VTS, which provides online tools to landlords for managing leases and tenant data, raised a $125M+ Series E led by CBRE Group, sources say at a $1.7B valuation (Peter Grant/Wall Street Journal)

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Cloud storage startup Wasabi, which competes with AWS’ S3, raised a $250M Series D, or $125M equity, led by L2 Point, and $125M debt, at a $1.1B+ valuation  —  The cloud services sector is still dominated by Amazon and the other so-called “hyperscalers” — e.g. the Microsoft Azures, Google Cloud Platforms and IBM Clouds of the world.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Jasper, a service that leverages AI to generate marketing art and copy, raised $125M led by Insight Partners at a $1.7B valuation  —  As the enthusiasm around AI image and text generators grows, Jasper, a startup developing what it describes as an “AI content” platform, has raised $125 million at a $1.7 billion valuation.

Yousef Saba / Reuters:
Chainalysis: MENA was the fastest-growing crypto market between July 2021 and June 2022, with transaction volume up 48% YoY to $566B; North America grew 36%  —  The Middle East and North Africa are the world’s fastest-growing cryptocurrency markets, with the volume of crypto received …

Natalie Wong / Bloomberg:
A look at business email compromise scams in the US involving real estate, and the Secret Service team that helped recover $244M in stolen BEC funds since 2019  —  For weeks, the Secret Service agent had been trying to identify the scammers moving millions of stolen dollars through banks around the New York tri-state area.

Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:
Accel, Lightspeed, Sequoia, a16z, and other firms are increasingly buying public tech stocks, capitalizing on low prices, as the private startup market stalls  —  Startup investors, known for making risky bets on unproven companies, are taking advantage of lower share prices following a market rout

Heather Vogell / ProPublica:
Source: the US DOJ is investigating whether rent-setting software made by RealPage is facilitating collusion among landlords to drive up rental prices  —  The DOJ will examine whether RealPage helped landlords coordinate rent increases.  Questions also swirl around a 2017 merger deal with its largest competitor.