Equity Monday: What if no one gets to buy TikTok?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

This weekend was a welcome reprieve from last week’s insane news cycle inside the world of technology and money. If you are still catching your breath from the Great IPO Wave of last Monday, we feel you. Here’s what we got into this morning:

• The TikTok sale could be in trouble, this time due to China changing its rules on sales of tech firms that have certain algorithms. TikTok parent company ByteDance intends to comply with the rules, but what impact the news could have on the sale of the social service is unclear as of yet, though the developments are not good if you were in favor of a deal.
• American tech shares are set to rise once again after setting records last week.
• Equity is back on YouTube, hell yeah!
• From the weekend: Medium’s growth in both traffic (pageviews) and income (paying subscribers) is super impressive according to its latest reporting. And the publishing platform and media company is doubling-down on product to fend off upstarts like the popular Substack. Per a Bloomberg report, tech IPO fundraising could set a record in 2020. And, to ground us in a macro-economic sense, Chinese banks are being forced to take a profit hit to support other companies.
• In the funding round domain, Semalytix raised €4.3 million in Series A funding (according to TechCrunch) for its pharmaceutical-AI service. And India-based Eruditus raised $113 million for its executive-focused education service. That’s a lot of money, but like we’ve been saying, edtech is hot.
• And, finally, will there be enough horns for all these hot SaaS rounds that are getting done in a blur today? What if SaaS revenue multiples slip by 20%? Then what? When deals go so fast that due diligence suffers, the hangover can last a bit.

And that is the week’s Monday ep, thanks for sticking with through our super-busy week last week. Whew!