Equity Monday: Jeff's going to space, and everyone wants a piece of Flipkart

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here. It's WWDC week, so expect a deluge of Apple news to overtake your Twitter feed here and there over the next few days. But there's a lot more going on, so let's dig in: The Weekend: A supercharged, supercharged Model S Tesla car is not coming out. Instead, a merely supercharged version will come out. It's still stupid fast and expensive. And Nigeria's war with Twitter continued, with new efforts from the African nation to limit access to the social media service within its borders. This Morning: Flipkart is raising $3 billion at a roughly $40 billion valuation The deal underscores not just how big the Indian tech scene is, but also how much investor interest there is in ecommerce bets more generally. And Jeff Bezos is going to space. Soon! Funding Rounds: Trulioo raised a $394 million Series D. The Canadian startup is now worth far more than $1 billion. And Chinese company Kanzhun is going public in the United States, which raised an eyebrow here amongst the Equity Morning Crew. Take The Damn Equity Survey: Take it! All the cools kids are taking it! And that's your start to the week. More to come from your friends here on Wednesday, and Friday. Chat soon! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Equity is brought to you by Extra Crunch, that prodigious TechCrunch paywall you keep running into. You can break through that paywall at a steep discount if you use the promo code EQUITY. If you do, you'll get access to our best stuff and you'll make Equity look really good internally at the same time. Enough of that, let's start the show.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Good morning, good morning, good morning, everybody, and welcome to Equity's Monday episode. This is our weekly primer where we catch up on the news and, as always, explore the numbers behind the headlines. It is June 7th, 2021, and we are back for a full summer week, which of course means that it is going to be a very busy one. Apple's WWDC Developer Event kicks off today and runs through Friday. Also this week, recent IPO UiPath will report earnings for what I think is the first time since it went public. US stocks are mixed but largely flat ahead of the open this morning. EU stocks were up just a smidgen, while Asian stocks were mostly mixed this morning. The stock market, however, was not the only thing being calm. Major cryptocurrencies have largely been flat in the last 24 hours, moving by, say, a couple of single-digit percentage points.

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  Now, do not forget to take the Equity survey that we have had out for a couple of days. It is over on our Twitter page. It's attached to the Last Week Podcast post on TechCrunch. I tweeted it out this morning, so please, please, fill it out and tell us what you'd like to hear more of or less of on the show. We're going to do this each and every year to make sure that you have a voice. And with that, let's begin.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  All right, so the weekend, now the weekend, this is fun. From the electric car front, Elon Musk has announced that a supercharged version of its Model S car, the Model S Plaid Plus, won't come out. However, the Model S Plaid will, and he says it's kind of good enough. And frankly, not to agree with Elon Musk so early on a Monday morning, but the Model S Plaid can go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than two seconds, has 1,000 horsepower, costs around $113,000. So, you know, that's probably enough. Also, over the weekend, Nigeria ramped up its ban of Twitter after the nation's government gave Big Tweet the boot last Friday, ISB's got to work blocking the service. Then, according to The Guardian, lots of folks just started to use VPNs to access

• 2:16Speaker 00

  the service, which is precisely what I would do because Twitter is life. Anyway, over the last couple of days, the Nigerian government vowed to crack down on those getting around its ban, which of course won't work, but it does largely show how increasingly autocratic governments have somewhat two ways to approach the internet, one of which appears to be to suffocate it, à la China, turning their internet into an Intranet, or it's to lose the battle with open information. And I suspect this anti-Twitter push will wind up in camp, too.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  All right, this morning, we are going to flip the script and talk about two different things, one of which is e-commerce and one of which is about nerds in space. And on the script flipping point, how about Flipkart, which could raise more than $3 billion in an upcoming funding round? Now, sure, Walmart owns most of Flipkart, but why shouldn't it raise a huge pile of money? The Indian e-commerce market is hot and everyone wants a piece of a leading player. And as you already guessed, SoftBank is part of the capital pool that could put money into Flipkart, though according to Bloomberg, the money will also come from sovereign wealth funds. Now, here's the thing that I really care about. At what price are they going to put in this $3 billion? Well, the number is about $40 billion, which means that for $3 billion, they will get far less than 10% of the company.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  That is very expensive. Now, you can just chalk this deal up to the sheer scale of the global e-commerce market, the acceleration thereof in the last 18 months, but it's still an enormous check and one to pay attention to. And then this morning, it was announced that Jeff Bezos is going to space. Yes, Jeff is going up. Here is TechCrunch's Daryl Etherington. Jeff Bezos is going to be one of the passengers on his spaceflight company, Blue Origin's first ever human space launch on July 20th. The Amazon founder announced the news via his Instagram on Monday morning, revealing that his brother Mark will also be coming along for the ride. Bezos and his brother will join the winner of an online auction Blue Origin is currently hosting, which currently stands at 2.8 million, as the highest bidder for that seat.

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  Now, I had a lot of thoughts about this and a whole bunch of jokes that I told my wife while we were making coffee, and she told me not to tell them. So I leave all the humor to you. Jeff, good luck.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  All right, funding rounds two this morning, both of which are very, very fun. The first one is Truly You, or Truly You, yeah, Truly You, T R U L I O O, Truly You. Anyways, it has put together a $394 million Series D. The new capital values the Canadian online identity verification service at about $1.75 billion, according to VentureBeat. Now, Truly You calls itself a regulatory tech or reg tech company. What that means in this case is that it provides an API to companies around the world to provide them with identity verification, business verification, and similar services, which is apparently a big darn deal because you don't raise that kind of money at that kind of price unless you have a big business.

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  And as VentureBeat kind of notes, you can chalk up this latest deal to the accelerating digital transformation we've talked so much about in the last couple of quarters. And of course, a lot of VCs want to put dollars down on that particular wager. So we're seeing capital in this case from TCV, Amex Ventures, City Ventures, Morale Capital, Bloomberg Capital, and probably, we presume, others. Next up, we have KanZun, which is going public in the United States. Now, who is that? Well, KanZun is a Chinese company that owns Boss Zepen, a recruiting app that is popular in the country. Now, this IPO stood out to me for a couple of reasons. First, that the US third quarter IPO market is heating up as expected with a number of filings dropping in recent weeks that should make the domestic July through September IPO period nice and active.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  And that we're still seeing Chinese companies pursue liquidity on the US markets. Forget the fact that China's government is increasingly burning bridges abroad while suppressing its population at home and committing genocide in Xi'anjing. The capital markets are still nice and cross-border. TechCrunch will peek at the IPO docs later today and report on them if that is your jam. We'll see you over on the blog.

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  All right, now, before we go, a small programming note that I am off next week, so please enjoy some extra time with Danny and Natasha and Grace and Chris. They are simply amazing and I love each and every one of them. Also, please do take our survey. We're already past that three-figure response mark, but we'd love to treble what we currently have to make sure that we're getting a good sample of y'all and your hopes, dreams, desires, and more. And with that, that is our show. Make sure to come hang out on Wednesday for our deep dive and Friday for our news roundup. We are on Twitter at EquityPod or I am on Twitter at Alex if you want to come and say hello. But in the meantime, you are gorgeous. You're going to have a good week. We care about you and we'll talk to you soon. So chat then. Bye.