Equity Monday: Hunting for green shoots amidst the startup data

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week.

Before we jump into today’s show, don’t forget that the long-form Equity that we’ve done for more than three years still drops on Friday. Last week’s was a particular delight, so make sure you’re caught up. Ready? Let’s go.

This weekend was busy, with Quibi launching, folks in the UK attacking 5G towers and Skype trying to steal some of Zoom’s thunder. News was dominated, as always, by COVID-19, this time leading to a stock market bump as some data from the disease appeared to take a short breather with — depending on which tracker you favor — fewer folks contracting the infection in the last 24 hours than the day prior; investors are hunting for any positive signal to trade on, and that appears to have been enough.

What’s coming up this week? Not earnings, or at least not the sort of earnings reports that we care about. Instead, we’re keeping eyes peeled for Q1 VC data and economic information from the United States. Here in the States Friday is off, remember, so this is a short week.

Next, two venture rounds:

• Valispace, a Germany-based startup that also has folks in Portugal, raised €2.2M recently led by JOIN Capital. The startup calls itself “Github for hardware,” which TechCrunch summarized as a “collaboration platform for engineers, allowing them to develop better satellites, planes, rockets, nuclear fusion reactors, cars and medical devices” with a browser-based app.
• And Vertical Future just raised £1.1M. It’s doing vertical farming, a topic that I’ve read about every few years but now appears to really be a thing! That’s exciting. Vertical Future raised a bigger round last year, and is generating food today in production sites.

Finally, we close with a question: How many more startups are going to die this year, compared to 2019, and what do their deaths mean for staff and investors alike? Will the end of so-called “tourist” money harm young companies or will it merely cull the silly?

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

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