Business

$200M Ice Cream, Jenga-Style Energy Raises $110M, And Uber Pops After All

Welcome to the Crunchbase News Weekend Update. An email form of this post went out Saturday morning. Happy reading!

After living in San Francisco for six months, I’ve started to roll my eyes at Brex-branded hot chocolate with Bailey’s. What makes me pause, however, is seeing Patricia. She’s the florist in my neighborhood who tirelessly tends to the orchids every day but somehow also remembers my name.

So, half a year in, I’m a bit more cynical about the memes in this city (let’s get more creative than weather jokes). This makes it all the more exciting when exceptions arise. This week there were two.

Uber, the ride-hailing company announced $5.48 billion in operating losses last week, and now is looking at stopping anniversary balloons as a cost-saving measure.

I guess Uber popped after all.

Next up in the news you don’t hear every day: I stood in line for ice cream that’s valued, apparently, at $200 million. The millennial pink jumpsuits didn’t throw me off, but the fact that one customer would’ve paid an entrance fee of $300 dollars just for an Instagram picture definitely did.

While the quirks stopped there, it wasn’t a calm week by any means. One of “the world’s most polarizing startups” filed to go public: WeWork. Our team broke down the big numbers and charted the (ludicrous) S-1 for you. Cloudflare also filed with strong revenue growth (big numberscharts), and Postmates will likely deliver next month.

Now onto some funding news. Lucidworks raised $100 million for AI-powered search; Energy Vault landed $110 million from SoftBank’s Vision Fund for a jenga-style tower of power; and OpenSpace, a construction tech startup, raised $14 million from investors. Also, Twitter led a $100 million investment into Sharechat, India’s rival to WhatsApp. In acquisitions, Tumblr was bought (again) and Scaleworks scooped up Nextopia.

Finally, read about how gender disparities continue to exist within venture capital firms. That in mind, read about where your potential future technical co-founder likely went to school.

Until next week,

Natasha

P.S. Follow my weekly personal newsletter about living in San Francisco, and Crunchbase News on Twitter and Facebook for daily updates.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias

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