Equity Monday: Three neat venture rounds, and Alibaba’s latest

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

.

• American equities are set to rise, which is good news for the startup-VC world as it means that the current up-cycle will continue. But the good public market is not landing evenly, as Europe sees its VC-backed IPO tally lag the rest of the world

  .

• The biggest recent news stories in tech and venture were Alibaba’s enormous Sun Art deal

  that echoes the Amazon-Whole Foods deal at first blush, and SpaceX’s latest success

  . The quiet weekend could herald the return of a slower, holiday news cycle as we close in on November.

On the funding front, we found three super cool startups:

• AiFi

  raised $14.5 million in a round that Crunchbase News covered

  . Autonomous, checkout-free stores? Count us in.

• Lawmatics

  raised a $2.5 million Seed round. The startup does vertical SaaS

  (CRM, marketing) for lawyers. That just sounds lucrative.

• And then there was Chiper

  , which put together

  a $12 million round to help build out its ecommerce service in Latin America. Investors Monashees, Kaszek Ventures, and WIND Ventures put the money up.

And to close we took a look at

some Q3 2020 data from CBInsights

and Crunchbase News

.

That’s all we got. The show is back in just a few days. Hugs!

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

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