Business | After the feast, the fast

The great Silicon Valley shake-out

We look at the world’s startups and identify the safe, the uneasy and the doomed

Jun 28th 2022|San Francisco

On a busy street in downtown San Francisco sit the former headquarters of Fast, a maker of check-out software for online merchants. The offices look quiet; a for-let sign hangs above one of the windows. That is a departure from its management’s flashy habits. Last year at an event announcing Tampa as its East Coast hub, the firm splurged on backflipping jet-ski riders and pickup trucks straight from the nascar race track. Fast had set investors’ pulses racing, too. It raised $125m between 2019 and 2021, including from some of Silicon Valley’s most astute venture capitalists at firms like Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures. Then, in April, having burned through its cash and being starved of fresh capital, Fast went bust.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “The great Silicon Valley shake-out”