Bird and Lyft raise $900M, a16z launches a crytpo fund and $6B more for Sequoia

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

This week Connie Loizos and I were joined by Norwest’s Scott Beechuk. Sadly, Matthew Lynley was reading slam poetry to ambivalent cacti in the Sonora Desert and thus couldn’t join us. He’ll be back soon, we promise.

But we had a good crew on deck and a grip of news to sift, so let’s get to what we got into.

First up was the latest headlines in the on-demand transportation sector. Lyft raised a huge new pile of cash at a staggering valuation, Uber got the go-ahead to operate once more in the great city of London and Bird’s $300 million round officially closed.

So that’s another $900 million for domestic transportation-sharing, at least, in a single week. Right.

Next up, Sequoia’s epic new $6 billion in fresh capital. Recall the famous line about a million dollars not being cool, but a billion dollars being cool? Sadly a billion dollars isn’t cool, 2012 Andreessen Horowitz. But maybe $6 billion is cool. At least 2018 Sequoia thinks so. (Good luck returning a multiple of that figure!)

Speaking of a16z, that shop has a new vehicle in the market focused on the crypto space. With $300 million ready to go and no 20 percent cap on crypto investments, a16z can now do what it wants inside of the surprisingly-still-nascent space.

All that and we tried to squeeze AppNexus into the show. (Update: We failed!)

Stay cool and we’ll see you in a week!