Equity

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and be sure to check out our most recent Friday episode, which featured news on Finix and Coinbase and Reddit, among others.(Also don't forget that Equity is growing! And TechCrunch events are about to kick off and kick some butt.)Here's what we got into this fine Monday morning: Skydio raises $170 million, a huge sum for the drone company. Will its market prove large enough, quickly enough for the company to stay VC-ready? The UK government is putting together a venture fund of sorts? That's mostly cool. Klarna raises lots of money at a new, bigger valuation. More here on its industry. Space S

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. Before we get into this week's show, make sure to check out all the news here about how Equity is expanding, and becoming even more of a thing in 2021! We are beyond hyped about it.Coming on the back of such a wild news week, we had to cut and cut from the notes doc to get the show to size. So, here's what made the cut: Coinbase filed to go public. Alex wrote about its S-1 filing here, and Danny riffed on a fascinating nuance regarding its cap table here. Hopin is raising more money, at an even larger valuation. Every time we cover the latest version of this story, we think it must be the last time. And then it happens again. So, check back here in October for when Hopin raises again. Reddit also picked up more money. Again. Our take is that the capital must mean that R

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is our first-ever Wednesday episode. If you want to learn more about the latest edition of the podcast, head here for more. This week we talked about space, an increasingly active part of the global economy, and a place where we're seeing more and more young tech companies place their focus.We were lucky to have TechCrunch's Darrell Etherington join us for the show. He's our resident expert, so we had to have him on to chat about the space startup ecosystem. Here's the rundown:SpaceX has raised a bunch more money, at a far higher valuation. We chat about why it didn't raise more, and how much capital there is available for the famous rocket company.Starlink came up as well, as the satellite array just put another 60 units into orbit. What is it good for? We have a few ideas.The second crew member of first all-civilian SpaceX mission revealed, and of course there is an IPO and s

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and be sure to check out our last main ep, in which Natasha coins a slogan for a16z that I both hate, and became the headline of the show!But enough of all of that, we have a lot to get through this morning. Here's what we talked about: The Weekend: Coinbase at $100 billion? More on that to come. Toast is going public! Probably! Wait Toast the company that laid off staff last year? Yep that Toast! It's not toast! And new rules on online lending in China. This Morning: Oscar Health put together an IPO price range that is interesting, and Apex Clearing is going public via a SPAC. Funding Rounds: Goph

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. In very good Show News™, Chris is back! He's working on the next iteration of the show, something that you will be able to see starting Very Soon. Get hype!Today though, we had a delectable dish of dynamic doings, namely news items of the following persuasion: Bitcoin broke the $50,000 barrier, something that we wanted to talk about. Especially in light of Coinbase's $77 billion valuation. Natasha walked us through some growth metrics, and Alex was sad that he isn't already retired. Danny remains a full-on crypto bull. And on the blockchain thing, Blockchain.com raised $120 million, proving that there is huge amounts of capital available for the guts-and-bolts tooling of the bitcoin world. Li Jin, who coined the term 'passion economy', has closed her debut $13 million f

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and be sure to check out our riff on whether SoftBank has another 20 DoorDashes waiting in the wings.This morning was a more relaxed Monday than I can recall in months, thanks to a holiday in many parts of the world. But that didn't stop us from parsing the news: The Weekend: This investigation into Clubhouse's data security is getting results, while over the weekend Dispo got huge in a hurry, and the Apple-Facebook dynamic got a better explaining. Increasingly the tech giant world feels like ad engines (Facebook, Alphabet) in opposition to software-and-hardware shops (Microsoft, Apple). This morning:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This week felt oddly comforting from a tech news perspective: Facebook is copying something, early-stage startup data is flawed enough to talk about, and sweet DoorDash is buying robots for undisclosed sums.So, here's a rundown of the tech news we got into (as always, jokes aren't previewed so you'll have to listen to the actual show to get our critique and Award Winning Analysis*):Ethena raising $2 million more for corporate training that is not awful, and Zeta raising $1.5 million for couples' banking. Natasha has been killing the early-stage beat lately.How Seed data could be getting harder and harder to parse from Alex's desk, and why VC data in general is dicey, from Danny's. We discuss if directional data is useful, and why the limited numbers could have a cultural impact on

