Fundings and Exits

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This was a live week! Which meant that Mary Ann Azevedo was on the mic with Alex Wilhelm, and Grace Mendenhall, our ever-trusty producer, helped us power through. A big shoutout to Dennis,

Less than a year ago, Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei, intending to perform research in the public interest on making AI more reliable and explainable. Its $124 million in funding was surprising then, but nothing could have prepared us for the company raising $580 million less than a year

Lotti Siniscalco is a partner at Emergence Capital, where she invests in early-stage enterprise software companies. During TechCrunch’s Early Stage event, she headlined a session dedicated to giving feedback on pitch decks. What follows is a small slice of Lotti’s input from the session. Constructing pitch decks is part art and part science. And they’re

Ford started production yesterday on its F-150 Lightning pickup truck, a do-or-die vehicle that takes the automaker’s — and the United States’ — best-selling vehicle and swaps its gas-guzzling engines for powerful electric motors juiced by more than 1,800 pounds of batteries. The mattress-sized pack can deliver over 300 miles of range, but if Ford

“Investors are pouring money into Latin America’s logistics and shipping businesses,” our former colleague Jon Shieber wrote in 2019. But a pandemic later, amid unrest over gasoline prices across the globe, it’s time for a revisit. Nowports (YC W19) is a good starting point for comparison. In February 2019, the Mexican startup was just graduating

Glorang, a Seoul-based edtech startup that offers after-school classes and extracurricular activities via online for students between the ages of 3 and 18, said Friday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding co-led by Korea Investment Partners and Murex Partners, along with Japan’s Pksha Capital.  The new funding, which brings its total raised

Over on TC+, I just launched a new series called Pitch Deck Teardowns! Astute readers may already have figured out what that is all about: You submit a pitch deck and we share it with our readers, highlighting things that are awesome, making suggestions for improvements, and celebrating the fun, innovative, and surprising things that

Oware co-founders Raza Kasmi and Adil Nasar Managing goods as they make their way through multiple warehouses and logistics providers is one of the biggest headaches that businesses in the supply chain face. After leaving his job at Careem, Adil Nasar founded a company that sources, manufacturers and distributes lights in Pakistan, and experienced those

While working as the head of treasury at Braintree, Boris de Souza once discovered a $90 million payment that went “missing” for over two weeks because of poor payments infrastructure.  “It was my first week on the job, and I received an email from a client saying ‘I think you shorted us $90 million,’” he

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 was out due to a family matter, so Alex

This year’s global deceleration of the venture capital market is broad, impacting most startup ecosystems, sectors and stages. If you are building a company in 2022, you should not expect to see the same frenetic interest in your project that you might have enjoyed last year. Things have changed. One element of market evolution in

Most founders are not experienced entrepreneurs, which means they tend to repeat the same mistakes as they try to overcome universal challenges. According to Klaviyo co-founder and chief product Ed Hallen, luck was a contributing factor to his marketing automation company’s success. “But it’s also clear that if we had known more upfront, we wouldn’t

Paying rent on time can mean the difference between having a place to live, and well, not. Circa believes there is a simpler way to help renters keep a roof over their heads. The Maine-based payment technology company has created a mobile-first platform to enable renters to pay on time, in full, each month. And,

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week. Stocks are down, and cryptos not looking too impressive as the world gears up for a packed

Companies that rode COVID-driven demand for their products during the first years of the pandemic are seeing their fortunes come back to Earth. Whether some of the biggest names in the cohort have a next act is becoming an open question. Even more, could it be that companies that fell out of favor due to

Even in markets where credit card penetration is high, shopping cart abandonment is still a major source of concern for online vendors. Now imagine the situation in Southeast Asia, where many countries have scores of e-wallets, buy now pay later services and other forms of payment. Bank transfers are also popular option for online purchases,

Welcome to my weekly fintech-focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it officially turns into a newsletter on May 1, sign up here.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week was a good week because we had the full team back together. Natasha Mascarenhas was on hand, Mary Ann Azevedo was on the mic, and Alex Wilhelm was around as well.

Asia had more IPOs than other regions in Q1 2022, but its tally dropped from Q4 2021 Anna Heim 7 hours Sometime in 2021, the world passed the 1,000-unicorn milestone. This was captured by Crunchbase’s private unicorn board, which is dedicated to tracking startups with valuations above $1 billion; the list kept on increasing and

MadEats, Y Combinator alum, claims to be the first “‘full-stack’ delivery-only startup in the Philippines,” with their own virtual storefront, ghost kitchens and fleet of drivers. More than that, they also conceptualize and launch their own brands, making them a delivery-only restaurant group. The company announced today it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding

Amazon may be attempting to take on Shopify in the west, but in India, it is gearing up to explore social commerce. Amazon India has acquired the social commerce startup GlowRoad as the e-commerce giant makes a bigger push into one of its key overseas markets, a source directly familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Construct Capital co-founders and general partners Dayna Grayson and Rachel Holt continue to dive into innovation that some investors may not think is so sexy, but actually runs behind the scenes so that our food gets to grocery stores every week and our packages arrive when they say they will. And this time, they have

In mid-2020, short-term rental startup Lyric Hospitality shuttered most of its locations in what was widely viewed as another pandemic casualty. But the San Francisco company — which was out to help folks who struggled to decide between staying in a hotel or an Airbnb — wasn’t ready to go down without a fight. It

Ordinary Folk, a Singapore-based telehealth startup dedicated to men and women’s health issues, has raised $5 million in pre-Series A funding from Monk’s Hill Ventures. The funding will be used for hiring and expand into Hong Kong while scaling in Singapore. Founded in 2020 by Sean Low, the startup has two main platforms: Noah is

Carta data shows breadth of slowdown, and early-stage startups are hardly immune Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 7 hours The comedown from venture capital’s torrid 2021 is sparing few startups. New data from Carta, a provider of shareholder management services to private companies, indicates that the slowdown in venture capital activity is not constrained to a

As consumers’ interest in the environment and nutrition rises, food-tech companies join the race to invent meat alternatives. In 2021, alternative seafood companies received $175 million in investment globally, increasing 92% from 2020. A South Korean startup called CellMEAT, which develops cell-based shrimp, has secured $8.1 million (10 billion KRW) Series A funding to compete

Local IPO pays off for merged entity of Indonesian trailblazers Gojek and Tokopedia Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 17 hours GoTo, the combined entity resulting from the merger of Gojek (an Indonesian ride-hailing player) and Tokopedia (an Indonesian e-commerce company), raised around $1.1 billion (IDR15.8 trillion, per the company) in its public-market debut on the Indonesia

Silicon Valley has gotten fantastically efficient at funding apps, SaaS and developer tools. It turns out, though, that climate change cares a lot less about bits, bytes, and stored procedures — it’s a lot more analog than that. Along come Evok Innovations and its cleantech fund, aiming to plow money into companies that are working

The digital transformation of banking and payments services is a red-hot trend that’s shown no signs of slowing down. Banking-as-a-service (BaaS) products like Synapse, Unit, and Bond have helped fuel the shift by allowing companies to quickly spin up new financial services using APIs. NovoPayment is a global BaaS startup based in Miami that has largely been focused

Square Peg Capital, one of Australia’s largest venture capital firms with current assets under management of about $3 billion USD, is digging deeper into Southeast Asia. The firm is currently raising $550 million in new funding, and if its recent investment history is anything to go by, a good chunk of that will be invested