Pod Insights Equity Podcast Tesla’s busy week, and is fintech having a moment? About this episode It’s been more than a minute since Tesla went public, but the EV company was inescapable on TechCrunch this week. From layoffs to pricing changes and more, it was a week dyed deeply in Tesla colors so we had to chat through the latest.
But that was just one element of what we got into on Equity this week. We also dug into Mary Ann’s reporting about Ramp’s latest round — and up valuation — that fit neatly next to Rippling’s own impending fundraise. If you are handling money, it’s a good time to be a startup.
The team also dug into Cherub, which wants to connect investors and founders, Maven Ventures’ consumer investing push, and touched on what Mercury is up to. All told, we were fortunate to have Kirsten Korosec along with us this week given the sheer volume, and diversity of transportation news to chew through, especially as it relates to Tesla.
Equity is back tomorrow with a special interview between Mary Ann and Notable Capital's Hans Tung, so stay tuned! Until then, hit play and let’s have some fun.
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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.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:10 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. Today is April 19th, 2024. My name is Alex and I'm joined today, as always, by my dear friends. In one corner, we have Mary Anne Azevedo, who brought the smallest water bottle I have ever seen in my life to this recording. Mary Anne, how is your thirst quenched by merely four ounces? That's my question.
0:36 Speaker 01 It's a long story, Alex, but you know, water is water and we all need to stay hydrated.
0:41 Speaker 00 Kirsten Korsak, do we need water? Or can we just drink a whole lot of Pepsi and call it good?
0:45 Kirsten Korosec? Hmm, as a desert dweller, I have to say water is more essential than Pepsi.
0:51 Speaker 00 Yes, you are in the United States, state of Arrakis, I believe it's called.
0:56 Kirsten Korosec? Yes, let the spice flow.
0:58 Speaker 00 Let the spice flow. And that's what we call New Mexico in the Northeast, because it's roughly as foreign to us as other planets. All right, on the pod today, we have a packed show. In the deals of the week column, we're going to talk about cherub, then maven, and then rippling. Then the first theme of the week is what the heck is going on over at Tesla? We haven't covered Tesla as much on the show as we did back in the day, because it got to be so big, but so much is going on that impacts the EV world. We just can't say no. And then we're going to wrap up with a section that I'm calling fintech. It's doing all right. Couple of news items there that we're going to tie together to discuss the state of all things fintech. But we are going to start with Mary Anne and a company called Cherub. And Mary Anne, I think this company kicks ass. Talk to us about it.
1:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was intrigued as well. It's an interesting concept. Cherub is what the co-founders describe as a raya of angel investing. And I shouldn't necessarily have assumed that everybody would understand what that is. Maybe it's because I read too much celebrity gossip, but Raya, and I hope I'm also pronouncing that right, is basically a dating app for the affluent, the wealthy celebrities, for example, are on Raya. Anyway, Cherub is attempting to do a similar thing, but matching up angel investors with entrepreneurs.
2:16 Speaker 00 Marian, did you just say that you're an avid consumer of celebrity gossip?
2:19 Speaker 01 I wouldn't say avid, but it is a vice. I find it entertaining. I admit it. I mean, we we write about these topics all day long. So, you know, if I want something mindless, that's what I do.
2:32 Speaker 00 But you could quit at any time, right? You're not really that into it.
2:36 Speaker 01 Oh, of course.
2:37 Speaker 00 You're not an addict. You're in control. Yeah.
2:39 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
2:40 Kirsten Korosec? No tabloid addiction here.
2:42 Speaker 01 No, no, no.
2:43 Kirsten Korosec? I have a question, though, related to the actual startup and not celebrity gossip. I know Alex wants to go down that road. So is there a vetting process to ensure that the folks who are on there are like legit angel investors or legit founders? Like, how does the process work? How do you get on?
3:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, that's actually a very good question. So it's a subscription-based product for founders. There's two different levels of subscriptions based on what they would get out of it. And then the angels, I am 99% sure, all have to be accredited. But beyond that, I don't know if there's any other vetting. She didn't mention that there was. I don't think there's any other criteria involved there. But what is interesting is that it's very similar to like these dating apps. A founder can look at an investor's profile, and investor can look at a founder's profile, and then they can, you know, express that they're interested. And then the other party can look at theirs and decide whether or not to accept or reject that connection. And that could be like, oh, well, that investor's
3:44 Speaker 01 only writing $10,000 checks. Well, we want someone who can write a bigger check, or things like that. Or an angel can be like, hmm, this company's way too early stage for me, so I'm not going to bother.
