Equity Monday: Quibi, two Boston rounds and a shift to pessimism

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 short-form week-starter in which we go over the weekend, look to the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds and dig into what is stuck on our minds.

So, by section then:

The weekend:

• The market narrative seems to have changed from optimism to pessimism, impacting stock prices and possibly closing the IPO window some, after it had unexpectedly opened.
• Quibi news is out that isn’t great: The mobile-first launch that came during a lockdown hasn’t helped the hugely funded service that had to convince the world that its content format was great. We calculate its effective cost-per-subscriber number and it isn’t super great.

The week ahead:

• Earnings from Groupon and Oracle. The former could tell us a little bit about the health of the consumer perhaps? And Oracle is a player in the cloud space, so its earnings might help us understand what’s up in that world. See, not everything cloud-related comes from Seattle.
• And we note the grip of tech conferences that were put on hold due to COVID-19, wondering what they might look like next year; do we ever go back to the way that things used to be?

Funding rounds:

• Duck Creek raises $230 million, which Bloomberg notes as a pre-IPO round.
• Appfire, also from Boston, raises a $49 million round. We want to read this S-1, badly.
• Tonik raises $21 million to launch a Southeast Asian digital bank.

What’s on our minds:

• The Exchange launches today, which you can learn more about over on TechCrunch.com. Check out the archive!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Equity Monday: Quibi, two Boston rounds and a shift to pessimism