Hello and welcome back to Equity, the Tech Runch Podcast, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines.

Today is February 7th, 2024. Good morning, this is Alex and welcome to our Wednesday show where we dig into the critical startup and venture capital stories of the week thus far. On the pod today, I have just for you why Vertical Sass is not dead how quickly Sumu Wealth is growing a

consumer crypto app with real traction I promise new capital for both FinTech and Ed Tech

and the latest early stage fund in Europe.

Now you may have seen some news out there about We Work Adam Newman and buying the company

out of bankruptcy.

Clearly I have a whole lot of thoughts but we're going to save

that for Friday and as a quick programming note if you did hear the Monday show you

may have noticed my audio was a little bit weird it's because I'm traveling

and was not holding my mic correctly, but I have since learned and will hold it well today.

All right, let's go.

First up, let's talk about Good Shuffle, which is building software for the event, rental, and production industry.

It just closed a $5 million series A funding round that was led by Fintop Capital. So a couple of things here.

First of all, that's an old school series a in terms of size. Keep in mind that rounds

have gotten larger over time, but it wasn't that long ago that a $5 million

Series A wouldn't have raised an eyebrow. The second thing that stood out to me

here was, hey, good news. Vertical SAS is still a thing. If you want to think about it, vertical SAS is kind of like

startups distilled. You go and find an industry that is super outdated and depends on paper and pencils,

and then you build software for it.

Next you go out and try to conquer the market before competitors arrive and try to make a real challenge of it,

but it's a model we've seen a lot of times.

Recently, in fact, we we saw bulk exchange which just raised a similar amount of money

...