3:54 Speaker 00 I want to ask about the business model, because it's free for investors, but they charge startups to join. So they're charging people money who need money, and people who have money don't have to pay. Is that right?
4:09 Speaker 01 Yeah. And at first I kind of thought, hmm, I would have thought it might be the other way around. But no, it's a $480 a year membership for founders to list their companies in the directory and they get analytics such as how many people viewed their deck and that sort of thing. Then they have a $950 a year membership. This is where the vetting comes in, a more vetted process to show the company more actively to investors. I talked to two founders who claimed, one of them said that they already got a $25,000 check just by being featured in cherub's newsletter and then meeting an investor in real life at an in-person event that cherub held. And then another founder told me that they were looking for more than just money. They wanted connections and they felt like they were
4:52 Speaker 01 going to be able to make more, a lot of connections through the site because they'd already raised like $5 million. They're a YC-backed company and a series A round led by Felices. And so they were like, we're really more even interested in the networking opportunities that can come out of this. So I agree with you. It almost sounds like counterintuitive that the founders would be paying, but I guess so far the couple that I talked to found value out of it.
5:15 Speaker 00 Maybe it's just not that much money. And so I'm, maybe it's more of like a, keep the, what's a play we've seen riffraff out of the platform so that way for investors who are in demand, they know that if they show up there, what they'll be shown is going to be at least sufficiently serious as to be able to cough up 500 bucks a year.
5:35 Speaker 01 Right.
5:36 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah, to me, it feels like being a member of a club, right? So there's that networking, social aspect, but backed with analytics and knowing that the people that you're going to be networking with also are interested in potentially investing and also have connections. So, you know, how much is a social club membership at, you know, your local country club? Probably a lot more and, you know, not, not filtered for the people that you want to meet. So it seems like an interesting business model to me. And it sounds like they have a waitlist of like 1,500 startups. So there's definitely demand.
6:08 Speaker 01 I think there is, and part of that may have to do with one of the co-founders, honestly, Jaclyn Johnson. She also founded Create and Cultivate. It's a self-described media company for ambitious women. I think she's fairly well-known, especially in the CPG space, which there are a lot of CPG companies featured on Cherub, although it's not exclusively based on consumer. There is a lot of it on there. And Angeline Wong, who was at Open Door for many years, they just seem really smart and have a lot of connections themselves. So I feel like a lot of people are drawn to them, too. Like, okay, if they're behind this, I want to know more. So that, I think that also helps.
6:46 Speaker 00 Yeah. On the consumer packaged goods front, we actually have some consumer tech investing news from Kirsten to get to.
6:51 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah. So remember earlier this year when everyone freaked out because Andreessen and Lehrer said, we're pivoting away from investing in consumer tech? Well, Maven Ventures just secured a $60 million fund, their fourth fund, that's going to be focused on consumer tech trends. So it's not going away. Startups, if you're working on consumer tech, there are investors out there. And it's interesting, because to me, these are smaller investments, right? So around a million dollars. They make about seven investments a year, or six to eight, I guess. And they've made seven investments from this new fund already. But to me, what's interesting, and Alex and Mary Ann, curious what your opinion is, is that
7:35 Kirsten Korosec? it's like, not just straight up consumer tech, it's a lot of AI. If you look at some of their recent investments. So it's really marrying the two. How is AI applied to consumer tech? Seems like what they're most interested in here. Would you agree?
7:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, they were saying that they want to do things like help build the next game-changing health AI company, or robotics AI consumer business. So I think you're right there. One thing also that very much stood out to me, though, is their record, that 16% of the firm's portfolio companies have reached a minimum $500 million exit or valuation. And that's 10 times the industry average. Like, dang, that's pretty good.
