Pinterest goes shopping, Alex Karp visits Ukraine, and a bittersweet departure that was more bitter than sweet?

It was so close! And then . . . it was not so close. Excited for the next one. 🏀 🏀

This is what Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg told Meta employees yesterday. Today, it seems possible that things could turn ugly.  In the WSJ: "The episode dovetailed with a company investigation into Ms. Sandberg’s activities, which hasn’t been previously reported, including a review of her use of corporate resources to help plan her coming wedding to Tom Bernthal, a consultant, the people said." 

Then there's this: "Ms. Sandberg has been telling people that she feels burned out and that she has become a punching bag for the company’s problems, the people said. 'She sees herself as someone who has been targeted, been tarred as a woman executive in a way that would not happen to a man. Gendered or not, she’s sick of it,' said one person who worked alongside Ms. Sandberg for many years."

Investors are struggling to leverage the massive amounts of data available today. Synaptic enables leading VCs, PEs, hedge funds, and sovereign funds to unlock the power of alternative data – like user traffic, employee data, app and product reviews, and more. Our no-code platform unifies 100+ real-time performance metrics on companies around the globe layered with a rich analytics toolkit. To learn how Synaptic can benefit your sourcing, tracking, and due diligence efforts, schedule a personalized demo.

Chainguard, a one-year-old startup based in Kirkland, Wa., that secures software components used in supply chains, raised a $50 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with additional participation from Amplify, Mantis VC, LiveOak Venture Partners, Banana Capital, and K5/JPMC. TechCrunch has more here.

Constrafor, a three-year-old New York startup that aims to improve the relationship between general contractors and subcontractors by streamlining documentation and assuming the risk for subcontractor invoices, raised $106 million in equity and debt funding led by Fintech Collective, with additional funding from Village Global, Clocktower Technology Ventures, and Commerce Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Minoryx, an eleven-year-old Barcelona startup that is developing treatments for orphan central nervous system disorders, raised a €51 million Series C round. Columbus Venture Partners and Caixa Capital co-led the deal. The company has raised a total of $143.9 million. More here.

MoEngage, an eight-year-old San Francisco customer engagement startup that helps brands analyze consumer behavior and create personalized communications across different communication channels, raised a $77 million Series E round co-led by Goldman Sachs and B Capital. Earlier backers also joined the round, including Steadview Capital, Multiples Alternate Asset Management, Eight Roads Ventures, and Matrix Partners India. The company has now raised a total of $210 million. The Economic Times has more here.

MycoMedica, a six-year-old Czech Republic-based startup whose mission is to use psilocybin mushrooms to create new psychiatric and neurological therapies, raised a $60 million Series B round led by Obvious Ventures; True Ventures and Kittyhawk Ventures also participated. The company has raised a total of $91.5 million. More here.

Rebellions, a two-year-old, South Korea-based company that builds chips designed for artificial intelligence applications, has raised a $50 million Series A round from investors, including Temasek’s Pavilion Capital, Korean Development Bank, SV Investment, Mirae Asset Capital, Mirae Asset Ventures, IMM Investment, KB Investment and KT Investment. TechCrunch has more here.

Upstream Bio, an 18-year-old startup based in Waltham, Ma., that is developing an experimental drug to treat asthma, raised a $200 million Series A round co-led by OrbiMed and Maruho; Access Biotechnology, Omega Funds, and Decheng Capital also contributed. The Boston Globe has more here.

ZeroNorth, a seven-year-old Boston startup whose platform helps vessel owners and operators to reduce CO2 emissions, raised a $50+ million Series B round led by PSG, with additional participation from previous investors A.P. Moller Holding and Cargill. More here.

Bark Technologies, a seven-year-old Atlanta startup that uses artificial intelligence to alert parents to cyberbullying, depression, suicidal ideation, violence, and online predation, raised a $30 million Series C round. Kayne Partners was the deal lead. More here.

