How the pandemic drove the IPO wave we see today

This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here. I had a neat look into the world of mental health startup fundraising planned for this week, but after being slow-motion carpet-bombed by S-1s, that is now shoved off to Monday and we have to pause and talk about COVID-19. The pandemic has been the most animating force for startups and venture capital in 2020, discounting the slow movement of global business into the digital realm. But COVID...

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Affirm, Airbnb, C3.ai, Roblox, Wish file for tech IPO finale of 2020

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. The wait was long but this week the time was right: Airbnb finally filed its S-1 and so did Affirm, C3.ai, Roblox, and Wish. We are likely to see these five price on public markets before the end of an already superlative year for tech IPOs. The ongoing pandemic and political turmoil were not scary enough, apparently. This coming decade, you have to think that we’ll see a more even spread of...

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All IPOs should be paid for in Robux

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is an all-time first for the show, it’s an Equity Leftovers. Which means that we’re not focusing on a single topic like we would in an Equity Shot. This is just, well, more Equity. Danny and I and Chris got together to chat about a few things that we could not leave out: Our piece looking at which venture capital firms are expected to make the most bank from the recent IPO deluge. Roblox’s...

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Extra Crunch roundup: A fistful of IPOs, Affirm’s Peloton problem, Zoom Apps and more

DoorDash, Affirm, Roblox, Airbnb, C3.ai and Wish all filed to go public in recent days, which means some venture capitalists are having the best week of their lives. Tech companies that go public capture our imagination because they are literal happy endings. An Initial Public Offering is the promised land for startup pilgrims who may wander the desert for years seeking product-market fit. After all, the “I” in “ISO” stands for “incentive.” A flurry of new S-1s in a single week forced me to rearrange our editorial calendar, but I didn’t mind; our...

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Kea raises $10M to build AI that helps restaurants answer the phone

Kea is a new startup giving restaurants an opportunity to upgrade one of the more old-fashioned ways that they take orders — over the phone. Today, Kea is announcing that it has raised a $10 million Series A led by Marbruck, with participation from Streamlined Ventures, Xfund, Heartland Ventures, DEEPCORE, Barrel Ventures and AVG Funds, as well as angel investors Raj Kapoor (chief strategy officer at Lyft), Craig Flom (who was on the founding team at Panera Bread), Wingstop franchisee Tony Lam and Five Guys franchisee Jonathan Kelly. Founder and...

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Snap acquired Voisey, an app to create music tracks overlaying your own vocals

Snapchat helped pioneer the use of lenses on faces in photos and videos to turn ordinary picture messages into fantastical creations where humans can look like, say, cats, and even cats can wear festival-chic flower crowns. Now it sounds like the company might be turning its attention… to sound. The company appears to have acquired Voisey, a U.K. startup that features instrumentals that you overlay with your own voice to create short music tracks (and videos), and also lets musicians upload instrumentals that become the basis for those tracks....

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LA-based Credit Key raises $33 million for its business-to-business payments platform

Bringing to small businesses across the U.S. the buy-now pay-later model that transformed companies like Klarna and Affirm into billion-dollar businesses has netted the payment and lending company Credit Key another $33.85 million in funding. The Los Angeles-based company raised its latest cash from Greycroft, Bonfire Ventures, Loeb.nyc and other, undisclosed investors, the company said. “B2B e-commerce continues to expand at an incredible pace, but a great majority of merchants still lack the payment tools that their customers are asking for,”...

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AllRight, an English language learning app for children, raises $5M from Genesis Investments

AllRight is a platform for English language learning, aimed at children four years or older, which combines lessons with real teachers and homework with “AI-powered” tutors. It’s now raised a $5 million Series A round led by Genesis Investments, with participation from TMT Investments, TerraVC and existing investors Flashpoint and Misha Lyalin. The Ukraine-based startup will now enter new markets and strengthen its positions in Poland, Russia, Spain and Latin America. AllRight’s competitors include Open English, LingoKids (which has raised $22...

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Loadsmart raises $90 million to further consolidate its one-stop freight and logistics platform

Leading on-demand digital freight platform Loadsmart has raised a $90 million Series C funding round, led by funds under management by BlackRock, and co-led by Chromo Invest. The funding will be used to continue to build out its platform to offer even more end-to-end logistics services to its freight customers, and the company says that it will be doing that in part through new collaboration with strategic investor TFI International, a leader in the logistics space, which also participated in this round. In addition to TFI, the round also saw renewed...

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Xesto is a foot scanning app that simplifies shoe gifting

You wait ages for foot scanning startups to help with the tricky fit issue that troubles online shoe shopping and then two come along at once: Launching today in time for Black Friday sprees is Xesto — which like Neatsy, which we wrote about earlier today, also makes use of the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera to generate individual 3D foot models for shoe size recommendations. The Canadian startup hasn’t always been focused on feet. It has a long-standing research collaboration with the University of Toronto, alma mater of its CEO and co-founder Sophie...

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