With $100M in funding, Playco is already a mobile gaming unicorn
Playco is a new mobile gaming startup created by Game Closure co-founder Michael Carter and Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron, as well as game producers Takeshi Otsuka and Teddy Cross. Although the Tokyo-headquartered company is only announcing its existence today, it’s already a unicorn — it says it has raised $100 …
Illumina buying cancer-screening spinout Grail in blockbuster $8B biotech deal
Biotech has become one of the hottest areas of venture investment in recent years, as progress in machine learning, genetics, medical devices, and biology fuse together into new products for the gargantuan health industry. Case in point: Grail, which began in 2016 as a spinoff from genetic sequencing giant Illumina …
The Peloton effect
During the most recent quarter, only a few earnings reports stood out from the rest. Zoom’s set of results were one of them, with the video-communications company showing enormous acceleration as the world replaced in-person contact with remote chat. Another was Peloton’s earnings from the fourth quarter of its fiscal …
In its 5th filing with the SEC, Palantir finally admits it is not a democracy
Palantir is not a democracy, and it really, really, really wants you to know that. Palantir’s governance has been under an exacting lens from regulators the past few weeks as it prepares for a public direct listing on September 29th. In revision after revision of its S-1 filing to the …
Equity Monday: The TikTok mess, and a grip of neat European VC activity
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from …
With $100M in funding, Playco is already a mobile gaming unicorn
Playco is a new mobile gaming startup created by Game Closure co-founder Michael Carter and Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron, as well as game producers Takeshi Otsuka and Teddy Cross. Although the Tokyo-headquartered company is only announcing its existence today, it’s already a unicorn — it says it’s raised $100 million …
Was Snowflake’s IPO mispriced or just misunderstood?
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. Was Snowflake’s IPO mispriced or just misunderstood? With an ocean of …
Unity Software has strong opening, gaining 31% after pricing above its raised range
Whoever said you can’t make money playing video games clearly hasn’t taken a look at Unity Software’s stock price. On its first official day of trading, the company rose more than 31%, opening at $75 per share before closing the day at $68.35. Unity’s share price gains came after last …
It’s game on as Unity begins trading
Unity Software, which sells a game development toolkit primarily for mobile phone app developers, raised $1.3 billion in its initial public offering. The company, which will begin trading today with the ticker symbol “U,” priced its shares at the top end of its expected range, selling 25 million shares at …
Amid layoffs and allegations of fraud, the FBI has arrested NS8’s CEO following its $100+ million summer financing
The tagline from today’s announcement from the United States Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York says it all: “Adam Rogas Allegedly Raised $123 Million from Investors Using Financial Statements that Showed Tens of Millions of Dollars of Revenue and Assets that Did Not Exist.” Rogas, the co-founder …