Colorfix, a six-year-old startup based in Norwich, U.K., that is attempting to remove environmentally hazardous chemicals from the textile dyeing and fixing process, raised a €18 million Series B round led by H&M Group; Sagana, Cambridge Enterprise, Bombyx Growth Fund, PDS Ventures, and Regeneration.VC also participated. The company has raised a total of $31.8 million. More here.

Coterie, a four-year-old Cincinnati baby diaper startup, raised a $23.8 million Series A led by Align Ventures; Beliade, Willow Growth, and RiverPark Ventures also chipped in. Forbes has more here.

Felux, a three-year-old Cleveland, Oh., startup that is building a digital marketplace and supply-chain platform that connects the buyers and suppliers of steel, raised a $19.5 million Series A. EquipmentShare led the deal, while Signia Venture Partners, Suffolk Construction, Expa, Lightbank, 8VC, and JumpStart Ventures provided additional capital. Cleveland.com has more here.

Foundation Alloy, a Seattle startup founded this year that aims to leverage advanced materials technology to design novel alloys optimized for manufacturing, raised a $10.5 million round co-led by The Engine and Material Impact, with Safar Partners also chipping in. Forbes has more here.

Foxen, a five-year-old startup based in Columbus, Oh., that helps property managers manage renters' insurance requirements for their units, raised a $44 million Series A led by Summit Partners, with additional participation from Level Equity. FinLedger has more here.

Penny AI, a five-year-old Vancouver startup that claims to leverage AI to help sellers reach out to customers and other sales consultants and drive sales growth, raised a $27 million Series B round led by PSG, with Acronym Venture Capital and ScaleUP Ventures also chipping in. TechBuzz has more here.

SamaCare, a four-year-old San Francisco startup that offers prescribers a unified prior authorization, enrollment, and benefits verification portal experience for specialty medication across payers, raised a $12 million Series A round led by Vive Collective. Earlier backers also joined the round, including NextView Ventures, South Park Commons, and Susa Capital. More here.

Tripp, a five-year-old Los Angeles startup that is creating mindfulness tools for the metaverse, raised an $11.2 million round from Bitkraft Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, Qualcomm, HTC, Niantic, and Mayfield. The company has raised a total of $26.2 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Vade, a 13-year-old startup based in Hem, France, that specializes in AI-powered threat detection and response technology for email, raised €28 million in its newest round. The deal leads were Tikehau Ace Capital, Bpifrance, and Auriga. The company has raised a total of $121.1 million. SiliconANGLE has more here.

Yummy, a two-year-old, Latin American local on-demand delivery and transportation super app, has raised $47 million in funding led by Anthos Capital. Other backers in the round include JAM Fund, Soma Capital, WIND Ventures, Ethos Capital and YC Continuity. The outfit has now raised $69 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.

Cloudwall Capital, a one-year-old New York startup whose platform allows institutional investors to stress test their digital asset portfolios and model outcomes, raised a $6.3 million seed round co-led by LocalGlobe and Illuminate Financial, with additional capital provided by IA Capital Partners, Eberg Capital, and NEMO Ventures. AltFi has more here.

Dework, a six-month-old, Stockholm, Sweden-based startup that helps DAOs organize internal and external teams and manage tasks and bounties, raised a $5 million seed round co-led by Paradigm and Pace Capital, with additional capital provided by Balaji Srinivasan, a former Coinbase CTO, and Sandeep Nailwal, a co-founder of the Polygon crypto platform. CoinDesk has more here.

Huuva, a one-year-old Helsinki startup that is creating a network of ghost kitchens throughout Central Europe, raised a $5.3 million seed round led by General Catalyst. The company has raised a total of $6.5 million. PYMNTS.com has more here.

Innerwell, a New York startup that is focused on commercially scaling ketamine-assisted psychotherapy through "digital care," raised a $3 million pre-seed round led by Greycroft, with additional participation from Looking Glass and Max Ventures. More here.

