Greetings and welcome back to Equity, a podcast on the business of startups where we break down the facts and subtleties hidden in the headlines.
On this Friday program, we discuss the most important startup and technology news from the previous seven days. We adore Kirsten Korosec, who joined Mary Ann, Alex, and her this week.
Here’s what we got into today:
- Nvidia blew the doors off with its earnings report. We talked through some of the high-level numbers and marveled at the company’s growth. TechCrunch has more on the matter here.
- Ramp raises $300 million: In this market, a multibillion-dollar valuation is a win for a fintech, even if Ramp’s new price tag is a bit lower than it was previously. So, while Ramp likely doesn’t love that it raised a down-round, it does have fresh capital and is worth $5.8 billion. That’s simply not that bad.
- Lex raised $2.75 million: Alex covered AI-powered writing tool’s Lex seed round. Kirsten got to give the app a try, and we all had nice things to say about the nascent startup.
- Northvolt is bringing its volts to North America: The global battery-building boom includes Swedish company Northvolt building a new facility in the United States. The company raised $1.2 billion from BlackRock.
- Better.com went public: Mary Ann interviewed the company’s CEO ahead of its SPAC-led public market listing, which got panned.
- In the transit world, Cruise got its wings clipped in San Francisco after an accident involving a fire truck. Alex is annoyed. Mary Ann is not.
- This year’s The Tech job Battlefield 200 companies feature a lot of startups focused on excrement. We’re not kidding.
That’s all from us this week. We are back Monday morning, chat then!