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 make sure to check out Friday's news-roundup with Danny and Natasha that included some neat notes on search startups. And their chances against Google. So, what did we chat about this morning? Here's the rough rundown: Stripe! Stripe raised new money at a new price and both were rather large. Would you believe that Stripe is still not public? It isn't! But it should be. Perhaps this is the last time it will raise before listing. Also from the recent past, Megvii filed to go public, and Nimble Robotics raised. The Deliveroo IPO is happening, and the £1 billion raise could value the company at £5 billion, Reuters reckons. Oh, and TechCrunch has the most recent WeWork numbers. DeepSee.ai raised a Series A, and we have questions about its product -- and hopes. Centrical also raised for its hybrid working software, which could come in demand after COVID ends. Extra Crunch Live this week is Emmalyn Shaw from Flourish Ventures and Adam Roseman from Steady. That's March 17th at 12 p.m. PDT and 3 p.m. EDT. See you there! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Like every week, we had to leave a lot of great stuff on the cutting-room floor. But, we did get to touch on a bunch of news that we feel really matters. Also we do wind up talking about a few Extra Crunch pieces, which is where our deeper analysis on news items lives. If the paywall is a bother, you can get access while saving 50% with the code "EQUITY." Here's what we got into: Crypto-art and the NFT boom continue. Check out what Beeple just did. Danny has an opinion on the matter. The Roblox direct-listing does very little actually solve the IPO pricing issue. That said, well done Bloxburg. We talked about the Coursera S-1, which gave us the first financial peek into an education company revitalized by the pandemic. The numbers needed context, so our follow up coverage gives readers 5 takeaways from the Coursera IPO. Language learning has a market, and it's big. We talked about Preply's $35 million raise and why tutoring marketplaces make sense. Dropbox is buying DocSend, which makes pretty good sense. Even if the exit price won't matter much for bigger funds. We're still witnessing Dropbox and Box add more features to their product via acquisitions. Let's see how it impacts their revenue growth. Zapier buys Makerpad. We struggled to pronounce Zapier, but did have some notes on the deal and what it might mean for the no-code space. Sticking the acquisition theme, PayPal bought Curv. If you were looking for more evidence that big companies are taking crypto seriously, well, here it is. And to close we nerded out about Neeva. Can a Google-competitor take on Google if it was founded by ex-Googlers? The show is back Monday morning. Stay cool! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down and focus on a single topic, or theme. This is our sweet spot: going beyond definitions and into the dirty and deep impact of how a phenomenon could impact startups and tech. We are hoping to explore more than answer, and debate more than agree. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, is this week's topic! This is something that you have nearly certainly heard of in the past few weeks but probably don't understand with perfect clarity. While we've all seen the Twitter threads of basic definitions, consider this episode the appetizer to your aperitif understanding. The Equity team put on our research caps, dug in, and found quite a lot to like. But we did not tread alone: our EIC Matthew Panzarino joined Chris and Alex and Danny and Natasha to help us out. Panzer was early to the NFT world and has contributed some of TechCrunch’s reporting on the matter. So, what did we get into? More than a little: We spent a few minutes on the NFT basics, including historical examples and how NFTs are minted, as well as some examples of how they have been used recently. From there we riffed on use-cases more broadly, and where we might find NFTs in the wild. Sure, we talked about visual art, but also music, tickets and sports moments. The NFT world has the possibility of a large remit if it plays its, ahem, tokens correctly. Then we talked culture. What could it mean that NFTs are in the market? Could residual incomes from the reselling of NFTs constitute a material revenue base for future artists, and how broad can the value-experiment go? Depending on which side of the NFT hype-cynicism divide you land, there’s plenty of room for discussion. A point made by Panzer: NFT's and the architecture of smart contracts and the way that social tokens work, these are all opportunities for the creators and originators of culture, to finally take part and participate in their rewards of the platforms of that culture -- you know, that hosts that culture. Because we've seen it over and over again: Artist blows up on TikTok, and you know, somebody does a dance to them, and then that video blows up. What does the artist get out of it? Sometimes they get a recording deal. Many times they get nothing. Right? In Vine, famously built on Black creators and brown creators and Latino creators and Latino creators. You know, TikTok, very much the same. Black Twitter one of the early driving forces of engagement on Twitter and culture on Twitter -- how many of them were actually able to participate in the economic rewards of Twitter as a platform selling advertising and making millions of dollars and their stock going bonkers? Besides, of course, you know, maybe