Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years don’t worry — we’re not changing the main show. (Here’s last week’s episode with Danny Crichton if you want to listen; I also just got the pun in the headline.)
Starting off this week the news is not very good.
I start to prep for Equity Monday on Fridays, keeping tabs of themes and news cycles. By the time it’s Sunday night I have a good idea of what the show is going to focus on. And I’m a little tired it being bad news about the coronavirus. Here’s to hoping that we, as a species, make material progress to stopping the damn thing.
In more mundane terms, the disease continued to shutter cities and countries, slowing the global economy. I’d rather focus on the human side of the story, but I’m a financial and technology journalist, so here we are.
Markets around the world are down sharply. Stocks in the United States are set to fall. Tech companies are pipped by pre-market trading to fall even further. Growth and SaaS public shops look set to take the sharpest hit.
Turning to funding rounds this week, just one. Instead of covering a number of funding events in the early-stage market, we’re discussing a single round raised by Capiche — a $1.1 million investment sourced from a number of small angel groups and venture firms. The company — here, on the Internet — is working to connect SaaS customers and power users so that they can share tips, pricing information, and negotiation tactics. As literally everyone knows, the SaaS market is too opaque. Also major tracking entities are thought by some to be too favored towards vendors. Capiche wants to tilt the balance of power towards users, instead.
If that will prove a lucrative model isn’t yet clear, but Capiche is a young company with its first real check. It has time to prove itself. According to CEO Austin Smith, his company has nearly two years (seven quarters) of runway in the bank without generating revenue. The startup intends to turn on income far before its money runs out, of course.
I think we’ll cover more individual rounds on Equity Monday over time as it’s more fun than running through a short, partially-themed list.
Finally, I riffed for you on the Credit Karma-Intuit deal that is supposed to be coming very, very soon, in a formal sense. $7 billion is a lot of money to start the week.
Happy Monday!
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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