Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex crawled through the Metaverse, leaning on Facebook’s latest earnings and
Month: February 2022
Reading back through a transcript from Facebook’s investor-disappointing fourth-quarter earnings call has solidified my perspective that we need a third-party, benevolent central entity for the metaverse. A sort of central digital clearinghouse that can transport me from place to place, inclusive of the platform-locked areas that will inevitably come to constitute a portion of our
Kenya-based EV startup BasiGo has closed $4.3 million in seed funding, three months after setting up operations in East Africa’s biggest economy, to provide clean-energy mass transit vehicles in a country that is heavily-reliant on fossil-fuel buses. The startup said it will use the new funding to set up an assembly plant in Nairobi and
Census, a startup building a data layer between business operations and a company’s data warehouse, confirmed an Axios story from earlier this week that it has raised a $60 million Series B on a valuation of $630 million. CEO Boris Jabes said that from the start he wanted to build something that would allow mostly
Last year we covered Longevica, which had raised $13 million after researching supplements to increase human longevity. Later that year we covered its launch of an open research tool for scientists to tracks the effects of more than 1,000 pharmacological compounds for testing drugs. This is just one example of the boom that is going
The Note is dead. After more than a decade, Samsung has officially closed the book on the transformative phablet. The brand will still exist, but only in a kind of liminal marketing capacity. “We’re thinking more and more of the Note as the experience,” a rep told me on a recent briefing call. As the
AMD CEO Lisa Su joins Emily Chang to discuss their latest earnings results, the future of the semiconductor industry, and when we can expect the chip shortage to fizzle out. Also, she responds to Pat Gelsinger’s video claiming that “AMD is in the rear-view mirror” for them.
The MENA region has about 400 million people with $500 billion in annual savings. But as a relatively young population, most of them have minimal equity market and investment exposure. Replicating the success of Robinhood in the U.S., some platforms are looking to create investors out of the region. One such is Egypt-based Thndr. The
French startup Silvr has raised a $20.6 million (€18 million) Series A funding round and has opened a $128 million (€112 million) debt line for its activities. Silvr wants to offer new credit opportunities for e-commerce and software-as-a-service companies. Essentially, it wants to bring the Pipe and Clearco experience to Europe. XAnge, Otium, Bpifrance, Eurazeo
Most companies today recognize the importance of global warming. As such, they are redefining their goals in an effort to address the climate change issue. Envisioning Partners, a Seoul-based venture capital firm, has secured its latest impact fund, the oversubscribed $64 million (76.8 billion KRW) Envisioning Climate Solutions (ECS) Fund, to back startups combating the
But increasing regulatory hurdles await Ron Miller 8 hours It’s easy to forget that Microsoft used to stumble from time to time, especially when you look at its gaudy $2 trillion market cap today. Around 2010, four years before Satya Nadella would succeed Steve Ballmer as CEO, the company pretty much completely missed the mobile
Jean-Paul Smets Contributor Jean-Paul Smets is the CEO of Rapid.Space, a hyper open cloud provider offering virtual private servers (VPS), content delivery networks (CDN) and global IPv6 (SDN). Picture this scenario as a young enterprise: You are a customer of Azure, AWS, or the Google Cloud Platform, assuming they are the frontrunners. While traveling in
Renowned Silicon Valley operator Adam Nash thinks you want to donate much more than you do, and he’s about to make it dead simple for you. Such is the message we received when talking late last week with Nash, whose most recent full-time roles include as a VP at Dropbox and president and CEO of
TechCrunch explored the changing state of the insurtech market last week, diving into category wins and losses from recent quarters and what’s ahead for the sector this year. Insurtech companies had a simply amazing fundraising year in 2021, setting records in both dollar and deal terms. But at the same time, the value of public
Meta’s external advisory organization issued new recommendations Tuesday, urging the company to bolster its policies that protect users against doxing. Facebook requested advice on the policy last year, acknowledging that it had difficulty balancing access to public information with privacy concerns. The company now known as Meta’s current policy on sharing private identifying details carves
