Equity Monday: What’s going on with $100M rounds?

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week.

Equity was busy last week, so catch up if you missed anything. We interviewed the CEO of Y Combinator, hosted a call with the TechCrunch staff digging into our favorite Demo Day companies, hosted Equity Monday on a Tuesday, held a call with Niko from General Catalyst, and hosted a guest — remotely! — on the regular Equity episode. It’s been busy.

This morning, however, was very nearly a repeat. The things that were bad last week are still bad this week. Still, there were a few things to go over:

SoftBank’s epic plan to unlock value in itself, something that investors are cheering.
Uber and Ola are halting rides in India’s capital, a move that we expect to see in more markets over time.
Cazoo, a used car sales portal, raised $116 million, a round that caught our eye as it was huge and seemingly incongruous to the news cycle.

In fact, that round was such an oddity that we ran a search of big rounds this morning on the show instead of looking at some Seed financings. We’ll get back to Seed next week.

Looking ahead, there isn’t much to celebrate. We are stuck between earnings cycles and every conference has been cancelled or moved online. Oh, and SaaS valuations are falling. That said, we still expect to be exhausted by the evening every day of the week.

So, let’s stick together and do our best to help one another. I look forward to starting the week with a different topic for once; Equity Monday was effectively born on the doorstep of the COVID-19 world. But we won’t get there without collective action. We can all help.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 AM PT and Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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