill the next cycle of early-stage funding. The “hollowing out” of the Midwestern venture deal pipeline becomes readily apparent when you look at funding data for the past several years, which you can find in the chart below.

To wit, deal volume is down markedly since 2014, as Crunchbase News reported in its Q4 2017 report of startup funding activity in the U.S. and Canada. But somewhat counterintuitively, the amount of money being invested into startups is on the rise in the Midwest and throughout many other parts of the country, reaching fresh multi-year highs in 2017. Almost one full quarter into 2018, the trend appears to continue unabated.

But this chart abstracts away a lot of nuance, so let’s take a closer look at the region and its states.

Focusing in on Midwestern deal and dollar volume

We’ll start first with deal volume, because that’s a fairly decent indicator of a geographic region’s level of startup activity. Below, we’ve plotted venture deal volume, divided by sub-region.

Again, based on the reported data from Crunchbase, we found that deal counts have been on a downward trend for several years. And though some of this may be attributable to reporting delays, projected deal volume data for the whole of the U.S. and Canada (fourth chart down in the Q4 quarterly report) shows a years’-long downtrend. There’s no reason to believe that startup activity in the Midwest is materially different from the rest of the U.S. and Canada.

But what about the relative “balance of power” between the two sub-regions? At least when it comes to deal volume, has one sub-region waxed while the other waned? To a limited extent, the answer is yes. Between 2012 and 2017, the percentage share of all Midwestern dealflow going to West North Central states like the Dakotas, Minnesota and Missouri has grown from 25.4 percent to 31.2 percent, up by nearly one-fifth in relative terms.

Now let’s check out dollar volume. The chart below displays aggregate reported venture capital dollar volume raised by startups in the Midwest.

As far as the amount of money Midwestern startups have raised over time, the trendline is generally up and to the right. But that’s not the only way this differs from the deal volume data we looked at earlier. For dollar volume, there appears to be no appreciable change in the “balance of power” between the two sub-regions since 2012. Depending on the year, East North Central states like Illinois, Michigan and Ohio raked in between 70 and 78 percent of total dollar volume, but that variance doesn’t appear in an orderly trend.

Where are most Midwestern deals done?

We started first at the regional level, then compared smaller groupings of states. Now, let’s see how deal and dollar volume is distributed on a state-by-state level. Doing so will point to the states that lead the region in venture-backed startup activity. Below, you’ll find a chart of how deal volume is split between the top five Midwestern states.

And here is how dollar volume is distributed.

As we saw with our analysis of the South, the top five Midwestern states for deal volume are the same five top-ranked states for dollar volume. But there is some notable variation in how these states rank among each other and the amount of deal and dollar volume they account for.

Considering that Illinois is home to Chicago and a number of downstate universities with deep tech startup roots, the fact that it places first for both metrics shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

What might be more of a head-scratcher is Minnesota, which ranks third in deal volume but second in dollar volume. Why does it switch places with Ohio? The answer could lie in the industrial mix which, in the case of Minnesota, includes a disproportionately high number of medical device and other life sciences companies, which typically take a lot of capital to get off the ground.

The top Midwestern startup cities

Longtime readers of Crunchbase News may remember a ranking of Midwestern startup cities we wrote back in August 2017. However, here we’re just focusing on deal and dollar volume over the past 15 months, since the start of 2017.

Let’s start first with the top 10 Midwestern cities as measured by number of startup funding rounds.

And in the chart below, you can see the top cities, as ranked by venture dollar volume, from the same period of time.

In both rankings, four of the top five cities are the same, but the odd one out appears to be Columbus, Ohio. Although there were a fairly large number of rounds raised by startups in that metro area, most of the rounds were fairly small by national standards. And one of the main reasons why Kansas City, Missouri jumped so much in the dollar volume rankings was a $100 million Series F round raised by C2FO.

But, again, as far as the Midwest goes, everything pales in comparison to Chicago alone.

For many, the Midwest is in a kind of Goldilocks zone. The East and West coasts seem to hold more or less equal sway over the culture and economy and most of its cities are neither too big nor too small. The only extreme it seems to occupy is its winter weather.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has taken out a full page ad in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and six UK papers today to apologize Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to CNN’s Brian Stelter.

The ad starts in bold letters, saying:

“We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”

The ad was published on Sunday, following Zuck’s first public acknowledgement of the issue on Facebook and a subsequent media tour earlier this week.

Congress has also put Mark Zuckerberg on notice to potentially come speak with them, with Senator Kennedy of Louisiana encouraging Zuck to “do the common sense thing and roll up his sleeves and take a meaningful amount of time talking to [them].”

For those of you still unsure what’s going on with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, you can see a full play-by-play here.

Here’s the full transcript from the print ad:

We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.

You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014. This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

We’ve already stopped apps like this from getting so much information. Now we’re limiting the data apps get when you sign in using Facebook.

We’re also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected.

Finally, we’ll remind you of which apps you’ve given access to your information — so you can shut off the ones you don’t want anymore.

Thank you for believing in this community. I promise to do better for you.

Mark Zuckerberg