The rules of VC are being broken – TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

As ever I was joined by TechCrunch managing editor Danny Crichton and our early-stage venture capital reporter Natasha Mascarenhas. We had Chris on the dials and a pile of news to get through, so we were pretty hype heading into the show.

But before we could truly get started we had to discuss Cincinnati, and TikTok. Pleasantries and extortion out of the way, we got busy:

• Ecommerce and fintech stay hot as Square reported big earnings, Shopify and Etsy do well, and more. We tied this to recent VC results in the fintech space, which saw a record number of $100 million rounds in Q2. There were some signs of weakness elsewhere, but the general state of things in tech is surprisingly hot, given the pandemic and recession.
• Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia has a new seed fund that he built in collaboration with AngelList.
• D2C women’s-health startup Stix raised a $1.3 million Seed round.
• Quantum-computing startup Rigetti raised a $79 million Series C.
• Rippling raised $145 million at an eye-popping $1.35 billion valuation; the company’s last value, set a year ago, was $270 million.
• AgentSync put together a $4.4 million Seed round to help bring APIs to insurtech.
• Turning away from funding to some neat product news, India-based Statiq is building a bootstrapped EV-charging network.
• And as we wrapped, the Byju-WhiteHat Jr. deal was neat, JIO is soaking up a huge amount of Indian VC, and Natasha’s latest piece on learning pods had us arguing about what things are worth.

It was another fun week! As always we appreciate you sticking with and supporting the show!