Alphabet is clearly looking to buy, so who's selling, and why did Wiz say no?

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week felt like two weeks rolled into one. To kick things off, Mary Ann Azevedo walked everyone through Clio’s huge fundraise. The Canadian legal tech company raised $900 million at a $3 billion valuation — a very large sum anytime, but especially in this market. Impressively, the company is still growing rapidly, which isn't easy to do when you’re at such a late stage. We talked about the drivers behind that growth and how Clio differs from other legal tech startups raising capital these days. Next up, Mary Ann and Rebecca Szkutak discussed Alphabet’s announcement this week that it would invest another up to $5 billion in Waymo. It’s an obvious vote of confidence on self-driving cars on Alphabet’s part, but both Becca and Mary Ann agreed on one thing: They’d prefer to stick with riding in cars with human drivers. We closed out our deals of the week with a lively discussion on a 17-year-old founder and investor who pitched investors out of the stall of his high school bathroom. He just raised money for his startup, Aviato, and his story is an inspirational and fun read. Next up was cybersecurity company Wiz turning down a $23 billion acquisition offer from Alphabet. We talked about potential reasons and looked at other examples of large M&A deals not working out. We wrapped up Equity with a look at digital banking startup Mercury abruptly shuttering its service to founders located in certain countries, such as Ukraine. Founders were naturally not happy, but another fintech was waiting in the wings to help affected customers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the business of
0:15.9	startups. Today is Friday July 26th. I'm Marianne
0:19.5	Azavito and joining me as TC Senior reporter on the Venture Beat and co-host of our sister-reporter on the Venture Beat and co-host of our sister show
0:25.5	Found, Becca Scutak. How are you, Becca? I am doing well. How are you, Marianne?
0:32.0	I'm tired. I'm not gonna lie.
0:34.6	Yeah, me too.
0:35.9	I'm tired.
0:36.8	Yeah, we're doing some renovations on our home
0:39.2	and while it's exciting, it's just also a lot going on, but I shouldn't complain. But anyway, we have so much to talk about today. It feels like a lot happened this week, and it just feels like two weeks rolled into one for some reason I don't know what do you think?
0:54.9	Yeah not even like tech news either just like news across the board from politics other areas of business
1:01.6	tech it just seems like this has been like kind of a crazy week.
1:05.0	Yeah.
1:06.0	Out of nowhere, it's the middle of July.
1:07.0	Right, right, exactly.
1:09.0	Well, anyway, I'm excited to talk about what we've got on the show today and our deals of the week include
1:14.6	Cleo Weimo Aviato I hope I pronounce that correctly I think so yeah and then we're gonna
1:22.1	look into who's saying no to M&A. And lastly, the risk of working with a FinTech. So first up, I covered Cleo's massive raise. It was a $900 million series F round. That's a lot of money these days. I mean, it's a lot of money anytime, but especially these days, and their new valuation which is three billion dollars.
1:45.0	So Clio is not it's not a startup in the sense that it's you know just a few years old or
1:51.3	anything it's actually been around for about 16 years it's a
1:54.8	Canadian company and basically they just aim to help law practices run more efficiently
2:00.2	with its cloud-based technology I've been covering Cleo for a few years, so I'm pretty
2:05.4	familiar with the company. I like the CEO, he's very articulate, a great interview, just
	...

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