Natasha Mascarenhas
Reporter
The Latest from Natasha Mascarenhas
Growth is not enough
The week brought together both this quarter's earnings cycle and the Q3 IPO rush. So, it was just a little busy!
Talkiatry lands $20M Series A to go all in on in-network psychiatric care
Talkiatry raised a $20 million Series A to scale a strategy simple in theory yet potentially challenging in execution: bring psychiatry services in-network with insurance providers.
Squire, a barbershop tech platform, triples its valuation (again) with Tiger Global
Squire is now a 175-person company with a tech platform used by over 2,000 shops across three continents.
Class, a Zoom-only virtual classroom, nears unicorn status after SoftBank check
Class, a virtual classroom that integrates exclusively with Zoom, announced today that it has raised $105 million in a financing led by SoftBank Vision Fund II. The 10-month-old startup has now raised
BoldVoice wants to help nonnative English speakers find (and flaunt) their voices
When Anada Lakra and Ilya Usorov first moved to the United States, they struggled to find their voices. They both knew and understood English, but when it came time to speak up, their accents became a
Edtech’s venture-backed globalization pauses at China
Edtech investors are increasingly going global, but regulatory crackdowns in China, which instructed K-12 tutoring startups to go nonprofit, have led to a chill among check-writers in the country.
Queenly’s marketplace for formalwear gets millions in round led by A16z
Queenly, a resale marketplace for formalwear, announced on Friday that it has grown its seed round to $6.3 million in a financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Connie Chan. The financing event
The DL on CockroachDB
As college students at Berkeley, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis created a successful open-source graphics program, GIMP, which got the attention of Google. The duo ultimately joined Google, and even
Duolingo’s bellwether IPO
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We were a smaller team this week, with Natasha and Alex together
All Raise launches virtual bootcamp for women and nonbinary founders
More doesn’t necessarily mean better — and that’s a lesson for life and for tech. To focus on the latter, the startup ecosystem is experiencing a boggling influx of capital right now. Howeve
Index Ventures’ trio of new funds leads to $3 billion, and more TikTok
Index Ventures has closed a trio of new funds: a $900 million early-stage fund, a $2 billion growth-stage fund and a previously announced $200 million seed-stage fund. The close gives Index $3 billion
How WeWork’s Adam Neumann made a pigeon look like a swan
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha took a trip down m
NewCampus wants to train the first-time managers within Southeast Asia’s tech giants
The tech boom in Southeast Asia isn’t just seeding a wave of new entrepreneurs building the next generation of unicorns, it’s also ushering young talent into the roles of first-time managers. And
Numerade lands $100M valuation for short-form STEM videos
Edtech entrepreneurs are using their moment in the sun to rethink the structures and impact of nearly every aspect of modern-day learning, from the art of testing to the reality of information retenti
Duolingo’s IPO could cast golden halo on edtech startups
We are now seeing what growth will look like at Duolingo after its COVID-bump was digested.
All eyes are on India’s brightest Zomato
Relevance is often tied to rarity. As a result, the first anything — whether a birthday, scientific feat or female vice president — comes with its own weight. Whether that pressure is warranted is
The price differential for engineers is declining
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. The whole crew was here this week, with Danny and Natasha and Ale
Norwest’s Lisa Wu explains how to think like a VC when fundraising
The overlapping in job roles is uncanny: The best investors and founders have to find focus through the noise, understand the weight of due diligence and pitch others with conviction.
Nooks set to seed its own in the world of virtual HQs
After operating in beta for a year, Nooks, a virtual workspace space targeting distributed teams, has attracted thousands of users and millions of dollars in venture capital. The Stanford student-led
Your funding round isn’t special, but you might be
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha and Danny decide