TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, Theresa Loconsolo
The intersection of technology, startups, and venture capital touches everything now. That’s why Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast, digs into the business of startups for entrepreneurs and enthusiasts alike. Every Wednesday and Friday, TechCrunch reporters keep you up-to-date on the world of business, technology, and venture capital. Equity is ranked the No.2 podcast in the Top 100 Venture Capital All time leaderboard on Goodpods—As well as No.17 for the Top 100 Finance All time chart and No.32 for the Top 100 Business News All time chart.
Venture firms are turning to creators to build trust with the next generation of founders before a check is ever written. It's a trend that's been building with a16z's acquisition of Erik Torenberg’s Turpentine podcast and OpenAI's acquisition of TBPN. Lightspeed Venture Partners just made its own notable hire in that vein, bringing on Claire Zau, a seed investor with a major following on Instagram and TikTok, to source deals and co-host the firm's new show, Lightwork, alongside CMO Josh Machiz.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis is joined by Zau and Machiz to dive deep into whether the “creator-investor” is becoming a real function in venture or just something firms are still trying to figure out.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
How an Instagram DM turned into a hire, and why Machiz says Zau’s investing instincts (not just her follower count) made her stand out from other creators.
Why Zau thinks tech Twitter is a “minuscule” slice of the tech-curious audience, and what she's learned about public sentiment on AI that doesn't show up on X.
How Lightspeed measures ROI on a media operation that's hard to tie directly to deal flow.
The founder and portfolio-company stories that came out of Zau's content, including how a single video helped land a health-tech founder a meeting with Shaq.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments come just days after one of OpenAI's own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face, though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have been just as much to blame as the model itself. Altman's not alone in this stance: both OpenAI and Anthropic have come out in support of a petition echoing that same message.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into whether the industry is ready to pump the brakes or just spooked, and who's on the hook when a model goes rogue.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
The viral “Avoiding AI” workshops hosted by librarians to help people opt out of AI features they didn't ask for
How Amazon's new 5,000-satellite bid to connect directly to your phone could turn up the heat on SpaceX (even though it's unclear if anyone actually wants satellite-to-phone service)
Why somehow there's room for one more AI lab: Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus's new startup, Prentis, is in talks to raise $100M at a $1B valuation
How Pangram raised $9 million to help publishers, teachers, and readers tell human writing from AI slop
Why DoorDash is building its own drone delivery business instead of just relying on partners like Wing and Flytrex
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
1:18 Zoox gets its robotaxi exemption
2:11 Sam Altman calls for pacing the frontier
6:01 The Hugging Face hack, dissected
10:12 Responsibility, regulation, and the Elon Musk wildcard
13:29 Librarians teaching people to unplug from AI
15:16 Prentice: a new AI lab raises at a $1B valuation
16:46 Amazon files for its own satellite-to-phone network
18:42 SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the launch-business angle
23:48 Pangram raises $9M to detect AI slop
29:23 DoorDash builds its own delivery drones
33:24 Outro
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With the Light Phone, Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier have spent over a decade exploring the value of simplicity in our relationship to technology, partnering along the way with players like Andrew Yang, Kendrick Lamar, and Pete Davidson. Now, with a new flip phone and a growing wave of “attention activists” pushing back on big tech, they think the rest of the world is finally catching up to them.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Amanda Silberling talks with Tang and Hollier about the company's newly announced flip phone, why they think the anti-smartphone backlash is only just getting started, and what it takes to break an addiction that fits in your pocket.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
How the design lessons from the original Motorola Razr shaped the new Light Flip
What the "Summer of Ludd" attention activist movement says about Gen Z's relationship with big tech
Why Light Phone is opening up an SDK so users can build their own tools instead of opting for an app store
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
0:51 Building Light Phone
3:10 The user shift: why people are finally ready to unplug
7:54 Designing outside the Silicon Valley bubble
9:54 Why simple tech is making a comeback (CDs, iPods, flip phones)
13:50 From the Motorola Razr to the Light Flip
17:54 Pricing and the Noble Mobile phone plan
19:44 What actually happens when you switch (and the Flip Your Life program)
23:13 Building an open-source app library for Light Phone
26:38 Outro
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Chinese AI lab Moonshot's open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face — a reminder that “China risk” isn't the only kind of AI risk worth worrying about.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into why Kimi K3 set off a fresh round of AI panic, the industry’s response to an OpenAI staffer's “regulatory FUD” post, and what that OpenAI breach means for AI security more broadly.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
Why EVs are getting killed off across the U.S. even as automakers roll out new models, and how Rivian and Ford, and a wave of new startups are betting on different EV strategies to survive
What Sila's $300 million raise says about where battery investment is headed even as EV demand cools
Travis Kalanick's comeback with a $1.7 billion raise for his robotics startup, Atoms, and why we’re surprised to see Uber among its investors
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
1:39 Chinese AI model Kimi sparks a Wall Street freakout
10:45 OpenAI model breaks out of a test, Hugging Face breach
15:53 Why EVs are getting killed off in the U.S.
