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Equity Monday: More money for fintech, Deliveroo’s IPO and AI startups
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 our Friday show that featured the Square-Tidal deal, some recent IPOs and some super-neat rounds.
Much like today’s show, if I am being honest. Here’s the rundown:
- Coursera filed to go public, which could help set the tone for edtech founders and startups regarding their own valuations and fundraising prospects.
- Bay Area startups did not leave.
- And the world of AI venture-capital funding shows that while there’s plenty of capital, the number of startups being founded in the space is dipping.
- Starling raised a huge new round in the fintech space, and Deliveroo dropped some financial numbers on its path to going public in short-order.
- Postscript raised $35 million for its Shopify-SMS service; Praava Health raised $10.6 million to bring better healthcare to Bangladesh.
A packed kickoff to what promises to be a packed week!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!
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SoftBank makes mountains of cash off of human laziness
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. It was yet another crazy week, but we did our best to get through as much of it as we could. Here’s the rundown, in case you are reading along with us!
- Square is buying Tidal in a deal that some are skeptical of, but one about which we found quite a lot to like.
- How capital-as-a-service can get you your first check in 2021, and a nod to Indie.VC, a pioneer in alternative financing for startups that announced it is shutting down net new investments this year.
- Oscar Health priced its IPO above its raised range, which was good for it in terms of fundraising. However, since its debut the company has lost pricing altitude. Its declines mimic those of other public neo-insurance providers in what could be a new trend.
- And sticking to the insurtech beat, Hippo is going public via a SPAC. Because everyone else is?
- Compass filed its S-1, which triggered a debate on how it’s different than Opendoor.
- Coupang’s IPO is also coming, replete with huge growth, an improving profitability picture and a massive valuation. This is one to watch.
- There was also a whole global news circuit around grocery delivery startups, with Instacart raising at a $39 billion valuation.
- And we wrapped with the Surreal seed round that we found to be more than a little spicy. As it turns out, commercialized deepfakes are not merely on the way; they are here.
And with that we are back on Monday. Have a rocking weekend!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion.
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The Equity podcast is growing
Equity is celebrating its fourth birthday in a few weeks and closed 2020 with its biggest quarter to date. To celebrate and say thank you to our wonderful listeners who tune into us each and every single week, we’re growing upward and outward!
First, as many of you have noticed, we’ve expanded the Equity team. Grace Mendenhall joined the production crew this year, initially helping cover for Chris Gates while he was out on paternity leave. But now Chris is back and so we’ve doubled our producer team.
In classic startup fashion, a bigger team means we can make more swings at R&D, or in this case, add on a new show to our semiweekly cadence.
Today, the whole Equity team — Chris, Grace, Danny, Natasha and Alex — are super proud to announce that we’re expanding the podcast’s show lineup. We’re going to add a new show each week, which will rotate around a particular theme, geography or supermassive news event. It’s your midweek chance to listen to a show about one trend, whether that’s space tech or the growth of community as a competitive advantage. Sometimes it will be an exact topic you’ve cared about for so long (insert Alex and SaaS joke here) and sometimes it will be about a topic you know nothing about. We’re here to convince you to care anyway. Regardless, you can depend on the Equity trio to give you a trifecta of shows that helps you stay up to date on startup and venture capital news in a consumable way.
Starting, well, now, here’s what Equity looks like:
- Equity on Monday: Our weekly kickoff show is not changing. Except Alex has promised to learn how to speak with better diction.
- Equity on Wednesday: Our midweek show focused on a single topic or theme. Expect to hear from other TechCrunch reporters about their beats, investors on what they are seeing in the market and reporting on countries and cities where startup activity is blowing up.
- Equity, now on Friday: The main Equity episode is not changing, other than that we’re going to tighten it up a little bit and release it Friday mornings like we used to. While it was a blast to get out the door Thursday afternoon, we’re going to give Equity Wednesday a little more time to breathe. And since so many of you listen to this episode on Friday anyway, most folks won’t notice a change.
As COVID-19 fades thanks to the rollout of vaccines around the globe, we’ll eventually get back into our studio. That could mean more video down the pike. And we’ll still do the odd Equity Shot for big events that we can’t help but chat about.
