Equity Tuesday: Everyone is raising money at the same time

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Tuesday, 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. We are back from a long weekend here in America. But not break here in the States can stop the flow of global tech news. So, here's the rundown: The Weekend: Tata bought BigBasket, setting up a fascinating ecommerce war in India. China is cracking down on edtech companies, leading to an IPO freeze. And Wejo is going public via a SPAC. You can read its investor deck here. This Morning: The are a zillion funding rounds in Europe and globally this morning, the start of what could be a super busy week's cycle. Private Equity is buying Cloudera, which is a surprise. Nio had chip shortage issues that impacted its delivery cadence. The Chinese EV company does expect to meet its Q2 delivery goal, however. Funding Rounds: Truebill raised $45 million. Chipper Cash raised $100 million. Zenyum raised $40 million. WeFox raised $650 million. Malt raised $97 million. Sennder raised $80 million. idwall raised $38 million. Belvo raised $43 million. And that was not even close to all the big ones. Riff: Late last week we missed the Sprinklr filing. You can read it here. Quite a number of VCs have money riding on the IPO. Welcome back, America, to the week. It's nice to see you, everyone else. Maybe Robinhood will file this week. 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

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  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.

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  Good morning and welcome to Equity's Monday episode. Of course, it is Tuesday because of the American holiday. This is our weekly primer where we catch up on the news and as always, explore the numbers behind the headlines. Today is June 1st, the final month of the second quarter of 2021. And yes, that does mean it is earnings season time in just one month. The US market is set to rise when it opens today. Asian stocks were mixed while European shares rose. Bitcoin has been largely flat in the last 24 hours, while Ethereum has been up by about 7% in the last day.

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  All right, look everyone, despite the fact that it was a holiday weekend here in the US, quite a lot happened over the last couple of days. So picking from a very deep stack of news, here is what you need to know. Tata, a huge Indian corporation, bought a majority stake in Big Basket, which competes with other online grocers in the country. So now we shall see Tata go up against the likes of Amazon and Walmart to help control e-commerce in the very large and important digital market. Also, Bloomberg reported this weekend that a recent change in policy regarding ed tech in China has, quote, "brought several potential mega IPOs to a screeching halt," end quote. It appears that China intends to apply more regulatory pressure to the private education business in the country.

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  Yet another step by the Chinese state to crack down on tech upstarts that have grown rapidly in the country in recent years. Of course, a long running narrative here, one to keep an eye on, especially because ed tech in China raised billions last year. And UK-based venture backed to Wejo, which is short for We Journey, is going public via a SPAC. The company focuses on information derived from car data. More of that over on techcrunch.com today as soon as I can write it. But really, guys, we have to leave this weekend behind us because there's oh, oh, oh, so much to get to.

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  All right. This morning, it feels a little bit like a pent up market releasing a grip of funding news and other kind of startup announcements. So let's talk about that for a second. Tech.eu's Robin Waters noted that by 9:30 a.m. CEST or Central European summertime, there had been more than $1 billion with a private investment announced into European startups, including a huge $650 million check into Wefox, a German insuretech company that Tech Crunch has covered before. And here in the US, Axios's Dan Primack counted at least 24 funding rounds before his newsletter went out. And guys, that's a morning newsletter. So it's going to be a very, very, very busy week. Also this morning, it was announced that private equity is buying

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  Cloudera, KKR and Clayton, Dubilier and Rice will purchase the enterprise data cloud company for $5.3 billion, a roughly 24% premium on the company's previous public value. Not a huge premium because it's not a very good company. That's the short take there. What else? Well, Neo, a Chinese electric car company, reported this morning that its May, quote, "vehicle deliveries were adversely impacted for several days due to the volatility of semiconductor supply and certain logistical adjustments." And just to be clear, I did change the tense in that. Anyways, in short, the chip shortage made Neo's May delivery numbers come up short, though the company does expect to meet its broader quarterly numbers. It's just worth keeping in mind that the global chip drought is impacting all sorts of companies.

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  And on the funding rounds front, guys, we have a bunch. So let's go ahead and just jump right in. Truebill, a personal finance startup, raised $45 million in a Series D led by Excel. Now, as TechCrunch notes, the funding comes just months after the company raised a $17 million Series C. The company has now raised $87 million in total. What to take away from this one? Well, it appears that the consumer fintech market is still hot and that investors are still happy to preempt rounds in the space. Next up is Chipper Cash, a startup that TechCrunch reports is, quote, "a three-year-old startup that facilitates cross-border payments across Africa," end quote. It put together a $100 million round to staff up.

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  The round matters because it's a huge investment for the continent and could help boost Africa's 2021 venture capital numbers to a new record. Over in Singapore, D2C dental brand Zenyam has raised $40 million. The round brings the company's total capital raised to $56 million to date. Now Zenyam, if you're not familiar, makes toothbrushes, teeth aligners, even fancier teeth aligners, that sort of thing. Several similar companies went public here in the US with a related model to help set a little bit of context. They didn't do that well, so it'll be very fun to see how Zenyam performs long term. And as we noted earlier, WeFox has put together a $650 million round. The German insurtech startup is now worth $3 billion.

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  Per our own reporting, the company's co-founder and CEO Julian Tieke said that the round was, quote, "much more than his company wanted to raise initially," with the CEO adding that the deal was, quote, "a very fast process and that it was oversubscribed by a factor of 4X." But wait, there's more. Malt raised a $97 million round at a nearly $500 million valuation. It was announced this morning. The startup connects technical talent to fixed term work and given how hot the developer and data scientist market is, the deal makes quite a lot of sense. And freight forwarder Cinder, that's S-E-N-N-D-E-R, has put together an $80 million round at a valuation of around $1 billion.

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  The startup, quote, "focuses on moving cargo across Europe and specifically focuses on trucks and FTL, or full truck load freight forwarding," end quote. That's of course via techwatch.com, a website you may have heard of. Over in Brazil, online ID security company IDWAL raised $38 million and Belvo, a Latin American-focused fintech startup that is kind of akin to a plat for the region, raised a $43 million Series A. TechCrunch covered its YC debut and earlier investing round. Now Belvo has a lot more capital, let's see what it can get done. And there were other rounds that we just can't get to this morning. In short, everything is happening at once.

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  Now, okay, closing up today, we're a little bit low on word count, so let me just wrap up with a note on Sprinklr. That's Sprinklr without the E. The company filed to go public as last week came to a close, but as most of us here in the US were trying to get off work as quickly as possible, we missed it. The customer experience platform raised more than $400 million while private, according to Crunchbase data. So even though we missed it, we still really have to care. It's a lot of money from Battery Ventures, Iconic, and others that have quite a lot of their own returns riding on this particular debut. Now, in brief, Sprinklr grew from around $93 million in revenue during the April 30 quarter of last year to around $111 million in the same period this year. And over the same timeframe, it became a little bit more unprofitable.

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  However, if you do use the company's preferred adjusted operating income metric, it actually saw slightly better profitability in its most recent quarter and very nearly broke even. It's yet another enterprise software IPO, y'all. I really hope you're not bored of those yet because this is not the last one.

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  And that is our show. Make sure to come hang out with us tomorrow for our regular Wednesday deep dive and Friday, of course, for our news roundup. We're on Twitter at EquityPod and I'm on Twitter as at Alex if you want to say hello. In the meantime, we will talk to you soon. Have a lovely week and I hope you're doing well.