Kickoff, a three-year-old, New York-based holistic wellness coaching platform that calls itself a business-in-a-box for aspiring wellness entrepreneurs, enabling them to set up their business and recruit clients, has raised $7 million in seed funding led by 645 Ventures; FJ Labs and Expa also joined the round, which brings the startup's total funding to $11 million. Axios has more here.

Koban, a one-year-old startup based in Santa Cruz De La Sierra, Bolivia, that aims to enables users to perform an array of financial services such as money transfers, raised a $2.3 million pre-seed round. Precursor Ventures, FJ Labs, Goldtruck Holdings, Class 5 Global, Newtopia, Buentrip Ventures, and iThinkVC all participated. Bloomberg has more here.

Liminal, a seven-year-old Singapore startup that claims to have developed a unique wallet architecture to secure digital assets across different blockchains, raised $4.7 million in seed funding. The deal lead was Elevation Capital, with LD Capital, Woodstock, Nexus Ventures, CoinDCX, Hashed, Cadenza Ventures, Vauld, Better Capital, and Sparrow Capital also joining in. CoinDesk has more here.

Privyr, a four-year-old Singapore startup whose mobile customer relationship management app works over SMS, WhatsApp, email, and other channels, raised a $6 million Series A co-led by MassMutual Ventures and Vulcan Capital, with Wavemaker Partners also chipping in. The company has raised a total of $6.7 million. VC Circle has more here.

Pulley, a year-old, San Francisco-based software startup that aims to help people obtain permits for construction projects of all sizes up to ten times faster than is possible today, just raised $4.4 million in seed funding. Susa Ventures led the round, joined by BoxGroup, Fifth Wall, Suffolk Construction and South Park Commons, among others. TechCrunch has more here.

Sanlo, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based fintech startup that offers small to medium-size game and app companies access to tools to manage their finances and capital to fuel their growth, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Konvoy. TechCrunch has more here.

SpectrumAi, a one-year-old Los Angeles startup that captures objective quality and outcomes data to improve care for individuals with autism for use in value-based contracting among payors, providers, and parents, raised a $9 million seed round co-led by F-Prime Capital and Frist Cressey Ventures, with additional participation from the Autism Impact Fund. More here.

Try Your Best (TYB), a months-old, startup that was founded by Outdoor Voices's founder Ty Haney --  it enables brands to collect input from customers in exchange for rewards like NFTs and brand coins that can be toward purchases -- has raised $9.8 million in funding led by Unusual Ventures and Sogal Ventures. TechCrunch has more on the company -- which is built on the Avalanche blockchain -- here.

Worried about VCs pulling back? Don't be. Raise your next round with SeedInvest and plug into a network of over 600,000 accredited and retail investors. A few could become your next big brand evangelists. More than 250 founders across SaaS, healthtech, CPG, and more have found fundraising success on SeedInvest. Find out if your company has what it takes to raise a community round. Submit your deck and connect with our team.

Pear VC's Anand Iyer, who spent a year leading blockchain and crypto investments for the venture firm Pear VC, has been quietly investing a $20 million "solo GP" fund called Canonical Capital that has backing from a wide number of other VCs, including a16z’s Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, longtime institutional investor Judith Elsea, Pear cofounder Mar Hershenson, Haseeb Qureshi from Dragonfly Capital, Semil Shah of Haystack Ventures, Amy Wu from FTX Ventures and Bilal Zuberi of Lux Capital, among others. Iyer tells TechCrunch that Canonical has already made 16 investments in seed and pre-seed startups spanning the developer infrastructure landscape. More here.

Designer Fund, a 10-year-old, San Francisco-based venture firm whose "value-add" is helping design products and scale design teams, is raising $40 million for its third fund, per an SEC filing. More here

Inner Loop Capital, a seven-year-old, Baltimore, Md.-based seed-stage venture firm, is raising $30 million for its second fund, shows an SEC filing. More here.