20:35 Tax credits, free markets, and the road ahead for EVs
28:56 Sila raises $300M for battery materials
32:20 Travis Kalanick's Atoms raises $1.7B, with Uber as an investor
36:39 Outro
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Anthropic leaped to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May, compared to $9 billion in 2025. It’s the kind of growth that Menlo Ventures' Matt Murphy says he's never seen in 25 years of investing, not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom. Menlo led Anthropic's $500M Series D, and Murphy has had a front-row seat as the company went from a pre-revenue, pre-launch bet to one of the most valuable startups out there.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Julie Bort talks with Murphy about backing Anthropic before anyone else would, why a great model was never the point, and what's driving the fastest-growing startups he's ever seen.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
Why Menlo bet on Anthropic at a $4 billion pre-revenue valuation when the deal didn't fit cleanly into any of the firm's funds, and why Google and Amazon signing on as investors was an early “green shoot.”
Why Murphy says the model was never the real moat, and how Claude Code, MCP, and Claude Skills turned Anthropic from a strong model into a full platform.
Murphy's take on the backlash to Anthropic's Mythos rollout, and why he pushes back on the idea that it was more marketing than safety.
Why companies like Lovable and Legora are growing faster than any startups Murphy has seen in 25 years, and what that speed means for founders trying to compete.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Apple filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, and it's not messing around. The complaint alleges a pattern of misconduct reaching all the way up to OpenAI's chief hardware officer and claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the company. OpenAI's response so far has been carefully hedged, and the timing couldn't be worse with the company reportedly eyeing an IPO as early as later this year.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what the lawsuit could mean for OpenAI's own hardware ambitions and IPO timeline, plus a bigger theme running through the week's news: how much should anyone trust AI companies with their data?
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
Why Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is warning enterprises about handing data over to AI labs, and whether open source is really a way out of the “Trojan horse” data-trust problem
How forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are changing the relationship between AI labs and their enterprise customers
Why General Catalyst just handed David Beckham's health drink startup a $1 billion customer value fund
The scoop on a new $200M drug-discovery startup from an ex-OpenAI researcher
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:40 Would you want Sam Altman listening to you?
01:53 Apple sues OpenAI over trade secrets
13:24 Satya Nadella's warning: "you're paying twice" with your data
19:03 Open source vs. going deeper with AI labs
24:52 General Catalyst gives David Beckham's health drink startup $1B
30:05 Ex-OpenAI researcher raises $200M for drug discovery startup
32:58 Outro
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Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic — the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Ode’s leaders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who founded Fractional AI, the applied AI services startup that Ode acquired earlier this year to serve as the new venture’s core. The three discuss why so many enterprise AI pilots never make it to production and why they think AI-native services are about to become one of the biggest categories in tech.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
The case for AI-native services, and why Ode believes small teams of applied AI engineers can unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in business value.
Why the company is hiring experienced generalists and former founders instead of AI researchers, and how it's turning them into elite FDEs.
Whether an AI services company can scale like software, yet maintain a boutique feel, and why Taylor believes Ode could one day become a trillion-dollar business.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:30 Fractional AI becomes "Ode with Anthropic"
1:13 Why non-AI companies are the real AI winners
2:04 Working with Blackstone, Anthropic, and beyond
3:05 Inside a real project: fixing LogicGate's bottleneck
7:29 How long does it take from hypothesis to production?