8:14 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah, I wonder if that very positive trend will continue because there's a saying in the world of publicly traded companies, Alex I'm sure has heard this, it's like it's hard to catch a falling knife, right? So it's hard to like time the the market. It's also really hard to time that perfect moment when to start investing in the next new new thing. And in this world, the next new new thing is AI. So the application of AI to consumer tech to me, man, it's going to be difficult to pick those winners. The good news is is that they have lots of folks there who have institutional knowledge and expertise in AI and that and those applications. So.
8:54 Speaker 00 I think the phrase is don't try to catch falling knives, with the implication being that if you do, you'll cut yourself and get bloody. So don't try to start buying stuff when it's on its way down. But I think it's actually kind of like the opposite in venture capital in a fun way. Like you want to be one step ahead of what's going on now. And so when you look at like the recent entries in Horowitz funds, they just put out as part of their 7.2 billion dollar package, they have like, I think it was 1.25 billion for like AI infra and another billion in there for AI apps. So currently that is like the thing people are putting capital into, but with probably less of a consumer focus. So for Maven, when I first read the story, Kirsten, I did think I'm like, oh, cool, consumer, something that won't be AI for once. And then I saw the portfolio companies had a similar
9:38 Speaker 00 kind of like, oh, reaction to it. But that said, I've learned a lot about consumer stuff lately. So like Pixar, for example, just announced they've reached like their billionth AI generated image for consumers. And, you know, I think chat GPTs continued sticking this with consumers shows that if you can nail the site, guys, the rewards are very large for the intersection of AI and folks. So I wouldn't want to have the challenge of picking that next thing because it sounds damned difficult. But if you can, I can also see how you could return a $60 million fund several times over with just one deal.
10:09 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah, and they have the benefit of going more at an earlier stage. They're looking at potentially making more investments with and sort of hopefully planting their investment seeds in a way that is diversified, even though there's obviously a trend here with the AI theme.
10:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, before we move on, I think it's important to note that a couple of companies that they had funded.
10:34 Kirsten Korosec? Actually, they had seeded where Zoom and Cruise and actually the founding managing partner Jim Scheinman is even credited for coming up with a Zoom name.
10:44 Speaker 00 So all they do is make car sounds and watch cars go by is apparently what we're doing. No, I mean, Maven's track record is pretty impressive, but I want to throw one more thing in here about this consumer AI thing that just occurred to me. There has been an interesting element of like price anchoring in the AI world. Like I pay OpenAI, how much does ChatGPT Pro cost? Does anyone know how much I'm paying OpenAI? I paid them some amount of money every month because my dad loves it. Right. And I think that, you know, like the copilot service from Microsoft for GitHub is 10 bucks a month. It's 30 bucks a month for like Office AI for Microsoft and so forth. So I really do feel like the market is saying, hey, these things will cost money. And if you can get a consumer product that you can charge for on a recurring basis like
11:27 Speaker 00 this, you can have an simply enormous amount of revenue. So maybe like the stuff that we're seeing here is gonna bear out better than we would think.
11:35 Kirsten Korosec? Actually, Alex, ChatGPT right now costs about $20 a month to answer your question. And by the way, what a nightmare future. Like I already am juggling so many subscriptions on the streaming side. Now I have to juggle all these AI subscriptions as well. How much money am I going to be spending five years from now? I don't even want to guess.
11:56 Speaker 00 This is why I have my law. I don't have. My spouse is detail oriented and handles our day to day accounting. So I don't actually know how many things we're paying for, but she says we're doing fine. So I'll take five more. Moving us along, my deal of the week is an upcoming round from a company called Rippling, which you might be familiar with if you're listening. It's in the HR tech space, competes with Gusto and Deal and smaller companies like Remote First that we covered on the show a little bit ago. And it's in the process of raising $870 million. But Mary Ann, ask me how much of that's primary versus secondary?
12:30 Kirsten Korosec? How much of that is primary versus secondary, Alex?
12:33 Speaker 00 What a brilliant question. It's $200 million in primary and $670 million in secondary, which is a pretty imbalanced frickin' round. And I think says two things. One, that the company is not burning so much that it is desperate to raise as much money for itself as it could, and that it's not going to go public for a long time because it just cashed out a bunch of its early investors and employees. But it's cool to see kind of a round at this size and valuation, Mary Ann. I was pretty hyped.
13:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was a little surprised, honestly, because it was just last March that they had raised $500 million right after or during the SVB meltdown. So that's a lot of money in a relatively short amount of time, especially in this market. I haven't talked to Rippling in a little while. So I'm not really up to speed on how the company is doing, but this would probably lead me to believe it's not doing too bad.
13:24 Speaker 00 No, not at all. The information reported, I think that they closed last year on a run rate or ARR basis of $350 million. So getting to be quite large. There are a couple of other competitors that are at the $500 million ARR marker higher. So they're not the biggest. Yeah. But what's blowing my mind is just like, I think Gusto and Deal are at 500 million and above. This one's at 350. I mean, there's a lot of revenue in this space. So the valuations do seem a little high. This deal put the company's value at 13.4 billion up from 11.25. But that said, you can kind of see why there's optimism about these companies.
14:04 Speaker 01 For sure. It's a massive space.
14:05 Kirsten Korosec? It is a massive space. So question is, how does this all shake out? I mean, they've obviously now raised a bunch of money. They're looking to expand. They recently signed a 123,000 square foot lease for some, a new SF headquarters. Wow. People are moving into commercial space. That's insane in San Francisco, right?
14:24 Kirsten Korosec? Quadrupling its office space. So they're spending money. They're expanding. They're definitely on that growth trajectory. Well, what does it bode in the long term in terms of going public? Do they need to even go public at this point?
14:35 Speaker 00 Ah.
14:36 Kirsten Korosec? Is the marketplace big enough for them to remain privately held, get the revenue, and kind of give a big F you to the public markets? Do they need them?
14:47 Speaker 00 That is a question that is broader and bigger and deeper than just Rippling in its current situation.
14:53 Kirsten Korosec? I know. We could have a whole show about it.
14:55 Speaker 00 But I, I think it's also the right question to ask. I will say though, that whenever you see this much secondary, the presumption is that it's going to reduce a lot of the pressure that might've been behind the company from its earliest investors to cash out those shares. Cause some funds have a 10 or 12 year timeframe and that can get a little bit sticky. Also some early employees can cash out some, so employees agitate less. So no, they don't need to go public. At some point, if you are venture backed, yes, you have to find an exit because that is how your backers will profit. But the question I think that I would ask is, does it have to happen in the next three years? Probably not. That said, there is an interesting IPO coming up next week. So this week we saw the Ibotta deal and I have some notes later
15:36 Speaker 00 on about that. So save that for a second. But Rubrik is going public next week and Rubrik is an interesting company. It does data management and cybersecurity stuff and it's like really unprofitable. And now I don't know what the state is of all these companies in the HR tech payroll space, but I presume they're not all profitable. And so if you want to get more of them off the bench and into the public markets, I think if Rubrik does well with its unprofitability, that would say there's enough enthusiasm to allow more to go public and then maybe some of these will not rippling, but maybe Gusto or Deal might consider it. So I, I think we'll get an interesting test, Kirsten, next week.
16:14 Kirsten Korosec? Stay tuned.
16:14 Speaker 00 Stay tuned indeed. All right. Now on the IPO front, as promised, Ibotta priced above range at $88 per share, ahead of its range of 76 to 84, and it opened trading on Thursday at something like $110, $111 per share. So yeah, the IPO wins are winsome.
16:34 Speaker 00 This is great. I did not expect to see this much enthusiasm and it's great not because I own a bought a stock. I do not, but it's great because I'm hoping it's going to get more companies to list. See if we can talk about them on the podcast because we've only had three IPOs since last August and then two, and then it was like a 12 month dearth. So not enough debuts, but good news there.
16:53 Speaker 01 I wish our listeners could see the glint in your eyes, Alex, when you talk about IPOs.
16:57 Kirsten Korosec? Before we move on, I just want to spend 30 seconds to mention, because this just happened, Serv Robotics, which is the sidewalk delivery robot company backed by Uber, kind of spun out of Uber slash Postmates, really, also backed by Nvidia, they debuted today and not looking great right now.
17:17 Speaker 00 Oh, no. What's the ticker symbol?
17:19 Kirsten Korosec? S E R V. So this was a reverse merger, very similar to a SPAC, slightly different details, but yeah, they're down. Granted, we're talking small amount of money here, you know, $3 a share. I think they're hoping to debut at four. They're down 88 cents, which is 22%. So we'll see what happens, but maybe not so bullish on the sidewalk delivery robot.
