Loneliness In Tech, YC’s Demo Day(s), And Bangalore Competes With Mountain View

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

After my notebook is tucked away and the recorder app stops, it seems that my conversations these days are taking the same not-so-subtle turn. Everyone I speak to, in some way, is lonely. Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and everyone hoping for outsized success are no exception.

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The realization inspired me to investigate the intersection of loneliness and tech and write a series focusing on those tensions. The first installment, unpacking how founders deal with loneliness, went live this past week.

But I am not the only one talking about mental health in tech. Y Combinator, which coaches and invests in hundreds of startups each year, is focusing on founder mental health, too, and it was a central theme at Y Combinator’s Demo Day.

On the YC Demo Day beat, Jason reported on the growing size of Y Combinator startup batches and Alex helped host a live Equity Podcast interviewing the president of Y Combinator, Michael Seibel. We also dove deeper into Tandem and all the other startups that share its name, and I had a lot of thoughts on the startups presenting and wrote about YC’s investment cadence in India.

Speaking of India, Tala, a digital lending startup, raised $110 million to expand its services in the region. International coverage continued when Yijipui, an online liquor retailer and Chinese unicorn, raised $80 million for its ongoing Series D. Plus, JUUL Labs raised $325 million to fuel the global expansion of its e-cigarettes.

Other rounds this week: Root Insurance raised $350 million, Better.com raised $160 million, and ThredUp raised $175 million to dress you up in what your friends got rid of. SpotHero also raised $50 million to make it easier to park your car.

On a final note, we welcomed Sophia Kunthara to the Crunchbase News family by way of the San Francisco Chronicle and Reuters. She’ll be covering the late-stage scene for us from the San Francisco desk, so follow her on Twitter to stay up to date. Of course, in honor of her first week here, Datadog filed to go public.

We’re one fantastic person stronger here, and we’re really proud of it.

Thanks for reading,

Natasha

P.S. Follow me (@nmasc_) and Crunchbase News on Twitter and Facebook for daily updates.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.