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 SF, Alex was in Providence and there was a mountain of news to shovel through. If you’re here because we mentioned linking to a certain story in the show notes, that’s here. For everyone else, let’s get into the agenda.
We kicked off with a look at three new venture funds. In order:
- Tusk Ventures: Tusk’s new fund, worth $70 million, is an effective doubling of its prior fund’s $36 million size. The politically savvy firm has put money into Coinbase, and other companies that deal with regulated industries.
- Sapphire Ventures: SAP’s former corporate venture fund Sapphire Ventures announced a whopping $1.4 billion fundraise this week. Sapphire may be one of or the most successful CVC spinouts to date.
- Moxxie: Katie Jacobs Stanton, known for co-founding #ANGELS, just closed her debut fund on $25 million. Kate chatted with her about her experience fundraising her very own fund, some of her previous investment and her plans for Moxxie Ventures, so there was plenty to unpack here.
From there we turned to the gender imbalance in the world of venture capital. This year, companies founded by women raised only 2.8% of capital. These not-so-stellar statistics are always worth digging into.
We then took a quick look at two different venture rounds, including ProdPerfect’s $13 million Series A and Pepper’s smaller $5.6 million round. ProdPerfect’s round was led by Anthos Capital (known for investing in Honey, which sold for $4 billion). The company has $2 million in ARR and is growing quickly. Pepper, formed by former Snap denizens, is working to help other startups lower their CAC costs in-channel. Smart.
And finally, Alex wanted to bring up his series on startups that reach the $100 million ARR threshold (Extra Crunch membership required). A first piece looking into the idea led to a few more submissions. There seem to be enough companies to name the grouping with something nice. Centurion? Centipede? Centaur? We’re working on it.
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