No one is talking about remote work from space

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

First and foremost, Equity was nominated a Webby for “Best Technology Podcast”!!! Drop everything and go Vote for Equity! We’d appreciate. A lot. And even if we lose, well, we’ll keep doing our thing and making each other laugh.

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Chris got together to chat through the week’s biggest news. And like every other week in recent memory, it was a busy one. But we did our best to hit some M&A news, some unicorn news, and some funding news from smaller startups.

Now, onto the show rundown, here’s what we discussed:

• The Discord-Microsoft deal is done, and Danny has a hot take. Namely, in his view, the deal was mostly banker chatter more than a real possibility. More chaff than wheat, in other words. Agree or not, we’re stoked for the Discord IPO in a few years (quarters?) time.
• Mastercard bought Erkata, and Danny was on hand to hand to explain why we care about the deal. Sure, it was $825 million in value, but some venture data from Finledger helped explain just how much capital is flowing into similar companies. Let’s see how that math works out.
• Clearbanc rebranded itself into a fintech unicorn, providing services along with sweet, sweet capital.
• The UiPath IPO finally priced and started to trade. It had a good first day, and you can check out what we learned talking to its CFO here.
• Over in China, a country that we’ve not covered enough lately, Laiye raised $50 million more. Like UiPath it competes in the RPA world.
• Deel, for one, had a good 2020. It hit 20x growth in revenue last year, and recently raised at a $1.25 billion valuation.
• And then we closed with two seed rounds raised by recent Y Combinator grads: Here’s the Queenly round, and here’s the Albedo deal!

We’ll see you on Monday.