Business

How Visas Impact The Valley, IPO Implosions, And The Silicon Prairie

Illustration of Black and Brown Women. [Dom Guzman]

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

While journalists strive for objectivity, oftentimes the subjective sits in between the lines of the stories we pursue, the voices we elevate, and the noise we clarify. For me, my most recent story on immigration and how it impacts the Valley’s workforce has a close-to-home undertone: both of my parents left India to come to the United States.

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This kind of perspective might make journalism professors cringe, but I’m firmly in the camp that the stories we care about are the stories that we tell the best.

More of this in our mini Podcast series, Some Personal News, but after that, grab your non-WeWork fruit water and let’s look at what else has happened in venture capital.

A handful of the news team was at TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup conference, for the week, giving us information on Brex’s newest product and Impossible Meat’s “steak” in the futureSophia also walked us through a nine-figure round scored by a scooter startup. It’s been a while, we know.

Putzing around the conference reminded me about how much is truly happening outside the Valley. And our coverage matched. This week, we got into Atlanta’s rise and challenges as a startup hub, how Nebraska is turning into a Silicon Prairie, and how Taiwan is manufacturing the next wave of entrepreneurs.

Moving into some healthy funding rounds, a Tokyo-based startup raised $42.9 million to diagnose gastric cancer early and a fertility product startup raised $5 million in a seed round. Of course, there’s more in Last Week In Venture.

From the fund side, we covered how Brazil-based ONEVC closed a $38 million fund to invest across the border, and how SoftBank has dealt in tenth of worldwide VC dollar volume so far in 2019.

Also, to address the elephant in the coworking space: WeWork officially pulled its IPO. Check out our timeline of the implosion.

As always, thank you for reading,

Natasha

P.S. Follow me on Twitter @nmasc_

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