Welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the financial side of technology. This week Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and your servant sat down with Gene Munster, best known for his bullish takes on Apple as an analyst. Munster is now a venture capitalist at Loup Ventures, where he’s a managing partner. As a group we dug into Lyft’s… Read More

 Okta is setting an increasingly ambitious target for its IPO, now officially pricing it at $17 per share set for its debut tomorrow — and looking to raise as much as $187 million in the hopes that it can capitalize on the newly open IPO window. Read More

 Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, long had aspirations to become a player in the mobile phone and tablet world, too. You can’t easily buy an Ubuntu-powered phone today (at least not in the U.S.), but over the years, a few have come and gone. As Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced today, however, the company will end its investment in the phone… Read More

 Snowflake Computing, the company that built a Data Warehouse as a Service cloud solution, announced a $100 million Series D investment led by Iconiq Capital with help from Madrona Venture Group. Early investors Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures also participated. Snowflake last raised $45 million in June, 2015. Today’s investment brings the… Read More

 Talla, a Cambridge, Mass. startup, wants to help companies ease into artificial intelligence, and they have come up with a new service assistant bot that gives companies whatever degree of intelligence-fueled power they are looking for. The tool, called ServiceAssistant, works as an IT or HR help desk inside of Slack or Microsoft Teams and gives customers a few options on how to use it. First… Read More

 Microsoft has had a fair bit of investment action with InsideSales, the startup with a unicorn valuation of $1.5 billion, and today they are expanding that relationship with some product integration. The companies announced that InsideSales Playbooks will be available on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. Playbooks offer customers a set of recommendations aimed at sales teams, such as the… Read More

 European VC firm 83North (formerly Greylock IL), which since 2008 has focused on backing startups in Europe and Israel, has closed its fourth fund — taking $250M in a raise that it says was both oversubscribed and its largest to date, and bringing its total capital under management to $800M. Read More

 FINE, a San Francisco- and Portland-based brand agency, is open sourcing the content management system (CMS) it has developed in-house to build sites for brands like Anchor Brewing, Kimpton Residences at Seafire, Prūf Cultivar (“Elevated Cannabis”) and others. Read More

 Former 500 Startups accelerator company Pluto AI is announcing $2.1 million in fundraising today from Fall Line Capital, Refactor Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Comet Labs and additional angels. Pluto is taking advantage of the sensorification of modern water treatment plants to extrapolate insights that can save operators precious time, money and water. Read More

 Find-a-doctor app Amino has raised $25 million in a Series C round of venture funding, according to CEO and co-founder David Vivero. Highland Capital led the investment joined by Accel, Aspect Ventures, CRV, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, and Pilot Wall Group. A ZocDoc competitor, Amino gives users the ability to search for doctors who are most experienced in treating their… Read More