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace noticed last week that we had a bevy of software-as-a-service (SaaS) stories that we wanted to chat about. So we decided to break them out into their own episode.What came out of the conversation is a mix of optimism, sarcasm, and healthy doubt regarding what's next for SaaS. SaaS matters as it is an incredibly popular business model for startups, a way to generate high-margin recurring incomes. Indeed, it's almost the default method for revenue generation amongst startups today.But precisely what SaaS is, and how it works, appear to be moving targets.This piece by our own Danny Crichton, for example, digs into a trend that he has noticed in the broader software space, namely startups taking a single task, or feature, and providing it in a manner that ascribes to best practices. For example, online checkout tech has been around since the dawn of

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and be sure to check out last week's main ep that dug into Robinhood, Miami, and a host of other topics.This morning we had a pile of news to get through. Here's the rundown: Pony.ai raised another $100 million, which underscores our growing thesis that there is no amount of money yet that will produce the tech required for self-driving cars to work. Perhaps we will get there, but it is going to cost a pretty penny or two. Sticking to cars, the Apple-Kia tieup is kaput, which we should have known the moment it became known. Apple previously bought startup Drive.ai back in 2019, of course. Vroom, a

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week's biggest tech happenings. The good news is that we managed to fit it all into a single episode this week. The bad news is that that means the show is pretty long. Sorry about that!So, what took us so much time to get through? All of this:Robinhood raised $3.4 billion after its trading hiccups, and we also chatted over what we know about the company's Q4 2020 numbers. In short, the company is growing nicely.RPA is big and UiPath is cashing in on the trend, raising $750 million at a $35 billion valuation. That's a lot of cash for very little dilution.Databricks raised $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation, after reaching $425 million in ARR. The company's growth is hot, but its valuation may be even hotter.Bumble is going public, so we chatted about its results, and how founder- and venture-friendly the datin

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and make sure to check out last week’s main episode and companion chat about Robinhood.This morning we ran into quite a lot of the same material, with Robinhood back in the news and the stock market looming large. Here's what we talked about:American stocks are set to rise, bitcoin is flat, and meme-stocks are mixed.In India, news is out that a new law could ban bitcoin (whatever that means), and this morning India forced Twitter to take down some accounts that had been critical of government policy. That's a pretty bad look. And it comes as we see a coup in Myanmar leading to a decline in internet connectivit

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace hopped online for our weekly show, sans Gamestop news (which you can find here) to talk about all the other busy news happening in startup world right now.Here's a taste of what we got into: Qualtrics IPO pricing, and the future of major acquisition pricing schemes. This company's path to the public markets has been a long-time coming, so we had plenty to say.How Atlanta's Calendly turned a scheduling nightmare into a $3 billion company. This story was not only neat, but also operated as a sort of palate cleanser for the team. Rhino's interesting insurtech play, and how it is pre-IPO pretty damn early. Revenue questions, the power of insurtech, and public markets impacting startups? This story had it all!Alex talks about how Fast is raising fast money ($102 million to be exact). Even more, the Fast story fits into a broader narrative of online ch

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This week the team — Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace — recorded a bonus Equity Shot to help our listeners make sense out of the Gamestop trading bonanza happening all over the internet. The story is fast-moving, and news continues to break (twice during our recording, in fact) about how trading apps such as Robinhood are responding to the tear. Still, this type of story is worth a temperature check and timestamp because it feels like it's a pivotal moment in many ways.Here's our coverage on the site so far for people playing catch up: How Trading Apps are responding to the Gamestop fustercluck - This piece from yesterday started our coverage of the response from trading apps concerning GameStop Gamestop, meme stocks, and the revenge of the retail trader - This piece dug into what the initial story was about, with some jokes Could meme stocks like gamestop kill bitco

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is Equity Monday,  our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and make sure to check out last week’s main ep, which was super-packed and a real treat.This morning the news was heavy, so here's your rundown to get you into the show:New funds for Clubhouse! TechCrunch has the story here, but I wonder why the app needs more money this soon. You can lay your own bets on how it performs, but at least it's fun to see consumer stuff get funded.Postmates staff are heading for the exits, and there's an IPO coming up that is both huge and under your radar.Chamath is doing the SPAC thing again. Again. And Taboola is also going public via a SPAC.IMVU raised $35 millionPula raised $

