All press is good press for Robinhood

• April 17, 2020

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week the Key Three were back with Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas, and Alex Wilhelm taking on the news while Chris Gates kept everything perfect.

Alex apologizes for the math error you’ll hear, naturally. 36 divided by four, is, of course, nine.

Turning to the show, as has been the case every single week since we cannot recall when, we had a hell of a packed agenda.; there were new funds to talk about, there were rounds aplenty. As the unicorn era hands the baton to the COVID-19 downturn, there still more than we can get through each week.

But we did manage all that follows:

• Lightspeed raised a host of new funds worth billions of dollars, including $1.83 billion in capital for later-stage deals and $1.5 billion to pour more capital into its international investments.
• Andreessen Horowitz wants to put together a second crypto-focused fund worth $450 million. That’s more than last time, and we had questions.
• Corigin Ventures raised its first institutional fund at $36 million, effectively stepping out of complete control from its parent organization, Corigin Real Estate.
• Stripe raised $600 million more, at a flat valuation to its preceding round. The payments company is now worth around $36 billion. The news dropped out of nowhere, and probably means that the eventual Stripe IPO is far, far away.
• Robinhood is raising new capital, which caught our eye.
• Carta, which helps manage equity for startups, laid off 16 percent of its staff as detailed in an emotional memo by the company’s CEO Henry Ward. Then, the plot thickened when news broke that it’s raising a new round of funding that would value it at $3 billion.
• Lucid and Everee, two Utah-based companies raised capital this week, right after we saw Podium raise the week before. $52 million for Lucid, makers of Lucidchart, and $10 million fo Everee, a payroll software startup with a fun twist.
• But we weren’t done yet, as we had to talk about Airbnb’s new debt work; Danny made the point that it’s hardly cheap capital for the firm to raise, possibly adding pressure to Airbnb later on. This is another company that will not go public in 2020.
• Savi raised $6 million to help students pay student loans, while Frank raised $5 million to help students avoid racking them up.
• Despite tight school budgets, Labster landed a deal with the California Community Colleges which tells us a bit about how edtech optimism is turning into actual dollars.

And, breathing out, that was the show. Thanks for sticking with us through the pandemic and not having a commute. It’s a treat to have you here.

Source

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week the Key Three were back with Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas, and Alex Wilhelm taking on the news while Chris Gates kept everything perfect. Alex apologizes for the math error you’ll hear,…