Melinda Gates opens up, Serena Williams speaks out, and the power of Twitter-shaming from Ukraine

More than a million people have fled Ukraine since the war started, a U.N. official said today. Meanwhile, reports of civilian casualities are rising, and in Kyiv alone, an estimated 15,000 people are now sheltering in the subways.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's youngest cabinet minister, visited Silicon Valley six months ago, posting a photo of himself arm-in-arm with Apple CEO Tim Cook on Facebook. Now he has turned a staid government Twitter account into a cannon to shame the world’s biggest tech companies -- and it's working. 

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said today that the Fed remains on track to begin to raise interest rates in two weeks. “For now, I would say that we will proceed carefully along the lines of that plan,” he told the House Financial Services Committee earlier. “We’re going to avoid adding uncertainty to what is already an extraordinarily challenging and uncertain moment.”

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99minutos, an eight-year-old, Mexico City, Mexico-based logistics service company for e-commerce vendors across Latin America, just raised $82 million in Series C funding. Oak HC/FT led the round, joined by earlier backers Kaszek and Prosus Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Balbix, a seven-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based company focused on automated cyber risk quantification, has raised $70 million in Series C funding. Redline Capital led the round, joined by Third Point Ventures, Nautilus Venture Partners, Mayfield, and a handful of other firms. SecurityWeek has more here.

CesiumAstro, a nearly five-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based company that's developing active phased array communications payloads for satellites and airborne platforms, has raised $60 million in Series B funding. Airbus Ventures and Forever Ventures led the round, joined by L3Harris Technologies and numerous previous backers, including Kleiner Perkins. SpaceNews has more here.

Connecteam, an eight-year-old, New York-based employee management outfit, raised $120 million in Series C funding co-led by Stripes and Insight Partners, with participation from Tiger Global, Qumra Capital and O.G. Tech. TechCrunch has more here.

Zeller, a two-year-old, Melbourne, Australia-based neobank for small- and midsize businesses that was founded by two former Square execs, has raised a $100 million AUD Series B round (about $72.7 million) led by Headline, with participation from the Australian superannuation fund Hostplus. Earlier investors also joined the round, including Square Peg, Addition and Spark Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Bright Security, a four-year-old, Israel-based, dynamic app security testing startup that was formerly known as NeuraLegion, just raised $20 million in Series A funding led b Evolution Equity Partners. Earlier backers also joined the round, including DNX Ventures, J-ventures, Fusion Fund and Incubate Fund. TechCrunch has more here.

Epsilogen, a five-year-old, London-based developer of immunoglobulin E antibodies to treat cancer, has raised £30.75 million in Series B funding. Novartis Venture Fund led the round, joined by 3B Future Health Fund, British Patient Capital, Schroders Capital, Caribou Property and earlier backers Epidarex Capital and ALSA Ventures. More here.

Fieldguide, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based automation and collaboration platform for audit and advisory firms, has raised $17 million in Series A funding. 8VC led the round, joined by earlier investors Floodgate and AICPA/CPA.com. More here.

FreeWill, a five-year-old, New York-based startup that combines philanthropy with estate planning (it helps people leave something behind for charity), has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Double Impact. Crain's New York Business has more here. 

nSure.ai, a three-year-old, Israel-based startup that says it has developed an automated chargeback guarantee platform for online retailers that lose money to fraud, has raised $13 million in Series A funding. MoreTech Ventures led the round, joined by earlier backers DisruptiveAI, Gryffin Ventures, and Moneta Seeds. Calcalist has more here.

Satellite Vu, a six-year-old, London-based thermal imaging satellite startup, just raised $21 million in Series B funding from Lockheed Martin, In-Q-Tel and Contrarian Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Tastewise, a five-year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based data, analytics and insights platform for restaurants, food brands and hospitality outfits, has raised $17 million in Series A funding. Disruptive led the round, joined by earlier backers PeakBridge and Pico Venture Partners. Calcalist has more here.

Tenderly, a four-year-old, Belgrade, Serbia-based platform for Ethereum developers to build blockchain apps, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Spark Capital. Other investors in the round include Accel, Point Nine Capital, Abstract Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap and Daedalus. TechCrunch has more here. 

Thetanuts Finance, an eight-month-old crypto derivatives platform, has raised $18 million in seed funding from Three Arrows Capital, Deribit, QCP Capital and Jump Crypto. More here.

Zero, a seven-year-old, Los Gatos, Ca.-based company whose software automates "high value processes" for law firms, has raised  $12 million in Series A funding led by Streamlined Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Daybreak Health, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based online counseling platform that aims to help teens build emotional well-being, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. More here.

Gradient Health, a nearly four-year-old, Durham, N.C.-based medical imaging diagnostics startup, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by VentureSouth. More here.

Nested, a Paris-based DeFi startup that allows users to build portfolios of tokens that are minted as NFTs, which are then easily discoverable on its platform and can be used to share DeFi investment strategies, just raised $7.5 million. Hedge fund managers Alan Howard led the Series A round, joined by Republic Capital, Kenetic Capital and CMT Digital. The Block has more here.

Affinity, the relationship intelligence platform for dealmakers, recently launched a report analyzing investment trends that point toward future unicorn status. Affinity used their proprietary data to analyze over 925 unicorns from the last five years. Learn how top venture capital firms use relationship intelligence to spot more unicorns. Check out the report here.