Our goal was to double-down on what we think is the best part of Equity: A group of friends hammering through the news as a group, learning, joking and having fun with the world of startups and venture capital.
So, we’ll see you one more time each week. Cool? Cool. Hugs from here and chat soon. — The Equity Team
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Equity Monday: Everyone is going public so what’s wrong with your startup?
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: Gophr raises money! Ageras Group raises money! Promise raises money! It was hard to pick just three, but each of those rounds has something notable about it. Enjoy!
- Deeper Dive/Riff: If the public markets will float even the most leaden of startup via a SPAC-balloon, any late-stage startup that doesn’t take the ride out of the private markets must either be perfect or too heavy to lift. And if it’s the second, we can write it off? Maybe?
And, finally, this is precisely what I feel like this Monday morning. Chat soon and stay safe!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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A16z doesn’t invest, it manifests
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 hyped!
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 are 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 fund for startups within the same category. She joined other investors in our latest survey on the creator economy’s changing tides.
- Off of $1 million in ARR, Circle has brought on $4 million in funding at a valuation north of $40 million.
- A16z invested in Stir, which helps creators manage and view their various income streams. The funding total was not disclosed, but is reportedly valuing the company, still in beta, at $100 million.
- TalkShopLive brought on new cash for live video shopping.
- Pipe17 closed an $8 million round that caught our eye. By building a service to help smaller e-commerce operations connect their tooling to one another, the company is betting on smaller e-commerce needing pipes to link up their various software services. This reminded us of Alloy, another neat company in e-commerce automation that also recently raised money.
- From there we riffed on the software market itself, its size and the potential for investors to loosen their rules of intra-portfolio competition.
- Public raised $220 million, OutSystems raised $150 million and Ally.io raised $50 million.
- Finally, a wave of edtech startups is over Zoom University and hopes to create much, much better. alternative.
And that’s our show! We are back early Monday morning for a packed week. So keep your podcast app warm, we’re coming for it.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Equity Dive: Edtech’s 2020 wakeup call
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week, we’re doing a first-ever for the show and taking a deep dive into one specific sector: Edtech.
Natasha Mascarenhas has covered education technology since Stanford first closed down classes in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. In the wake of the historic shuttering of much of the United States’ traditional institutions of education, the sector has formed new unicorns, attracted record-breaking venture capital totals, and most of all, enjoyed time in a long-overdue spotlight.
For this Equity Dive, we zero into one part of that conversation: Edtech’s impact on higher education. We brought together Udacity co-founder and Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun, Eschaton founder and college drop-out Ian Dilick, and Cowboy Ventures investor Jomayra Herrera to answer our biggest questions.
Here’s what we got into:
- How the state of remote school is leading to gap years among students
- A framework for how to think of higher education’s main three products (including which is most defensible over time)
- What learnings we can take from this COVID-19 experiment on remote schooling to apply to the future
- Why ed-tech is flocking to the notion of life-long learning
- And the reality of who self-paced learning serves — and who it leaves out
And much, much more. If you celebrate, thank you for spending part of your Thanksgiving with the Equity crew. We’re so thankful to have this platform and audience, and it means a ton that y’all tune in each week.
Finally, if you liked this format and want to see more, feel free to tweet us your thoughts or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Talk soon!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Equity shot: Boo! It’s the Halloween earnings special!
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
As promised, the whole gang is back, this time to chew on the biggest, baddest, worstest, and most troubling earnings reports from the current cycle. This week saw Amazon and Alphabet and Microsoft and Apple and Facebook report, along with a host of smaller companies.
Spoiler alert: there were more tricks than treats.
- Danny, Natasha and Alex wanted to get to the bottom of the big tech results, asking what really mattered from each of them?
- Then it was time to dig into themes. We saw plan price increases coming from Netflix and Spotify, advertising getting a boo-st from politics and 2020’s overall meltdown, and boo-ming billions of consumer interest in…desktops.
- After that, a dive into the results of smaller SaaS and cloud companies, picking out trends that might help us see around the corner a bit; is the tech boom slowing, or is corporate growth merely failing to keep up with inflated investor expectations?
- This week felt like a shudder ran through the spine of our economy. The earnings paint a neutral picture, which isn’t exactly an exhale to rejoice over. The coronavirus continues to be a threat that poses a risk to public businesses. For startups, that could mean a less frothy exit market nad lower valuations. And for the public, it means that the uncertain is still ahead of us. So wear a mask.
