Community is the new AI

Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week with Grace on the dials, which meant that we had a flat lovely time recording Equity for you. Of course, Equity is TechCrunch’s venture capital focused podcast where we dig into the most critical funding rounds, and natter about the key news items impacting startups.

Before we hop into this week’s topics, you can follow the show on Twitter, where we rather often host impromptu Twitter spaces that sometimes become episodes. Come hang!

Here’s the rundown for this week:

• Chalo raises $40M to improve bus transit in India: This startup wins name (and startup) of the week. Chalo wants to tackle inefficiencies in India’s bus system, so we noodle over why that makes sense and what challenges could be ahead.
• Masterworks raises $110M for fractional art ownership: Call it a Series A if you must, but the mega-round that Masterworks just raised helps underscore the global shift toward alternative investing, and fractional ownership. How long until we get Masterworks on the blockchain? That would be the real IRL-NFT crossover we are kinda waiting for.
• CostCertified wants to save your next home reno project: CostCertified, which just participated in Y Combinator’s summer cohort, raised $8.45 million in seed funding. The Canadian company’s end goal is to build the “Amazon for construction.” CostCertified allows contractors to send a shoppable interactive estimate to homeowners so that they can choose their selections during a project, and see the effect on price instantly.
• All about community: Community has been watered down, there’s no doubt about it. But, there are still arguments for why it works — and we make them (often).
• Google invests in Africa: American tech giant Google is putting capital to work in Africa, but in the form of infra investment and early-stage investing. Frankly both make good sense, given the advertising giant’s business model.
• Edtech goes B2B: Udemy is going public! We have dug through the numbers already, but thankfully with Natasha on the show we got to go a level deeper on where edtech revenues may come from next.

And that’s our show! We are back bright and early on Monday!