Natasha Mascarenhas
The Latest from Natasha Mascarenhas
Checkout wants to be Rapyd and Fast
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We’re back on this lovely Saturday with a bonus episode! Again! T
Lessons from Top Hat’s acquisition spree
Top Hat, a startup that digitizes textbooks and turns them into an interactive experience for college students, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired yet another business: Fountainhead Press. Th
The end of Plaid-Visa, and Palantir’s growing startup mafia
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we — Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace — h
Pace launches out of private beta with a plan to scale virtual group therapy
One in five people have a mental health illness. Pace, a new startup founded by Pinterest and Affirm executives, wants to pay attention to the other four in that statistic. “Nobody is perfectly ment
Affirm doubles after starting to trade despite strong IPO pricing
Today shares of Affirm, a buy-now-pay-later unicorn, started trading above $90 per share, far above its $49 per-share IPO price, a figure that was already miles above the company’s early expectation
Loop launches out of stealth to make auto insurance more equitable
Car auto-insurance from legacy providers has structural bias built into it. It uses metrics such as credit score, income, marital status and education to figure out insurance rates, which eventually d
Inside SuperCharger Ventures’ debut virtual edtech accelerator
Before the pandemic, edtech companies went decades without raising financing due to lack of interest from generalist venture capitalists. Now, more than a year since COVID-19 began, the sector is show
The next Zoom wants to be nothing like Zoom
In the past few months, there hasn’t been one conversation I’ve had about remote work that doesn’t include a mention of Hopin, a virtual events platform last valued at $2.1 billion.
Who is underpricing Roblox?
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We’re back on this lovely Saturday with a bonus episode!
Hopin might be the fastest growth story of this era
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Happy 2021, or as our own Danny Crichton aptly names it, December 3
The tech-powered wave of smart, not slow, tutoring sessions
Some of the biggest decision-makers in edtech are taking a scalpel to the way tutoring used to work.
Tech leaders speak out about platforms’ roles in US Capitol riots
After pro-Trump extremists violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, a number of tech executives and industry leaders are calling on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to more aggressi
Teamflow lands $3.9 million for a productive virtual HQ platform
After a year of video calls and Slack messages, the definition of workplace is set to shift again. In a post-pandemic world, some will return to the office, many will remain remote and regardless of w
GitHub alumni are building Rewatch, a solution for your Zoom fatigue
The rise of distributed teams in response to the coronavirus has led to more video-conferencing meetings for all of us. As offices remain closed, distributed work is forcing companies to figure out a
One Way Ventures, a firm focused on immigrant founders, closes second fund
One Way Ventures, a venture capital firm that backs immigrant founders, has closed its second fund at $57.5 million. The close comes three years after One Way announced its debut fund, a $28 million i
The big question on every startup’s mind for 2021
My big question for 2021, and the one that is on every startup’s mind, is how will a cataclysmic event such as a global pandemic show up in post-pandemic innovation? I think we’re in the early
Union Square Ventures and Learn Capital file paperwork indicating new funds
As 2020 comes to a long-awaited end, a series of filings indicate that venture capitalists are ending the year with fresh money. According to SEC paperwork, Learn Capital and USV have filed paperwork
What startups can learn from this dumpster fire year
Want this newsletter in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here. Remember when it was news that venture capitalists were open for business? Or when Zoom investing was only done by that one guy
US seed-stage investing flourished during pandemic
If you didn’t think much about seed in 2020, you’re not alone. Late, huge rounds consumed most of the media’s oxygen, leaving smaller startups to compete for scraps of attention.
Five VCs discuss what surprised them the most in 2020
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today is our holiday look-back at the year, bring