Resolute Ventures today announced Resolute DAO, a DAO made up of 40-plus previously funded Resolute Ventures founders. The DAO will invest a total of $5 million in early web3 companies and unlike some other DAOs, there's no capital required for founders to enter the organization. Resolute Ventures is funding the $5 million commitment, which it says will be broken up into more than 30 checks of roughly $150,000. Instead of dollars, DAO members commit their time and expertise in exchange for resulting economics in the companies the DAO invests in. Axios has more here.

Section Partners, a seven-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based firm that offers personal financing to startup founders and employees, is raising $300 million for its fifth fund, shows an SEC filing. More here.

Ten Eleven Ventures, an eight-year-old, Burlingame, Ca.-based cybersecurity-focused, stage-agnostic investment firm, says it has raised $600 million for its third and newest fund -- a vehicle that brings the firm's total assets under management to more than $1 billion. More here.

Tuesday Capital, the seed- and early-stage venture firm led by Patrick Gallagher (long of the Bay Area and now living in Austin), is raising $30 million for its fifth fund, per an SEC filing first flagged by Axios. More here.

As Pinterest sets about improving the online shopping experience on its platform, the company announced this afternoon it’s acquiring the AI-powered shopping service The Yes, which was founded by e-commerce veteran and former Stitch Fix COO Julie Bornstein and technical co-founder, Amit Aggarwal. Deal terms were not disclosed, reports TechCrunch. The Yes had raised just one round of funding -- $30 million, in 2019 -- launching the company 18 months later during the pandemic. (We wrote about it then here.)

Freightos, a venture-backed ocean and air freight marketplace, says it's going public through a merger with Gersher Acquisition Company. The Freightos SPAC will have a pro forma enterprise value of approximately $435 million and could generate up to $166 million, although realized cash could be a quarter of that amount depending on the extent of Gersher’s pre-merger redemptions. FreightWaves has more here.

Mindset Growth Opportunities I, a blank check company targeting disruptive agriculture and food technologies, has withdrawn its plans for an IPO. It had filed in December 2021 to raise $175 million by offering 17.5 million units at $10, with each unit containing one share of common stock and one-half of a warrant. More here.

Mobiv Acquisition, a blank check company targeting the electric vehicle industry in Asia and Europe, filed with the SEC to raise up to $100 million in an IPO. The company plans to raise $100 million by offering 10 million units at $10. Each unit consists of one share of common stock and one-half of a warrant, exercisable at $11.50. More here.

Slack’s Stewart Butterfield and Away’s Jen Rubio just bought this 17,000-square-foot Hamptons home for $32.2 million.

Amal Dokhan has been promoted to general partner at the venture firm 500 Global MENA. Dokhan, based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, joined the firm roughly two years ago. More here.

Paris Heymann has joined Index Ventures in New York, where the global firm is in the process of opening its newest U.S. office. Heymann previously spent four years with Arena Holdings and, before that, was an associate at Bain Capital. More here.

Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, visited Ukraine and met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to discuss ways its technology could help the country resist the continuing Russian invasion. In a tweet today, Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister for digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, said that Karp was the first CEO to visit the country since the beginning of the Russian invasion.

Nike founder Phil Knight and Alan Smolinisky, a partial owner of the MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers, have made an offer for the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, according to the New York Time, which says the bid is in excess of $2 billion.

Another Peter Thiel acolyte who is running for Senate -- Blake Masters, who cowrite the book "Zero to One" with Thiel and who is now competing in the Arizona GOP race -- received an endorsement  from former president Donald Trump today. Trump earlier endorsed J.D. Vance, a former employee of Thiel and venture capitalist who is now running in the Ohio senate race against Democrat Tim Ryan. (Trump otherwise has a split record right now when it comes to the strength of his endorsements.)

Jake Reynolds is segueing out of TCV, after 25 years with the growth equity firm. He tells Axios: "I'll remain a GP in all of our current funds, remain in all of my current boards, and hopefully be of value as a mentor to the younger generation of TCV." More here.

