Cisco buys Duo, Brandless raises $240M, and Apple broaches $1T

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

This week TechCrunch’s Matthew Lynley and Crunchbase News’s Alex Wilhelm were joined by Jyoti Bansal, the founder of AppDynamics and a partner at Unusual Ventures, among other startup work.

Our own Connie Loizos was off this week.

This episode was effectively a news grab-bag. There’s a little of everything: public company drama, big rounds, acquisitions, and more.

Up top: Apple’s broaching of the $1 trillion barrier, which some people called early and some people called late. It depends on how you were counting. But the venerable consumer electronics giant did indeed manage to hoist its market cap over the trillion dollar mark, making it the first American company to do so.

But as we all wind up agreeing, it’s just a round number.

Moving along Sonos’s IPO had a good first day but only after a disappointing pricing run. Or as Lynley explains on the show, the firm had to price under its target range to go out, but then closed above that target range by the end of its first day’s trading. This is more evidence that pricing an IPO is an occult art of sorts. (More here on the company’s numbers.)

Scooting along, Duo Security is exiting to Cisco for $2.35 billion. This deal came at quite literally the perfect moment as the company our guest founded sold to Cisco for $3.7 billion last year. Why? Recurring revenue, which is seeing its value rise.

And finally, Brandless, which picked up a massive $240 million round led by the ever-hungry SoftBank Vision Fund. A deal to which I had a question: Why?

All that and we even managed to tell a joke and mangle a segue. More next week!