Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week wound up being incredibly busy. What else, with a week that included both the Airbnb and Affirm IPO filings, a host of mega-rounds for new unicorns, some fascinating smaller funding events and some new funds?
So we had a lot to get through, but with Chris and Danny and Natasha and your humble servant, we dove in headfirst:
- Affirm has filed to go public! The fintech unicorn is big, growing and losing less money over time. We were pretty impressed in our first look. Then, with a bit more time, we dug deeper and found a weakness or two. Still, Affirm is heading public and not in poor shape.
- Airbnb filed, and we jumped into an Equity Shot as fast as we could on Tuesday to get our minds around the news. Since then, Danny dug through the venture capital winners circle — a surprisingly small subset of firms! — and we also got into some questions that I had about the company’s finances.
- Robinhood is said to have an IPO in the books, so we talked a bit about what we know concerning its Q3 growth.
- And then there was edtech, as always. This week we talked about Tencent backing Udemy, Duolingo raising again and Transfr picking up a Series A that we thought was super interesting.
- Danny wanted to talk about the Trust & Will Series A. We tried to not make that many jokes.
- ZenBusiness raised $55 million as well, in an outsized Series B.
- Financial Venture Studio put together a new fund to cut small checks into seed-stage fintech startups. We think that’s great. Especially given what we know about what is going on in the fintech venture world.
- And Natasha walked us through her latest deep-dive, a look into the world of virtual headquarters. This led to the worst joke of the show.
What a week! Three episodes, some new records, and a very tired us after all the action. More on Monday!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/19/fintech-unicorn-affirm-has-a-lot-of-eggs-in-one-basket/
