Equity Monday: India’s digital economy attracts ample attention, three funding rounds and earnings season

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

This is Equity Monday, our week-starting primer in which we go over the latest news, dig into the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds and dive into the latest big news from the startup world. (You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, if you are so inclined! Don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode as well. All the cool kids are doing it.)

Some weekends are slow. This weekend was not. Here’s the round-up of news that we had to talk about:

• Qualcomm pours capital into India’s Reliance Jio, which has now raised $15.7 billion in the past three months.
• Google intends to invest $10 billion into India over the next five to seven years, looking to put capital to work through “a mix of equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure and ecosystem investments” via a new “Google for India Digitization Fund.”
• And, Google has education plans in India. India! It’s a big deal!
• WeWork might turn cash flow positive in 2021. That’s still a ways from now, but it does go to show that deep under the flesh of whatever WeWork claimed to be during its 2019 IPO process, there was a real company somewhere in its bones. How large a company is not clear.
• UIPath raised $225 million in a Series E that values it at over $10 billion. The company’s ARR has quadrupled to $400 million in the past few years.
• Finally, US tech’s response to the Hong Kong “security” law that isn’t.

Up ahead we have a fascinating earnings season, one that the media doesn’t expect to go very well. Stocks were up as we wrote the show, so it appears that Wall Street is more bullish than worried. We’ll see. Netflix reports later this week. Then, next week, we really get underway with Snap, IBM, Microsoft and others.

We also touched on three funding rounds: More money for cancer-focused AI startup Paige, $6.3 million for FitXR to keep working on its fitness VR work, and this small round from Russia, which reminded us that you can build a startup even in a failing democracy.

Wrapping, this earnings season is a big deal. Lots of tech investors are betting that an accelerated digital transformation is going to push most tech shops into a growth curve that makes their equity attractive, even at elevated prices. Quite a lot of capital has been sunk in this idea. We’ll see what happens when the numbers come in.

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