17:42 Speaker 00 That is such a gosh darn letdown because Serv Robotics is like the absolute like cross section of things that I love. Cute robots, delivered burritos and sitting on my ass and oh, and self-driving. It's like, it's everything I love in one package. I wish we could buy individual stocks as turtleists because it would be fun to like, you know, like buy some Serv and be like, yeah, that'll show the haters. I'm going to use their robots. We don't do that, but I'm disappointed. It's off 21% right now. Damn.
18:09 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah. Well, but it's just first day. So let's see what happens over the long term. And they do notably have some big companies backing them, Nvidia, Uber being the main ones, but they're still small, you know? So let's see if they can manage to scale up.
18:24 Speaker 00 All right. When we come back, we're going to talk about what is going on at Tesla. But first, my dear friends, a short break.
18:34 Speaker 00 And we are back and I'm so glad that we have Kirsten on the call today because it has been a week of nonstop Tesla news. Started off with a bang and there has been many developments since then. Kirsten, why won't Tesla leave us alone and give us back the news cycle?
18:49 Kirsten Korosec? Because Elon's still in charge.
18:51 Speaker 00 Ah, let's start on the start of the week. So going back to Monday, rumors are flying that layoffs are coming. They arrive and the company said that they were 10%, it was more than 10%.
19:03 Kirsten Korosec? So there's about 140,000 employees right now or were under Tesla as of Sunday night and Monday come layoffs around 10%. That's what we're hearing. An email goes out, but it was a little bit chaotic as sometimes things are with Tesla. Some people, and we had sources tell us this and other outlets reported this, that people were badging into one of the facilities and then kind of being flagged and learning that's how they were laid off.
19:30 Speaker 01 Oh, that's awful.
19:32 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah. Layoffs have happened in Tesla periodically over the years. It's oftentimes used to resize the company or the big underlying thing. There's a couple of themes here. Some very big high performers were part of those layoffs. At the same time as these layoffs, a couple of high profile people, people who Elon actually let be out there in the public space, which is a big deal. He typically is the one who is sort of the mouthpiece for the company. Drew Baglino being the primary person that a lot of attention has been put on. And the speculation and theory there, which is backed up by some evidence, is that there has been an underlying kind of fight going on within Tesla over whether to pursue
20:15 Kirsten Korosec? a $25,000 or a low cost, cheap EV or this robot taxi that is supposedly based on the same platform. And in Walter Isaacson's biography that came out last year, it kind of gives details on this sort of fight. So what we, it looks like what's happening is Elon, in classic Elon's style, is pivoting, is going all in on robot taxi and realigning the business as a result.
20:43 Speaker 00 So there was also a recent cut to the price of full self-driving the software package. And I think people also could use it for free for a month, something like that.
20:51 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah, that's still going on.
20:53 Speaker 00 Okay, it seemed like a push by the company to get more people getting out there, getting more data for it. And so to me, thinking about that, does the, does the FSD price cuts and free trials feed more data into the company to support the robot taxi push? Because I can see that kind of making sense.
21:09 Kirsten Korosec? Well, I mean, there's so many questions I have about the robot taxis. So quite honestly, I think the big thing to remember here is going back to fundamentals of the company. Primarily, they've received, you know, revenue and profits from the making and selling of cars. The price wars that started a year ago really kind of prompted by them has absolutely squeezed their profit margins to a point where they were once the envy of the automotive industry and they have absolutely dropped. As a result of these EV price wars and clear evidence of some softening demand across the industry, even though Tesla is still very much a leader, it is still affecting that company. So they're looking for other
21:51 Kirsten Korosec? financial levers. The other financial lever is FSD, really. So the free trial push to me was absolutely more of, sure, is there a data play in the background? Yeah, but it's also a revenue, a big time revenue play. The fact that they then went ahead and reduced the price suggests that the take rate on that free trial wasn't maybe what they wanted.
22:16 Speaker 00 Okay.
