- Ecommerce and fintech stay hot as Square reported big earnings, Shopify and Etsy do well, and more. We tied this to recent VC results in the fintech space, which saw a record number of $100 million rounds in Q2. There were some signs of weakness elsewhere, but the general state of things in tech is surprisingly hot, given the pandemic and recession.
- Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia has a new seed fund that he built in collaboration with AngelList.
- D2C women’s-health startup Stix raised a $1.3 million Seed round.
- Quantum-computing startup Rigetti raised a $79 million Series C.
- Rippling raised $145 million at an eye-popping $1.35 billion valuation; the company’s last value, set a year ago, was $270 million.
- AgentSync put together a $4.4 million Seed round to help bring APIs to insurtech.
- Turning away from funding to some neat product news, India-based Statiq is building a bootstrapped EV-charging network.
- And as we wrapped, the Byju-WhiteHat Jr. deal was neat, JIO is soaking up a huge amount of Indian VC, and Natasha’s latest piece on learning pods had us arguing about what things are worth.
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