Hydrogen pioneers Verdagy — from “verde” for green, and “agy” for energy — raised $25 million from a fistful of strategic investors in the energy sector in a bid to take a messy, not-that-environmentally-friendly process of making hydrogen and replacing it with an industrially scalable solution with no nasties going into the air. It turns
Startups do not have a great survival rate. Nine out of ten will fail, and those that persist will likely need at least three to four years to become profitable. Entrepreneurs who are fortunate enough to make it across the finish line of an exit often still find themselves running uphill: reorganizations and layoffs create
European Union lawmakers have today presented a Chips Act: Their plan, trailed last fall, to bolster regional sovereignty in semiconductor production and supply chain resilience through a package of targeted support for chip production inside the bloc, including in areas like R&D and via funding for startups and scale-ups working on cutting edge tech in
Chicken is the most consumed meat in the United States and the world. And yet, the system in place to breed and feed and raise all this chicken is incredibly detrimental to our overall wellbeing. It props up a conventional agricultural apparatus that focuses on corn and soy production, not to mention fosters a system
As proof that web3 is not some passing trend, blockchain infrastructure startup Alchemy announced today that it has closed on a $200 million Series C1 equity round that values the company at $10.2 billion. For the unacquainted, web3 refers to a decentralized web based on the blockchain. And put simply, Alchemy wants to do for
Months after TikTok was hauled into its first-ever major congressional hearing over platform safety, the company is today announcing a series of policy updates and plans for new features and technologies aimed at making the video-based social network a safer and more secure environment, particularly for younger users. The changes attempt to address some concerns
In climate circles we spend a lot of time talking about manufacturing and power generation in the effort of cutting CO2 emissions. It’s pretty rare that I get a whiff of a company that has a clear path toward cutting global carbon emissions by a full percent — but that’s what Rondo Energy pitched to
Product-led sales and growth were big buzzwords last year, and startups are continuing to raise new infusions of capital as they develop their approaches. In Endgame’s case, the company announced Tuesday it closed on $30 million in Series B funding. The company touts itself as “the world’s first product-led sales platform” and enables software companies
Hearts Radiant, a Spanish startup that’s building a “longevity coach” for seniors — with the goal of extending quality of life through app-based personalized coaching designed to combat and even prevent frailty — has closed a seed round of funding as it gears up to launch in the US, eyeing Florida’s 4M+ over 65s. We
MicroStrategy co-Founder, Chairman & CEO Michael Saylor joins Emily Chang on the heels of their 4Q earnings. They discuss their results and the firm purchasing another $25 million worth of Bitcoin; Bitcoin’s spiraling down since November; and his discussion with Block’s Jack Dorsey during the MicroStrategy World 2022 conference.
For many of us, our home is by far our biggest asset, and in the world of fintech, that’s led to a logical extension: when you need money, borrow against that biggest asset. Today, a London fintech called Selina, which provides flexible capital to consumers on five-year terms against up to 85% of the value
Retail investment apps in Southeast Asia attracted a lot of funding last year, and the trend looks set to continue with Vietnam-focused Infina announcing that it has added $4 million to its seed funding. Along with the $2 million it announced in June, this brings the round’s total to $6 million. Investors include Sequoia Capital
Bruce Dahlgren Contributor Bruce Dahlgren is CEO of MetricStream, a risk management (IRM) and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) company. Browsing travel options on Google Flights, you may have noticed that airlines have begun to incorporate carbon emissions data into their offerings to consumers. As a frequent flyer, all things — including price — being
Companies like Opendoor opened the door to a new way of buying and selling properties by inserting a strong middle player who could buy in houses or apartments and redevelop them at scale, and then sell them to new homeowners at a profit. Now Clikalia, another player in the so-called iBuyer space, has raised €75
Vivek Narayanadas Contributor Vivek Narayanadas serves as General Counsel for MetaMap, which helps online services become borderless through user-centric, privacy-forward trust and safety workflows. From securing a loan to renting a car to getting a job, our lives increasingly depend on the digital world to enable trust-based interactions online. That world is now borderless: people
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