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September 21, 2020

Equity Monday: The TikTok mess, and a grip of neat European VC activity

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 weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

What a busy morning. We had to cover TikTok . We had to talk VC rounds. So, this is what we got up to:

  • U.S. tech stocks are poised to sell off further this morning.
  • The Oracle-TikTok-Walmart-ByteDance deal is either coming into focus, or a period of even less clarity. It’s hard to tell.
  • Nikola founder Trevor Milton is leaving the board of his own company in the wake of fraud allegations. Shares of the company are sharply lower in pre-market trading.
  • Turning to TikTok, this primer represents the best over-the-weekend roundup that we could find. But, of course, things are still breaking as we come to print.
  • Since recording, Oracle has said that “upon creation of TikTok Global, Oracle/Walmart will make their investment and the TikTok Global shares will be distributed to their owners, Americans will be the majority and ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global.” And, President Trump said this morning that China has to give up control of TikTok or the deal is off. ByteDance has said that it will retain control. You figure that out.
  • But there was some good stuff to chat about. Including the super-neat Mobile Premier League round worth $90 million, growth news from EU-based Babbel, a new London-based seed fund that got raised and a Swedish health tech Series B.
  • As you guessed from today’s title, it was fun to see such a concentration of EU VC activity.
  • Finally, will the Nikola mess discourage more SPACs from taking companies public? If the rest of the stock market wasn’t selling off, we would have said “no.” But today? Is the answer “maybe”?

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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