The sunset of daylight and the focus year of Meta

Hello and welcome to Equity, a startup business podcast, where we unpack the numbers and nuances behind the headlines.

Mary Ann And alexander were a dynamic duo this week, battling a storm of tech news, startup updates, and lingering questions over hundreds of billions of dollars in venture capital investments.

Here’s what the show went into today:

• Fascinating supporters of Checkmate and the future of online shopping: Mary Ann covered a very interesting Series A for Checkmate, a startup that has not only shown real legs on the competitive App Store, but also on social media platforms from afar.
• Cava’s IPO won’t save the IPO market, but it could still help: Alex is so deprived of an IPO that he makes connections between everything that files and the startup market. This time it’s not even that hard!
• The light of day calls him: From the “not a huge surprise” category comes the end of Daylight, a neobank aimed at the LGBTQ+ market that had been struggling for a while. This raised the question: will thematic neobanks succeed?
• Dismissals, dismissals, dismissals: SoundCloud is cutting staff to get to profitability, which we can understand. Meta is downsizing because it wants to conserve capital for more share buybacks?
• Anthropic’s massive funding round and who could win the AI ​​war: When is $450 million not that much money? When building fundamental AI models that take OpenAI and others. Also in this section: Cold War metaphors.

And with that, we’re heading into a holiday weekend here in the US, so Equity will be back on Tuesday.