And with that, the show is back Monday morning. Have a good weekend, everyone.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Equity Shot: All about the Qualtrics IPO
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
After the morning show went out, the Equity crew could not shut up about the Qualtrics-SAP deal, so we had no choice but to jump back into recording mode for an off-the-cuff Equity Shot. As always, Shots are short-form Equity episodes that focus on a single, news topic.
Building off of Danny’s SAP knowledge, Natasha’s curiosity about the future Qualtrics S-1, and my own recent dive into the SAP and Qualtrics numbers, we managed to cover quite a lot of ground. So, if you wanted to know:
- Why did SAP have to pay so much for Qualtrics back in the day?
- Why is SAP willing to part with Qualtrics so soon after buying it?
- How much might Qualtrics be worth?
- And, of course, did the Equity team expect to see this news in 2020?
Then you are probably going to like what we have in store for you.
Spoiler on that last as the answer is a firm no, but, all the same, what fun. That’s about it for this Equity Shot, hit play, have fun, and we are back Friday morning unless something else happens, like a Palantir S-1.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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The 3% gap in no-code
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Up top the crew this week was the regular contingent: Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas and myself. As a tiny programming note, we’re going back to posting some videos on YouTube in a few weeks, so make sure to peep the TechCrunch channel if that’s your jam.
And we did a special episode on the SPAC boom, if you are into financial arcana. For more on SPACs –> here.
The Equity crew tried something new this week, namely centering our main conversation around a theme that we’re keeping tabs on: The resilience of tech during the current pandemic-led recession.
Starting with the recent economic news, it’s surprising that tech’s layoffs have slowed to a crawl. And, as we’ve recently seen, there’s still plenty of money flowing into startups, even if there are some dips present on a year-over-year basis. Why are things still pretty good for startups, and pretty good for major tech companies? We have a few ideas, like the acceleration of the digital transformation (more here, and here), and software eating the world. The latter concept, of course, is related to the former.
After that it was time to go through some neat funding rounds from the week, including:
- Dumpling raising $6.5 million to help individual shoppers build their own Instacart.
- Kibbo’s shot at making the #vanlife happen for more folks, something that we think is a good fit for the pandemic and the mobile professional.
- Sora’s $5.3 million raise for no-code HR connective tissue, something that I was rather bullish on but drew some chat about no-code itself, and if the trend is more hype than substance.
All that and I have a newsletter launching this weekend that if you read, you will automatically be 100% cooler. It’s called the TechCrunch Exchange, and you can snag it for free here.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Give us your seed round and we will send back double
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week was full of news of all sorts, but as we recorded, both Danny and Natasha “not Tash” Mascarenhas were still locked out of their Twitter accounts after a proletariat revolution on the social platform saw the ruling Blue Checkmark Class forced into silence. That’s not really what happened, but it sounds better than what actually went down at Big Social.
Anyway, Twitter accounts or not, the three of us gathered to parse through a wave of news:
- The new TechCrunch List that Danny spent a very long time compiling has arrived! It’s live! You can find it here. It is good.
- And, if you want to know which VCs were even more fêted by founders, head here. (If you are irked that you did not make either list, please email Danny, not the show!)
- Moving on, Google is putting billions into Reliance Jio after every other company in the world did the same. Google is buying a bit less of the Indian telecom than the search giant, but between the two of them it’s been more than $10 billion in dealmaking. Perhaps Reliance Jio is done raising money? At last?
- Udemy is hunting up more capital at a higher valuation, reports say, providing Natasha with the perfect moment to let us know what is going with edtech.
- Turning to funding rounds, I was hyped about the Macro round that TechCrunch covered this week, Danny wanted to chat about The Browser Company’s similarly sized $5 million round and Natasha talked us through LiteBoxer’s combined $6 million in new capital.
- Closing, we talked about IPOs for a hot second. The IPO window is open, and now that nCino and GoHealth have gone public, we want to know who is next.
It was a lovely time and there is a bit of show news. Namely that Equity is coming back to YouTube either this week or the next. So if you want to see us talk, soon you will be able to! Again!
Oh, and follow the show on Twitter. If you can, that is.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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