Duolingo’s bellwether IPO

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We were a smaller team this week, with Natasha and Alex together with Chris to sort through yet another summer frenzy of a week.

This time around we actually recorded live on Twitter Spaces, which was a first for the podcast. If you missed it, it’s probably because we didn’t promote the taping since it was just an experiment. Good news, though, is that it went well, and we’re going to do some more live tapings of the show with the entire crew on the mics. Make sure to follow the show on the Big Tweet to ensure that you can come hang with us next week. We’ll also do some Q&A at the end, if we’re in good moods.

Until then, let’s live in the present. Here’s what we got into in today’s show:

• The blisteringly hot EU startup market: You can raise money anywhere, but you might want to do it in Europe, where VCs are putting acre-feet of capital to work this year. Hours before the taping, Index Ventures announced a $3 billion trio of funds (and TikTok strategy?), basically solidifying our earlier reporting.
• The huge round for crypto trading house FTX, and OpenSea raising again: Regardless of whether or not you are paying attention to the crypto market today, investors are still firing capital at startups in the space at an eye-catching pace.
• Duolingo’s first IPO price range: It’s a good-news week for consumer-focused, edtech startups, since the public markets will finally get a taste of a non-enterprise sector startup. Plus, Duolingo’s upcoming finance event could lead to them finally bolstering areas like speech, cultural norms and fluency.
• From the world of funding rounds, we had notes on Sololearn, Numerade, NewCampus, Mural, Spreadsheet.com and Bolt. The conversation ran into some fresh corners, such as how a company raised less than its preceding round but 4x’d its valuation and if we should bite-size all learning.
• And we chatted about Clubhouse leaving beta. Live on Twitter spaces. What can you do?