Equity Monday: No, tech news doesn’t stop over the holidays

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 private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out the first of our two holiday eps, the last one talking to VCs about what surprised them in 2020.

Anyhoo, from vacation, here’s what Chris and I got up to:

A report looking at how ecommerce changed during 2020.
The epic carnage surrounding the Chinese government’s clamping down on its tech sector (more here, and here from TechCrunch).
Lalamove raised $515 million in a Series E.
Yuanfudao raised another $300 million.
Indian startups did not have the strongest year of venture fundraising, which felt a bit surprising.
And it doesn’t appear that Japan did either.
But here in the United States, holy shit things were bonkers.

Tune in Thursday for one more fun episode, and then we’re back to regular programming the week after!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.