Equity Monday: Heartbest and Acquire raise capital as tech turns to Apple’s WWDC

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 short-form week-starter in which we go over the weekend, look to the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds and dig into what is stuck on our minds.

This morning, here’s what we talked about:

• Equity is on Twitter! You can follow us on @EquityPod
• The COVID-19 pandemic hit a new, worse milestone over the weekend. What is ahead for the global economy is not clear, but the horizon is not clear for startups big and small.
• Many tech firms in the US took Juneteenth off, limiting recent news, and with WWDC starting today there’s going to be something akin to a Cupertino takeover for the next few days. If you don’t care about Apple, you can just take some time off.
• Stocks are heading up this morning, with tech shares testing new records.
• Mexico’s Heartbest raised a $2 million Series A to help develop plant-based dairy replacements, and San Francisco’s Acquire raised a $6.4 million Series A to help with its customer success service. Blue Horizon Ventures and Base10 led the rounds, respectively.
• And, finally, the Hey-Apple drama reaches WWDC today. Apple has signaled that no changes are coming, but the company is in water that feels fractionally hotter with each passing day. What Apple can do to repair relations with developers who are more than a little worried about the megacorp isn’t clear. But for startups, the final results of this scrap could really matter.

And that is that. Equity is back Friday with more. Have a great week!