Hello and welcome back to
Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week
Kate was in China, so TechCrunch’s
Danny Crichton and
Alex took the helm while she was
out grilling Lime. So, with our producer (the excellent
Mr. Gates) in San Francisco and Danny in New York and Alex in the provinces, we got into the following to start:
- Jetpack Aviation and it’s seed round to build a flying motorcycle, because of course why not
- An endurance racing startup raising money from Usain Bolt
- Norwest’s mega new $2B fund
- EQT’s mega new $750 million rumored European growth fund
- And a new round for Peanut, the social network for mothers
Pivoting into the biggest news from the week,
1Password raised a comically-large
$200 million Series A round of funding. The firm quite obviously hadn’t raised much capital before but had grown to be quite large. Hence the large check. Recall that Series A really means a company’s first institutional round, not a specific dollar range.
Next we discussed DoorDash and its
possible $100 million add-on to its $600 million round from earlier this year. The new capital should keep the on-demand technology company’s valuation pegged just above where it was set during its preceding round. So, a down round this is not.
Meanwhile, Docker received a $35M investment from Benchmark and sold much of its business to Marantis, which has all the appearances of a recap for the formerly high-flying unicorn.
What else? JUUL is
laying off staff,
WeWork is still losing an ocean of dollars, and
Line is partnering up with Yahoo Japan.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.