Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Our beloved Danny was back, joining Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris to chat through yet another incredibly busy week. As a window into our process, every week we tell one another that the next week we’ll cut the show down to size. Then the week is so interesting that we end up cutting a lot of news, but also keeping a lot of news. The chaotic process is a work in progress, but it means that the end result is always what we decided we can’t not talk about.
Here’s what we got into:
- A little URL to IRL update from Natasha, who just got back from an edtech conference.
- How one VC got hit by ransomware, and why stolen LP data could be a wake-up call for investors.
- The crew chatted through some Cloud 100 numbers, and riffed for a minute on Figma, Gusto and Mailchimp, companies all reportedly worth around the $10 billion mark.
- From the early-stage funding round side of things, we noodled on Surfside’s $4 million raise, and the capital that Pave recently attracted. Felt also raised money to make maps more mainstream, which had us thinking about use cases galore.
- In unicorn-land, Trendyol raised a mountain of cash, while UpGrad became India’s newest unicorn.
- Climate change is going to mean lots more companies need to handle disaster prep, Danny argues. His recent EC-1 here about RapidSOS got into the deep and complex world of three simple numbers: 911.
- And we ended the show with a riff on Salesforce+, which we had fun with but also tried to take seriously because we are journalists after all.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.