they were able to purchase stock, right? So the, the remapping of how creators can participate in that economy directly by saying, “Hey, I've created something of value, and I'd love to connect directly with the people that enjoy that and they can provide me value back” -- that’s what’s so exciting about this.And we chatted just a minute about the weight, or carbon footprint, of different blockchains. There’s real nuance to this point of argument, but it was also something we couldn’t avoid. Panzer again:And this is probably the biggest negative blowback on Ethereum and NFTs is that Ethereum is by nature a very heavy chain, which means that it takes a lot of work to prove that a block has been written to the chain. Not quite as heavy as Bitcoin, but it's up there. And that energy usage that was used to mine that Ethereum that's being spent on the chain to confirm a new transaction is being sort of credited forwards in-- for lack of a better term to the artists minting on it. I don't think that's absolutely fair. But it's absolutely fair to acknowledge that it does have an ecological impact.Every week Equity will bring you something special on Wednesdays, adding to our regular Monday (weekly kickoff!) and Friday (news roundup!) shows. The world of tech is large, diverse, and variously dangerous and delightful. We're excited to keep talking through it with you. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 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 proivders 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 its 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! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the number behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down and focus on a single topic, or theme. This week we're talking agtech, a surprisingly cool bit of the technology startup world. But Chris and Danny and Natasha and Alex were not alone in their quest to take a look into agtech, we brought alone TechCrunch climate editor Jon Shieber for the ride. With his help we got through a number of pretty damn interesting things, including: SESO Labor raising $4.5 million to help farms secure the labor they need, and navigate the American immigration system. Future Acres looking to raise $3 million for its farming robots. And Farmwise, which last raised $14.5 million and has an idea regarding how to rent robot labor to farms. We also chatted about Anuvia's epic $103 million raise that could help boost farm yields while cutting carbon emissions. And Better Origin, which wants to help farmers raise flies to feed to chickens. Which we had a few ideas about. And that's that! We're back on Friday with our long-form, newsy episode. Thanks to everyone checking out our newest show. Oh, and don't forget about TechCrunch Early Stage and TechCrunch Justice. They are going to rock. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 SPAC one, space SPAC two And then on the funding round side of things, here's Axonius' very interesting round, and this fun pre-seed deal from Europe! And finally we chat Oscar Health, a company whose IPO is all sorts of confusing. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Reddit is a better business than we anticipated. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian backed a new community tool proving the monetary value of the community. That led us into a conversation about a professional network for independent workers, and a collaborative workspace for interior design fans. Toast is said to be on the road to an IPO, and so we riffed on what Olo's IPO can tell us about the Boston-based unicorn. Shippo raised more money after a big 2020; can the company double again in 2021? Finix raised $3 million through an SPV filled with over 80 Black and LatinX investors. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 startup angle involved. Which brought us to a side conversation on which one of us are most interested in going to space commercially. It's the raised hands feature no one asked for, but take your guesses on who wants to go first and see if you're right. Regardless, Axiom Space raises $130 million for its commercial space station ambitions And then there was the Astra SPAC. You can read its deck here. What matters is that we get a look into how fast it plans to ramp future launches. And the answer is fast. As we get more comfortable in our Wednesday episodes, we'll tinker with the format and the like. As we do, we're always taking feedback at [email protected], or over on Twitter. Hit us up, we're having a lot of fun but are always looking for ways to sharpen the show! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 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 ecommerce operations connect their tooling to one another, the company is betting on smaller ecommerce needing pipes to link up their various software services. This reminded us of Alloy, another neat company in ecommerce 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. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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: GM has new electric cars, TechCrunch reports. VW isn't worried about Apple. And every EV company in the world is going public via a SPAC. Who will win? You can place your own bets. And India is loosening some tech regulation. The American stock market is closed. Funding Rounds: We chatted about the recent Libeo round, and the latest on Nymbus, both of which are more than cool. And, finally, read this if you want feel let down by American VCs. (American media, to be clear, has similar issues.) Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 signal. Reddit raises $250 million, but doesn't tell us who the investors are and what the money is precisely going to. Still, the company has had quite a year so far so the capital comes at an interesting time. Justo, an online grocery based in Mexico, raises $65 million as the pandemic continues to shake up the way we live and shop. DoorDash buys a salad robot, which brings Natasha nostalgia and Danny anger. The inverted SoftBank J-Curve thesis is a must-listen and read. And from the world of dating, a big M&A deal that caught our attention, and the latest from the Bumble IPO. In good news, long-time Equity producer Chris Gates is back starting next week, which means we'll have our biggest crew ever helping get the show put together. And, in other good news, there's going to be more Equity than ever for you to hear. Coming soon. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 the Internet. And yet Rapyd and Fast and Checkout.com and others are raising oceans of capital to provide checkout solutions to other companies. Why? They offer best practices-like services. From there we talked about the inclusion of humans into software, which isn't a radical concept but has new weight considering the information overload world we live in. The whole concept of having an Airtable hotline to answer each and every random question we have seems like music to our ears, what about yours? And finally we discussed the growing use of on-demand pricing over traditional SaaS. Danny asked if this is really something new, which we discussed. Perhaps we're seeing more on-demand pricing in modern software companies thanks to not only the success of companies like Snowflake, but also growing ranks of API-delivered startups. Overall it was fun to niche down to a single theme, something we rarely get to do on the main show. Expect more of this from us in the following months! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 2020 IPO, bought a Super Bowl ad. Who would have expected that? Its shares are up, however, after the ad. Still on the car beat, Tesla bought $1.50 billion in bitcoin, and may accept the stuff as tender to buy its vehicles in the future. The move sent the price of bitcoin higher. Clubhouse got banned in China. Phable raised $12 million, Nexthink raised $180 million, and Bumble is targeting a higher share price in its impending IPO. And we may have figured out the ∆ between what investors are saying about the Seed market, and what data has largely said. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 dating market may be in the future. In a big exit for the Boston startup ecosystem, alcohol delivery platform Drizly has sold to Uber for $1.1 billion. Sticking to the alcohol beat, Danny talked us through the Vivino news, describing himself as a wine sophisticate with a distaste for sommeliers, which is just about the most Danny thing he has ever said. But the company really is neat. Divvy homes raised a $110 million Series C to make it easier to buy a home, after financing five times as many homes in 2020 as it did in pre-pandemic times. And then there were some neat early-stage rounds to chat about: Balance raising $5.5 million to bring B2B payments to the modern world, Alloy Automation raising $4 million for ecommerce automation, and Beam raising $9.5 million to build a new browser. Make sure to read Natasha's profile of the new Expectul CEO here. And, we closed on some Miami news. And somehow we still have another entire day before the weeks is up! So much for 2021 calming down after 2020's storms. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 connectivity; there is a clear link between authoritarianism and a desire for Internet control. Robinhood's CEO went on Clubhouse, where he was interviewed by Elon Musk about last week's mess; it turns out the National Securities Clearing Corporation, or NSCC, had asked Robinhood for $3 billion in deposit requirements. That number was reduced to $700 million, with Robinhood limiting some consumer behavior, allowing the company to open Friday morning. This morning the key news stories include the mess that is Facebook Groups, and the EU is appealing a tax decision that could impact tech company structure for years to come. Ben raised $2.5 million Phocas Software raised $34 million DesignCrowd raised $7.6 million And, finally, we are heading into earnings season, so strap in and get ready for a deluge of results. All that and we are back Thursday, if not before. Hugs and hellos from the Equity crew! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 checkout startups raising a zillion dollars in recent weeks. A boom in food delivery and restaurant startups, and why Danny is bearish on a plastic-free play. Natasha is in favor. Alex gets a company's model mixed up with Spoon Rocket. Natasha explains how Clubhouse isn't the first company to raise millions off of millions of users with no known near-term monetization plan. Her piece on ClassDojo illustrates how a quiet edtech giant finally turned its 51 million users into a profitable base. There's also an investor survey for you to check out (Discount code: EQUITY). TCV's record fund, and a female-focused angel fund coming out of Africa. As always, it was a ton to get through because there is just so much going on. More Monday morning, until then stay cool! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices