JavaProspect: Asana raises $50M, Airbnb gets a new CFO and a 2019 IPO preview

Saturday, December 1, 2018

Asana raises $50M, Airbnb gets a new CFO and a 2019 IPO preview

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week as TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin came to life, Kate Clark and I snagged some mics and dug through the biggest news of the week (a $50 million check), and talked through who may go public next year and what those IPOs might look like.

Our usual fare, if you will. (If you are missing Danny and Connie, fear not, they will be back next week.)

This week we hit two news items and one roundup. Here’s the skinny:

Asana raises $50 million. Yep, Asana went back to the funding well this week for its Series E, despite having raised a $75 million Series D earlier this year. The company’s funding pace might seem aggressive, but we’re hearing that many startups are looking to tack on extra cash. Why? Because the market might change, and so the savvy are stacking chips in case the cashier closes. Oh, and the company dropped a number of relative growth metrics that were, I have to say, impressive.
Airbnb gets a new CFO. After its old CFO took off, Airbnb’s eventual IPO was on hold. You can’t go public without a CFO. But now it has one! And that means that the company can eventually sell shares on a public exchange, whenever it deigns to sell equity to the hoi polloi. But put your checkbook down, as it’s far from clear precisely when Airbnb will pull the trigger and give us an S-1.
Speaking of which, let’s talk decacorn IPOs. Not my best segue, but it’ll do. There are a number of private tech companies worth $10 billion or more (10x unicorns, or, ahem, decacorns) that will probably try to go public next year. You can read about it here, but the gist is that Uber, Lyft, Pinterest and Airbnb need to go public, and there’s reason to believe that they are going to do it next year.