Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This was a special week for us because Danny was back in the office, which meant we cornered him into coming on the show. Danny, of course, is an Equity regular. Also aboard this week were our regular hosts, Kate and Alex.
We were relieved to have three hosts, because there was a lot of news to get through, from IPOs to late-stage financings to little seed fundings, and, we shit you not, camping!
Up first was the rapidly approaching WeWork IPO. WeWork, also known as The We Company, filed to go public some time ago. So we weren’t terribly surprised to learn the company is plotting a September listing. Though that’s earlier than we’d been expecting, we’re not complaining. If the sooner-than-anticipated IPO is due to market timing, or the company simply being ready, we don’t know yet. But we will when we see the numbers. Bring on the S-1 filing.
Next, Alex took us through a few recent and upcoming IPOs. He promised to be brief, so we’ll mirror the feat here. Last week Phreesia, Medallia and DouYu went public (notes here), Livongo got out this week (S-1 review here) and 9F and CloudMinds have filed. Expect more IPO news in time, whether you want it or not.
Leaving the public markets, Kate had words concerning the forthcoming Bird round that has yet to close. The company is raising its Series D led by Sequoia at a $2.5 billion valuation. Listen to the episode for your weekly scooter rant.
Next, Danny took us through the Robinhood round, which brought us to a discussion point. Alex wanted to compare Robinhood to Slack, when the latter company was worth about the same amount as Robinhood is now. Kate objected to the comparison; one’s an enterprise software business and the other a fintech giant. Still, Alex had lots of great points.
We then turned to HipCamp. The company, known as Airbnb for camping, raised a nice round of funding at a $127 million valuation. Andreessen Horowitz was involved via new general partner Andrew Chen, who recently announced another deal in the email subscription platform Substack. We’re betting Airbnb gobbles up HipCamp at some point.
We also touched on Gusto’s $200 million raise (and its constituent new valuation), before closing with the now-very-probable Vision Fund 2.0 and its Microsoft connection.
All that and we left even more material on the floor due to time. Make sure to check out Equity on Spotify if you haven’t seen us over there before. Click here to find the show.
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