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 private market news, talks 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.

First, happy belated birthday to Chris Gates, one of the founding members of the show. His birthday was yesterday, and while he's on vacation for two weeks, we still wanted to give him a shoutout. Chris is a very good person, a good friend, a good father, a good partner. He's kind, supportive, and hilarious. And he has a very good beard.

But Equity waits for no single person, regardless of their merit, so on we went! Here's today's show:

• Stocks are a bit blah this morning, though set to rise in the United States. Cryptos are up a little.
• From the weekend, Venmo is getting into ecommerce, and Apple loves Surface.
• From this morning: Binance is beefing with the United Kingdom, and appears to be winning, which is somewhat humorous.
• On the funding round beat, Slice raised $20 million, Botrista raised $10 million, and Thursday raised $3.5 million.
• We wrapped with this.

The Equity crew is back on Wednesday for our deep-dive, this week focusing on the creator economy which should be good fun. Chat then!

Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.