22:16 Kirsten Korosec? But that is a bit speculative. So, you know, again, it's a theory. To answer your question of whether this data will then go and be used for robot taxis, we could maybe assume that. But we're talking about the difference between an ADAS system, because FSD is not self-driving, to a level four, meaning a human driver is not expected to be in the loop, robot taxi. And where that data is used and how it overlaps is still a big question mark because they haven't talked about it.
22:43 Speaker 00 Okay, I'm just gonna ask you this very, very simply, because I want to make sure that I'm not totally insane. Is there any company in the world right now that has a level four autonomous driving system that can be unleashed on, for example, a whole continent worth of roads?
23:01 Kirsten Korosec? So no, because we don't have evidence of a company doing that. The closest would be, let's say, Waymo, which is currently operating a level four robotaxi in which the human being in the vehicle is not in any way expected to take over. And it is operating commercially in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. So not the whole continent, certainly. And so we call them ODDs or operational design domains. So that could mean the specific geography. That could also mean no left turns, or never when it rains, or no fog.
23:42 Kirsten Korosec? So, you know, what you're talking about is really level five. Anywhere, all conditions, any road. And that is something that, quite honestly, most folks believe is decades away.
23:54 Speaker 00 Right.
23:55 Kirsten Korosec? Well, we're going to see more as the level four.
23:57 Speaker 01 Yes, decades away. I like that.
23:59 Speaker 00 Mary Ann, I'm arguing my parade rained on. You don't need to add hail to the mix. Kirsten, so my point with that question, although I do very much appreciate the very succinct and clear answer, was more like, what is Elon thinking that robotaxis are around the corner if level five, to your point, is so far away? What am I missing in this picture that makes this a possibility versus a pipe dream? Because I want to believe it. I want self-driving. I'm the opposite of Mary Ann here, but it just seems like a pivot off a cliff versus towards a new future.
24:29 Kirsten Korosec? As a history lesson, Elon Musk has been talking about a car that can drive itself for years. In an interview I had with him as far back as December of 2015, when I was at Fortune on a TechCrunch, you know, he said it was two years away. And in promise publicly, either via social media, or in press conferences, or in interviews, that your Tesla would turn into a robotaxi in which you could then make money off of it. So these have been promises that have been put out there for years. Now, Elon has, in the past, made promises and then delivered on those. This is one that seems very distant, and I don't really, quite honestly, see how they can do it with the hardware that they have right now.
25:11 Kirsten Korosec? They've skewed a lot of more of the traditional hardware such as LiDAR on their vehicles and they're just going based on cameras. Will the robotaxi be the same? There's also regulatory questions such as, does it have a steering wheel and pedals? Because that would require special federal exemption under FMVSS, which is an acronym I won't get into here, but basically it's all the requirements that your car has to have, like an airbag, like a steering wheel. Those are real requirements under federal law. If you build a robotaxi without those things, you need an exemption. So what's this robotaxi going to look like? Like basically this announcement to me, leaves me with a lot of
25:52 Kirsten Korosec? questions and quite frankly, huge amounts of risk for the company. I know that there are a lot of people out there who are bullish. I'm sure I will hear from you. You're going to tell me that this is the future and he's betting on the future. And it's true that Elon has incredibly high tolerance for risk, probably more than any human being I've ever encountered. But the question is, I don't know how they turn this into a revenue maker in the near term.
26:16 Speaker 00 I agree with everything you just said, but let's move on. We have to talk about fintech. Mary Anne Fintech has been the dirge of the technology symphony for quite some time now, but the plodding pace has gone away and it does seem that we've reached a new tempo. You might even say it's allegro.
26:32 Speaker 01 Yes. Wow. Yeah. This week I covered Ramp's latest raise. It was $150 million Series D extension at a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion. So what is interesting about this is the valuation is actually an increase compared to its last round, even though it's still down from its valuation two years ago. But wow, in this environment, that's pretty impressive. Also impressive are the list of investors participating in this round. We had Kosla Ventures and Founders Fund co-leading. We had new backers, Sequoia Capital, Greylock, 8VC, and a long list of other existing backers that also participated in the round.
27:16 Speaker 00 Is this just everyone who's not an investor in Brex?
