Outsized seed rounds, neobanks and booming M&A? Well hello, 2023
Feb 17, 2023
The hosts dive into Descope's impressive $53 million seed funding, spotlighting its innovative passwordless solutions. They explore Vexi's mission to boost credit access for Mexican youth and introduce a new venture fund championing female representation. The discussion shifts to the challenges facing the Buy Now, Pay Later sector, including recent layoffs and market shifts. Finally, they assess the EU's more organized tech scene and ponder the evolving relationship between startups and customer investment.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
Outsized Seed Round for Descope
Descope, a passwordless authentication startup, raised a $53 million seed round.
This is unusual, especially in the current market, considering their competitive landscape.
insights INSIGHT
Descope's No-Code Advantage
Descope's no-code platform speeds up time to market for authentication services.
It simplifies the process of building and modifying user journeys, which may have justified their large seed round.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Phenomenal Ventures First Fund
Phenomenal Ventures, founded by Meena Harris and Helen Min, closed a $6 million fund.
Around 40% of the LPs are founders, and nearly half identify as women.
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Natasha, Mary Ann and Becca got on the mic to talk startups, pet peeves and focaccia. What else did you expect?
Here's what we got into:
Descope landed a $53 million (!) seed round, a Phenomenal new venture fund and a neobank out to make credit more accessible to young people in Mexico.
Then we pivoted to talk about buy now, pay later (BNPL), which included some chatter about Affirm's recent woes and which areas of BNPL that do seem to be growing despite questions around whether this is the end of the BNPL boom as we know it.
Tech layoffs are as widespread as ever so we talked about what advice some VCs have for those laid off workers considering launching their own startups, and what we thought of that advice.
Finally, we ended with a jump over the pond to talk about EU's tech scene. Mostly about the fact that it is far more put together than the U.S., and all that jazz.
With that, we'll be skipping the upcoming week's Equity Monday due to the holiday and back with more on Wednesday, led by Becca!
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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