Equity Monday: Edtech consolidation, and Amazon continues to make you like it less

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

This morning we took a global look at the news, trying to take in the latest from around our little planet:

• American stocks are set to rise as much of the world had the day off from trading; Indian stocks fell on the back of poor COVID-19 news.
• The biggest tech news was this bit of bad news from Facebook, if you are a fan of privacy. And the FT has data on the Chinese tech liquidity market that isn’t great news.
• Amazon is in trouble after it illegally retaliated against workers. And there’s more reporting on how low the company was willing to stoop to try and block union activity. Corporations, they’re always letting us down.
• And edtech giant Byju’s buying an IRL tutoring service for a billion dollars.
• On the funding front, Meesho is now worth $2.1 billion thanks to SoftBank Vision Fund 2, while Cresta now has $50 million more in its own coffers.
• And we wrapped with a peek at the Alkami Technology IPO, which was good fun thanks to where the company was founded.

It’s going to be a blast of a week. Talk to you Wednesday!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

Private equity, a SPAC and an IPO walk into a bar