27:20 Speaker 01 I don't, I don't know. I didn't analyze to that extent, but yeah, there, there's a lot. It's also interesting if I have to, you know, talk about this too, is that Keith Raboy, he actually led the investment into Ramp very, very early on, like when he was at Founder's Fund and was on the board, but he left to COSLA a few months ago. And so he obviously helped lead the round for COSLA. Founder's Fund, I guess, didn't have hard feelings and still participated and actually co-led the round. So I thought that was a little bit of an interesting backstory.
27:54 Kirsten Korosec? So is this fintech having a moment or is this just about Ramp?
27:59 Speaker 01 That is a good question. I mean, Ramp arguably has really stood out as sort of an outlier. It hasn't had to lay off. It's been notching consistent revenue growth, at least based on what they tell us, continuing to raise capital steadily with a valuation that's, you know, not that far off its peak two years ago. So, you know, I don't know. I would say it's definitely probably more reflective of how well Ramp is doing. It claims to have done very well in the first quarter compared to the year before. And that is looking at it, as Eric Gliman, co-founder said, at a much larger base. So as Alex and I have talked about in the past, it's harder to grow exponentially the bigger you get, but Ramp seems to keep doing that.
28:42 Speaker 01 One other quick note, though, some would argue that Rippling also falls into the fintech space, so because they got into global payroll. So if you count these two deals, then you could also say this is a little bit more of fintech itself having a moment.
28:56 Speaker 00 Stole the words right out of my mouth. And also I would say that the other bit of fintech news that we have in the show notes today is about Mercury, expanding away from just doing business and startup banking into also consumer banking. And to me, that shows a level of confidence in what they've built. They're willing to expand into consumer. I mean, we have seen Goldman Sachs try this with Marcus and torch a bunch of money and run away. So to me, with the Rippling round, with the Ramp round, and then the kind of bold choice from Mercury, that's the combination of those made me feel like fintech's having a moment. I may certainly be over indexing on three data points, but that was the impetus behind that as the title of the section, Chris.
29:38 Kirsten Korosec? Well, at least fintech is having a moment this quarter, which is split that way.
29:41 Speaker 01 Right, or at least this week anyway. Because who knows what would happen next week?
29:45 Speaker 00 I said fintech is having a moment. A moment is by definition, an ephemeral amount of time.
29:51 Speaker 01 Anyway, yeah, interesting news about Mercury expanding into personal banking. We'll see how that goes. They just want to say that what they are looking to do is more of a premium thing, not going necessarily after the masses, but more targeting like the founders and investors that already use its B2B product, but on the personal banking side.
30:09 Speaker 00 Okay, we got to wrap, but Mary Ann, I have one last question for you about Chime. Have you heard anything from them?
30:14 Speaker 01 I haven't talked to Chime. They're so quiet. I don't know what's going on at Chime.
30:19 Speaker 00 This is weird because they grew so quickly and they don't have to raise money. I don't care about that. But I just, I can't recall seeing news from them, hearing about them. No one's reporting on their numbers.
30:29 Speaker 01 Very quiet.
30:30 Speaker 00 They're either doing incredibly well or incredibly not well. It's one of the two. We'll find out in time, I suppose.
30:35 Speaker 01 Maybe I need to reach out and ask.
30:37 Speaker 00 Well, let's just start going through everyone that's left the company on LinkedIn and just go down one by one and get them on the phone. All right, but that is all the time we have for Equity today. Kirsten Korosec from the Transport Desk, thank you so much for your time. Mary Ann Azaveto from all things fintech and venture, thank you for your time. Equity, of course, is part of the TechCrunch Podcast Network and our sister show is Found, focused on all things founders. Equity comes out three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, except for when we have a special weekend interview. Mary Ann?
31:05 Speaker 01 Yes, I have an interview coming out this weekend with Anstung. Well, he was with what was formerly called GGV Capital, now called Notable Capital. Really great interview. Please, please listen up for it. You won't regret it.
31:19 Speaker 00 Yeah. And also to everyone I offended by calling Notable Capital the most boring name in venture capital, I apologize, kind of. All right, we're out of here. Bye, everybody.
31:26 Speaker 01 Bye.
31:27 Kirsten Korosec? Bye.
31:31 Speaker 00 Equity is hosted by myself, Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch Senior Reporter, Mary Ann Azaveto. We are produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator and a big thank you to the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
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