Equity Monday: Good vaccine news, three rounds, and why IPOs are trending

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 big news, chats 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 — and don’t forget to check out last Thursday’s main ep, and our bonus episode that went out on Saturday.

If you like Equity, your cup runeth over.

So, what did we get into this morning? A grip of things, which I’ve listed below in order:

• American Thanksgiving is this week, so news may slow as we move towards Thursday.
• New, good vaccine news is boosting stocks and hopes that the pandemic could be brought under control next year.
• Bitcoin is racing towards new records.
• LA-based Credit Key raises $33 million for its business-to-business payments platform — in light of the Affirm IPO this round is no surprise.
• Digital freight forwarder Forto raises another $50M in round led by Inven Capital — the pandemic is messing around with supply chains, perhaps leaving room for startups in the space to aggressively grow.
• Digital electricity supplier Tibber closes $65M Series B led by Eight Roads, Balderton — of our three rounds, this one took me the longest to understand.
• This essay from Tomasz Tunguz, which is good.

Please stay safe this week, America. Do something boring and unfun, so that we can keep more of us alive into next year.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.