Green Toast, Boston And The Bay, And A $200M Series A

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

Boston is the city where I grew up journalistically. It’s where I learned the difference between a Seed investment and a Series A round (remember this for later), and where I landed my first real byline. For these reasons and the great coffee, my return to Beantown was extra special (and sniffly) this week, and reminded me of two important things:

• Boston doesn’t want to be the next Silicon Valley. It just wants to be Boston, but known a little more within the venture and startup community as a hub for all things entrepreneurship
• It’s more than a home for biotech companies.

Those thoughts fell into stories, like a piece on one of the city’s most valuable startups starting a lending program, or a data pull on how Boston has historically progressed in funding female founders.

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Speaking of important progress for underrepresented founders, Austin created a new network to help women in tech connect and lift each other up. And a final note on diversity on inclusion, our very own Gené Teare will be moderating panels in Finland next week, including one on how to build a more inclusive work environment.

Jumping to our bread and butter, we covered everything from a startup working to make homebuyers’ lives easier to reports that a SoftBank-funded food delivery company may be eyeing a supergiant round at a $12.6 billion valuation.

Further outside the Bay Area, Austin’s LawnStarter raised $10.5 million in green the mowing startup doesn’t want to get rid of. And New York’s Hive, a work productivity startup, raised $10.5 million to not be a Slack clone.

We also stumbled upon some news from Toronto-based 1Password earlier this week. The password manager startup raised $200 million in a Series A from Accel, in its first funding in 14 years. Remember above when I nodded to Boston as the city where I learned the difference between a seed and Series A rounds? Toronto, as I noted above, is giving me a run for my — understanding of — money.

That’s all I got for you all this week. Now, I’m on to spending some time in Philly with great tacos and even greater people.

Cheers,
Natasha

P.S. Follow me on Twitter @nmasc_