Mmhmm, it’s the most ridiculous story we’ve ever heard

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

Danny and Alex were on deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. Natasha will be back with us starting next week. So, it was old times on the show with just two of our team to vamp on the news. And oh boy was there a lot of news to get into. Like, loads.

• What’s going on with Didi? Didi’s woes have continued this week, with the company seeing its share price continue to fall. The Equity team’s view is that the era of Chinese companies listing in the United States is over.
• What’s going on with facial recognition tech? With AnyVision raising a $235 million round, Danny and Alex tangled over the future of privacy, and what counts as good enough when it comes to keeping ourselves to ourselves.
• Nextdoor is going public: Via a SPAC, mind, but the transaction had our tongues wagging about its history, growth, and how hard it can be to build a social network.
• Dataminr buys WatchKeeper: In its first-ever acquisition, Dataminr bought a smaller company to help it better visualize the data it collects. It’s a neat deal, and especially fun given that Dataminr should go public sooner rather than later.
• Planet and Satellogic are going public: One week, two satellite SPACs. You can read more about Planet here, and Satellogic here.
• FabricNano and Cloverly raise capital: Satellites had us into the concept of climate change, so we also dug into recent funding rounds from FabricNano and Cloverly. It’s beyond neat to see for-profit companies tackle our warming planet.
• Two new venture capital funds: Acrylic has put together a $55 million fund for moonshot crypto work, while Renegade Partners has a $100 million fund for early-and-mid-stage generalist investments.
• Mmhmm is big time: And then there was mmhmm. Which now has $100 million more, and some big plans. Our question is what will it do with the money. We’ll have to wait and find out, we suppose.