Solution-Max: We’ve gone Plaid #

Friday, January 17, 2020

We’ve gone Plaid #

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Danny and Alex were back together to riff over a the latest early-stage rounds, the latest on the late-stage front, and more. It was yet another stacked week, forcing us to pick and choose a bit.

Starting off, however, here’s the rounds that caught our eyes this past week:

Insurify raised a $23 million Series A, dwarfing its preceding capital raises
WorkBoard stacked $30 million into its accounts less than a year after its Series B
ProductBoard raised a $45 million Series B, from blue-chips Sequoia and Bessemer

Leaving the earlier stages and heading to the other end of the spectrum, we touched on Cloudinary passing the $60 million ARR mark, ExtraHop aiming for $100 million ARR mark in short order, and SiteMinder’s new $70 million round that gave it a $750 million valuation after crossing $70 million ARR last year.

Got all that? Like we said, it has been busy.

The two main stories this week on the show were the big Plaid deal, and what’s going on in the United States’s own venture market.

With Plaid, Visa spent more than $5 billion to acquire the financial data API service in one of the first blockbuster exits of the year, making some VCs at Spark Capital and other firms very happy.

Meanwhile, the U.S. venture capital landscape is changing rapidly as more and more regions outside of Silicon Valley bulk up on their startups. The Valley is barely a majority of VC dollars these days, while regions like the mid-Atlantic and the Southeast are raising their profiles quickly. We talk about that, plus the more than a dozen mega funds that launched last year.

Wrapping up, it appears that the venture capitalist classes are tired. Not that we feel too poorly for them, but it goes to show that there’s so much going on these days that no one is getting any rest. No matter how much money they have.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.