Spotify <3 podcasts, Calm becomes a unicorn and Reddit's Series D

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

This week Kate Clark and I sat down to get through the biggest news in the venture and startup world. This is our regular episode of the week after a shot focused on the Slack IPO, and an interview concerning Facebook. So, back to our roots. And as has been the case for months and months now, there was a lot to get through.

Podcasting took center stage this week, with music giant Spotify snapping up podcasting tool startup Anchor and podcast production company Gimlet. The latter was expected, but the combined $230 million price tag may have come as a surprise to some.

Spotify says that it isn’t done investing in the space. It won’t be alone, however, in hoping to drive big dollars with original audio shows. Himalaya raised a pocket of money — $100 million — to build out its own podcasting world.

Moving to other huge rounds, Calm picked up $88 million in a new round, pushing its valuation to the $1 billion threshold. That makes Calm, probably, the first mental-health focused startup to make it into unicorn territory. Reddit is also scoping a nine-figure round (Kate isn’t a fan), which could just about double its valuation to $3 billion.

Databricks raised a bunch of money this week at a similar, $2.75 billion valuation. It does big data analytics.

Lastly on the funding front, Lime did close that big round we’ve been expecting it to. What does that mean? It could be that Lime’s latest capital shows there is appetite for risk left in the market. Or that a lot of folks need to tell their LPs that they have acquired exposure to the scooter market. Who knows.

We also hit on an LA venture summit and wrapped. We’ll be back in a week!