Peter Sanborn has joined the fintech-focused, Singapore-based global venture firm Arbor Ventures as a general partner based in San Francisco. Formerly, he was the VP and head of corporate development at PayPal, where he logged close to eight years. More here.

Sheryl Sandberg has sold more than $1.7 billion worth of Facebook stock over the last decade. CNBC has more here.

Divya Sudhakar has joined Geodesic Capital as a partner in the Bay Area. She joins the outfit from Intel Capital, where she spent nearly two-and-a-half years. Sudhakar also spent two years as a principal with In-Q-Tel. More here.

Sydney Thomas, a longtime principal with the seed-stage firm Precursor Ventures, has left the firm in order to launch her own pre-seed fund. TechCrunch has more here.

Coinbase said today that it will extend a hiring freeze for both new and existing positions for the “foreseeable future” and rescind a number of accepted offers. The cryptocurrency exchange cited market conditions and ongoing business “prioritization efforts” for the decision. Bloomberg has more here.

Hybrid primary care company Carbon Health laid off roughly a quarter of its corporate staff this week, Jen Zhu, the company's former senior manager of program development and one of the individuals impacted by the cut, wrote today on LinkedIn.

Cerebral, a SoftBank-backed mental telehealth company, will undergo layoffs amid a federal probe into its prescribing practices and a subsequent decision to stop writing scripts for most controlled medications. Impacted employees will find out they've been cut on July 1. (Eek.) Cerebral, founded in early 2020, has raised roughly $460 million to date, shows Crunchbase. Bloomberg has more here.

Crypto platform Gemini has cut approximately 10% of its workforce, per cofounders and twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. In a post announcing the news, The duo attributed the layoffs to “turbulent market conditions that are likely to persist for some time.”

IRL, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based social app startup, let staff know today that it is laying off 25 people, which is roughly 25% of its over staff. According to Crunchbase, the outfit has raised roughly $200 million to date, including a $170 million Series B round led by a year ago. TechCrunch has the skinny here.

Policygenius, an eight-year-old, insurtech startup that has raised $250 million from investors over the years, including a $125 million Series E round that was announced less than three months ago, has reportedly laid off 25% of its employees. TechCrunch has more here.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sued Gemini Trust Company today, alleging the crypto exchange’s staff misled the federal regulator during Gemini’s 2017 effort to launch trading of what would have been a landmark bitcoin (BTC) futures contract. Coindesk has the story here.

One-third of Americans making $250,000 say they are living paycheck-to-paycheck. 

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said yesterday at an investor conference that U.S. consumers still have some six to nine months of spending power left in their bank accounts before a hurricane hits, though we don't yet know if it's a "minor storm" or "superstorm Sandy," he added.

Lael Brainard, the vice-chair of the Federal Reserve, today warned that the U.S. central bank may need to extend its run of half-point rate rises into September if inflation does not slow sufficiently in the coming months. 

Internal documents obtained by Vice show Amazon's dystopian system for tracking workers every minute of their shifts.

Losses at Tiger Global Management reached 52% this year, prompting the firm to cut management fees and create separate accounts for the illiquid wagers of customers who want to redeem, Bloomberg reported earlier today. Per its report, as the value of its public holdings plummeted, Tiger’s exposure to illiquid venture capital bets comprised too much of its portfolio, leading the firm to tell investors in its hedge and long-only funds that if they wish to redeem, their private investments will be placed in a separate account that will be cashed out at a later date. 

Will a recommendation letter from someone famous help get you into an elite school?

The real winners of the Depp-Heard trial were content creators who went all-in.

Lucrative white noise podcasts.

Design auction.

A tribute-worthy egg cooker. 🥚

Spend less time pitching investors and more time building with SeedInvest, a community of more than 600,000 individual investors, who combined have played a role in successful raises for more than 250 startups. Whether you’re raising Seed or Series A or Series B funding, SeedInvest is ready to help you get there. Learn more and apply to raise.