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Equity Monday: A global selloff, MURAL snags $23M, and two unicorns that can’t raise

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 it in the slightest. (Here’s last week’s episode which took a look at The Athletic’s latest round, in case you missed it.)

This Monday was a bit of a bad news run. The weekend was stuffed with news, not much of it good.

Continued concerns relating to the spread of the coronavirus led to equity selloffs in Asia and Europe. In the United States, markets look set to follow suit. The concerns come as startups had already come under pressure from investors to show a quick path to profitability. Now, their public comps are taking fire as well.

Topping it off, today kicks off a huge, two-week earnings run from tech companies worth trillions of dollars. It’s not a great moment for it. (As we note on the show, the economic side of the outbreak is a small portion of the story; it feels a bit crass to cover the moment from a dollars-perspective, but that’s our particular lens.)

We also ran through three funding rounds, including MURAL’s $23 million Series A, Otter.ai’s $10 million Series B, and Sawee’s $2.3 million round focused on last-mile logistics. (As a product, I can’t recommend Otter highly enough.)

Wrapping, a Wall Street Journal story was stuck in my head all weekend. According to the Journal’s Eliot Brown, Lime and DoorDash have each been out in the markets trying to raise money lately. Neither has managed to pull it off. If stocks keep selling, what happens next for the infamous unicorns?

That’s what we have for you today. More on Friday morning.

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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