Accel has closed its seventh India fund with $650 million in capital commitments to invest as the firm looks to double down on the world’s second-largest internet market, as well as more aggressively invest in the Southeast Asia region, two partners told TechCrunch in an interview. More here.

SV Angel, the seed-stage fund co-managed Ron and Topher Conway, has raised $269 million for its first-ever growth fund, which will focus on existing portfolio companies. It will be led by Ashvin Bachireddy, previously of Geodesic Capital. The firm's seed-stage practice is meanwhile run by Beth Turner, who joined the firm nearly five years ago from a family office. Axios has more here.

Video-game giant Epic Games has bought Bandcamp, a 13-year-old online music store and community geared around independent musicians. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. TechCrunch has more here.

Ro, the online pharmacy recently that's valued by its investors at $7 billion (and has also seen some turnover), just acquired a three-year-old company called Dadi that sends test kits to men for sperm testing and collection, per Fast Company, whose sources say Ro paid $100 million for the startup. (TC said this was in the works in November.) The deal is reminiscent of one that Ro struck last year for Modern Fertility, an outfit that says it helps women test fertility hormones at home and for which Ro reportedly paid $225 million. More here.

Snowflake, which helps customers store and manage data in the cloud without cloud vendor lock-in, is spending $800 million to acquire Streamlit, a nearly four-year-old startup that developed a popular open source project for building data-based apps. Streamlit had raised $62 million from investors. Snowflake, founded in 2012, went public in September 2020 and its once high-flying shares were battered today (to a seemingly irrational extent) after it reported slowing revenue growth -- not that CEO Frank Slootman needs to sweat the ups and downs too much. TechCrunch has more here.

Tier Mobility, the Berlin-based micromobility operator that has been steadily taking over Europe, is entering into North America by acquiring the e-scooter and e-bike company Spin from automaker Ford. Tier will acquire all of Spin’s inventory as part of the deal, terms of which are not being disclosed. Tier apparently has the money to shop, having raised $200 million in October. Meanwhile, Ford, which purchased Spin for $100 million back in 2018, will maintain a strategic investment in Spin. TechCrunch has the story here.

Rigetti Computing, the nearly nine-year-old, Berkeley Ca.-based quantum computing company, is officially a publicly traded outfit after completing its merger with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company II, a blank-check company led by Zillow cofounder Spencer Rascoff. Its shares began trading today.

A U.S. judge has ruled that investor Chamath Palihapitiya, Clover Health, and its executives must face a lawsuit that accused them of misleading investors about the health insurance company when it went public via one of Palihapitiya's many special purpose acquisition companies. U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger declined to dismiss the case, allowing investors to proceed with allegations Clover lied about the source of its growth and the existence of a U.S. Department of Justice probe into the company. (We talked with Palihapitiya in September about disclosures Clover didn't make to investors, and he called these a "judgment call." He elaborates in that same conversation here.)

"I couldn't trust what we had." Melinda Gates lifts the lid on her divorce from Bill Gates for the first time in an interview with journalist Gayle King that's scheduled to air tomorrow, Thurs., morning. The sit-down comes 10 months after the longtime couple publicly revealed that they were splitting.

Zane Lackey, co-founder of Signal Sciences and former CISO of Etsy, has joined Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner focused on infrastructure deals. More here.

Yuri Namikawa has been promoted to partner at Expa, the venture studio founded by Uber and StumbleUpon cofounder Garrett Camp. Namikawa has been a pincipal at Expa since 2020, focused on pre-seed and seed stage opportunities. Prior to joining Expa, she was an investor at Norwest Venture Partners, led business operations at Udemy, and worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley. More here.

Serena Williams called out The New York Times today after the paper published in print an article about her new venture fund but used a photo of her sister, Venus. 😵

Pae Wu has been promoted to general partner at SOSV, the global venture firm. She is based in San Francisco. Before joining the firm, she served as the scientific director of Telefónica’s moonshot factory in Barcelona; was science director at the US Office of Naval Research in Singapore; and worked as a  technical consultant at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). More here.

Per Renaissance Capital: There have been 16 IPOs priced this year, a -72.9% change from last year. Total proceeds raised were $2.0 bil this year, a -91.5% change from last year. There have been 33 IPOs filed this year, a -59.8% change from last year. There have been 48 SPAC IPOs, the most in any sector.

Retailers likely indulged in some schadenfreude today, as Amazon said it's closing 68 of its brick-and-mortar bookstores, pop-ups and shops carrying toys and home goods in the U.S. and the U.K. Reuters has the story here.

Ford Motor Company says it's increasing its electric vehicle investment to $50 billion through 2026, up from the previous $30 billion by 2025. TechCrunch has more here.

Friends With Benefits is a VIP lounge for crypto’s creative class. Is it empty hype or the future of friendship?

Make way for Miky Lee.

The cost of going out is going up.

Thirty-eight essential restaurants in L.A. (if you decide to go out anyway).

Watch the Northern Lights at Finland's Aurora Queen hotel.

Be your own bank using XRP and DAOs? DAOs are the web3 version of a company, whilst XRP is transforming cross border payments. The ability to create liquidity by leveraging both is a total game-changer; a whole new concept of freedom is on the horizon. But how do we get there? What do we need to know? What are the blindspots? Join Linqto Learn tomorrow, March 3rd at 9am PT to discuss why all roads lead to DAOs with Jennifer Arcuri and Victoria Smith. Register here.