If you’re trying to develop fluency in a non-native tongue, language immersion is a crucial part of the learning process. Surrounding yourself with native speakers helps with pronunciation, context building, and most of all, confidence. But what if you’re an eight-year-old kid in Spain learning English and can’t swing a solo trip to the United […]
The tale of two edtech IPOs
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Last week, Natasha and Alex jumped on Twitter Spaces to discuss the tale of two edtech IPOs: Duolingo, the consumer language learning company, and PowerSchool, the enterprise K-12 software platform. It was a rare moment in the sun for the […]
Unicorns are ready for a haircut
The digitization of your haircut may not have been on your 2020 bucket list, but 2021 has an even more surprising line item: Tech-powered barbershops are now a business proposition valued at nearly a billion dollars. Squire is a back-end barbershop management tool for independent businesses. I first covered it in the early months of […]
5 lessons from Duolingo’s bellwether edtech IPO of the year
Duolingo landed onto the public markets this week, rallying excitement and attention for the edtech sector and its founder cohort. The language learning business’ stock price soared when it began to trade, even after the unicorn raised its IPO price range, and priced above the raised interval. Duolingo’s IPO proves that public market investors can […]
Growth is not enough
The week brought together both this quarter’s earnings cycle and the Q3 IPO rush. So, it was just a little busy!
Talkiatry lands $20M Series A to go all in on in-network psychiatric care
Talkiatry raised a $20 million Series A to scale a strategy simple in theory yet potentially challenging in execution: bring psychiatry services in-network with insurance providers.
Squire, a Barbershop tech platform, triples its valuation (again) with Tiger Global
When co-founders Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant first began barbershop tech platform Squire in 2016, they leaned in quite literally: the duo bought a barbershop in Chelsea, New York to see first-hand how the business worked. For one year, the co-founders religiously worked at the shop, now owned by a larger barbershop chain, handling every […]
Class, a Zoom-only virtual classroom, nears unicorn status after SoftBank check
Class, a virtual classroom that integrates exclusively with Zoom, announced today that it has raised $105 million in a financing led by SoftBank Vision Fund II. The 10-month old startup has now raised a total of $146 million in known venture funding to date, which eclipses the amount of capital raised by founder Michael Chasen’s […]
BoldVoice wants to help nonnative English speakers find (and flaunt) their voices
When Anada Lakra and Ilya Usorov first moved to the United States, they struggled to find their voices. They both knew and understood English, but when it came time to speak up, their accents became a hurdle. Usorov, for example, watched his Russian-born parents struggle to advocate for themselves, which limited work opportunities. While Lakra, […]
Edtech’s venture-backed globalization pauses at China
Edtech investors are increasingly going global, but regulatory crackdowns in China, which instructed K-12 tutoring startups to go non-profit, have led to a chill among check-writers in the country.