Daylight’s sunset and Meta’s year of focus

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

Mary Ann and Alex were a dynamic duo this week, taking on a blizzard of tech news, startup updates, and questions that linger over hundreds of billions of dollars worth of venture capital investments.

Here’s what the show got into today:

• The toptechtrends.com/2023/05/25/celebrity-investors-pile-into-consumer-savings-startup-checkmate/”>fascinating backers of Checkmate, and the future of online shopping: Mary Ann covered a very interesting Series A for Checkmate, a startup that not only has shown real legs on the competitive App Store, but also on social media platforms far and wide.
• Cava’s IPO toptechtrends.com/2023/05/23/cava-ipo-analysis/”>won’t save the IPO market, but it could help all the same: Alex is so IPO-deprived that he’s drawing connections between anything that files and the startup market. This time it’s not even that much of a stretch!
• Daylight toptechtrends.com/2023/05/22/daylight-the-lgbtq-neobank-calls-it-quits/”>calls it quits: From the ‘not a huge surprise’ category comes the end of Daylight, a neobank aimed at the LGBTQ+ market that has been struggling for a while yet. This begged the question are themed neobanks going to make it?
• toptechtrends.com/2023/05/24/soundcloud-lays-off-8-of-staff-as-it-aims-to-reach-profitability-this-year/”>Layoffs, Layoffs, toptechtrends.com/2023/05/24/meta-conducts-yet-another-round-of-layoffs/”>Layoffs: Soundcloud is cutting staff to get to profitability, which we can understand. Meta is cutting staff because it, well, wants to conserve capital for more share buybacks?
• Anthropic’s toptechtrends.com/2023/05/23/anthropic-raises-350m-to-build-next-gen-ai-assistants/”>massive funding round and toptechtrends.com/2023/05/22/startups-enterprise-ai-race/”>who is going to win the AI war? When is $450 million not that much money? When you are building foundational AI models that are taking on OpenAI and others. Also in this section: Cold War metaphors.

And with that, we’re heading off into a holiday weekend here in the US, so Equity will be back next Tuesday.

toptechtrends.com/2023/05/26/daylights-sunset-and-metas-year-of-focus/”>Daylight’s sunset and Meta’s year of focus by toptechtrends.com/author/alex-wilhelm/”>Alex Wilhelm originally published on toptechtrends.com/”>TechCrunch