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This week we — Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace -- had more than a little to noodle over, but not so much that we blocked out a second episode. We try to stick to our current format, but, may do more shows in the future. Have a thought about that? equitypod@techcrunch.com is your friend and we are listening.Now! We took a broad approach this week, so there is a little of something for everything down below. Enjoy!Hims is going to SPAC itself onto the public markets, which should prove interesting for other D2C startups eyeing the same move.The final quarter of 2020 and the full year brought an ocean of capital to bear on US startups, something that we delighted in chewing on. Fintech is also hot as all heck.Plaid is building a fintech accelerator, which we thought was cool.An edtech startup based in Nigeria raised a $7.5 million Series A on the back of a really neat distribution

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is Equity (Monday) Tuesday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and make sure to check out last week's two episodes, covering all the news sans ecommerce, and then all the ecommerce news.We're here on a Tuesday due to an American holiday, but that short break did not mean that the world's news volume slowed down in the slightest. Here's the rundown:From the weekend: The story of a fired GitHub employee ended as you expected it would, with a small twist; the Microsoft company's head of HR is leaving. Not sure from this remove is this is a firing, or merely finding someone to axe over the error, but the fact that they are leaving stood out.Auto1 Group is going publ

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We’re back on this lovely Saturday with a bonus episode!Again!There is enough going on that to avoid failing to bring you stuff that we think matters, we are back yet again for more. This time around we are not talking Roblox, we're talking about ecommerce, and a number of rounds -- big and small -- that have been raised in the space. Honest question: do y'all plan to release news on the same week? Are trends a social construct?From Natasha, Grace, Danny, and your humble servant, here's your run-down: Webflow raised $140 million in a round that it says it did not need. This is not a new thing. Some startups are doing well, and don't burn much. So investors offer them more at a nice price. In this case $2.1 billion. (Webflow does no-code Checkout.com raised $450 million. The rich really do get richer. In this case the founders of Checkout.com, whose company is now worth arou

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This week we -- Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace -- had a lot to get through, as the news volume in early 2021 has been rapid, and serious. Sadly this means that some early-stage rounds missed the cut, though we did make sure to have some Series A material in the show.So, what did we the assembled crew get to? Here's your cheat-sheet:The demise of the Plaid-Visa deal, our chat with the CEO of the fintech unicorn, and what the failed transaction could mean for startup valuations more broady.Why the $1.4 billion Nuvia exit to Qualcomm is impressive in scale, and puzzling. This topic also gave Danny a chance to talk about chips, his favorite thing.Auto-insurance rates can often depend on highly variable demographic data like marital status, income, and education. Loop is a new seed-stage startup that wants to make the process more equitable. It landed millions this week, underscori

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here —and don't forget to check out the extra episode we dropped on Saturday, as there was just too much to talk about last week.So, what's on the docket for today? A great host of things:Trump was broadly deplatformed, which is controversial not only amongst his political allies and acolytes, but also amongst those worried that fringe-yet-not-wrong views could suffer in the future.Parler, a Twitter clone that tried to claim the mantle of free speech -- despite having posting rules -- was cut off by major tech companies over its inability to censor calls for violence. It had recently hit #1 in the App Store.Bitcoin a

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We're back on this lovely Saturday with a bonus episode!The normal crew assembled, including Alex, Natasha, Danny, and Chris, to chatter about a chunk of creator and gamer news. And some big numbers, the sorts that we always find fun to chat about.A sneak peek at what we discussed during this second-ever Equity Leftovers:Roblox's epic pre-IPO raise, and its decision to go public through direct listing instead of the IPO that it had previously planned.Niantic buying a gaming platform with an esports-focus.Nintendo buying a gaming studio, leading the crew to declare that the famous company is the Disney of video games.Cameo, which allows fans to pay celebrities for personalized messages, is on a hiring spree after bringing in $100 million in transactions last year. The Information says that the company is seeking funding, which isn't entirely surprising. Axios reports that it has bro