9:19 Measuring ROI: revenue, efficiency, and evals
16:37 Model choice vs. workflow redesign, and why it's Claude-first
23:10 Hiring generalists over specialized AI talent
26:39 Can this scale without turning into another consulting firm?
30:49 Outro
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Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he's worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
How Chinese labs are producing the majority of open models being downloaded in the U.S., and why Delangue thinks that's a problem worth fixing rather than a reason to distrust open source itself.
How Hugging Face is choosing capital efficiency over the usual Silicon Valley fundraising playbook, including why the company turned down a large investment from Nvidia last year.
Why he sees robotics as an even more urgent case for open, transparent AI than chatbots or coding tools, given how much of your home and family life a robot ends up seeing.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:33 Breaking down open source growth data
04:34 What's driving the open source resurgence
08:47 Who’s using Hugging Face, and how?
10:28 China overtakes the US in open model downloads
16:34 Safety, access, and the risk of AI power concentration
24:03 Hugging Face's approach to legal risk
28:00 Turning down Nvidia
31:47 Underinvested opportunities: local AI, bio, robotics
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When it comes to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models just don’t have what it takes. Models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at text, but they're less skilled at understanding how things actually move through space and time — an essential skill for producing intelligence that generalizes. That gap, it turns out, might be filled by gaming data. That's the bet behind General Intuition, a Bezos-backed, New York-based startup valued at $2.3 billion that just closed a $320 million round with Coatue, Eric Schmidt, and researchers at MIT and Google DeepMind joining its list of investors.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, General Intuition CEO Pim de Witte joins Rebecca Bellan to dig into why world models trained on gaming data might be the next big leap in physical AI, how the company spun out of gaming platform Medal TV, and where the ethical red lines are when your models could end up being used for defense applications.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
How eight minutes of real-world data was enough to get a robot navigating an office cold.
Why General Intuition turned down an acquisition offer reportedly from OpenAI to stay independent, and why having investors who back your mission is essential to building a generational company.
How the company is trying to get ahead of AI job displacement by building Nerve, a marketplace connecting gamers to data labeling and teleoperations work.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Instead of our usual news rundown, Equity is sending you off into the 4th of July weekend with a special episode of our sister podcast Build Mode.
Season 3 launches July 9th, but before it does, Build Mode is revisiting some of the best fundraising and startup advice from the investors featured in last season.
From choosing the right investors to building a differentiated go-to-market strategy, these venture capitalists and founder-turned-investors share hard-earned lessons on fundraising, portfolio dynamics, investor-founder relationships, and what separates the companies that successfully raise their next round from those that don't.
In this episode, you'll hear from:
Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst
Ross Fubini, managing partner at XYZ Venture Capital and Leslie Feinzaig, founder and general partner at Graham & Walker
Paul Irving, partner at GTMfund
Leah Solivan, founder of TaskRabbit and founder of Precedent VC
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:19 Yuri Sagalov (General Catalyst): The three types of investors and who founders should avoid
03:29 Ross Fubini (XYZ VC) & Leslie Feinzaig (Graham & Walker): What great investors actually bring to the table
08:36 Paul Irving (GTMfund): The go-to-market signals investors look for
12:30 Leah Solivan (TaskRabbit / Precedent VC): Understanding the competition inside your investors' portfolios
14:30 Outro
Subscribe to Build Mode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And watch the full videos on YouTube.
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We've said it before, and we'll say it again: the autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money's flowing back, and it's the people who lived through that first wave who are building the next one.
Humble Robotics founder and CEO Eyal Cohen is one of them. Cohen was at Otto when Uber came calling, later followed Anthony Levandowski to Pronto, and after two decades bouncing between deep tech bets in the Bay Area, his new company came out of stealth in April with $24 million to build a fully autonomous, cabless electric hauler for freight.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Cohen joins Kirsten Korosec to talk about AV déjà vu and what he's learned from 15 years of building startups across electrification, solar, and robotics.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
The bet behind Humble's cabless design and why "the simplest possible robotics platform" was the starting point
How vision models are replacing months of hand-built engineering work that used to go into recognizing things like traffic cones and stop signs
Why Cohen thinks culture beats out compensation when it comes to securing talent in robotics these days
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market for years, but the era of total dependence might be ending.
OpenAI just shared its plans to spice things up with Jalapeño, its custom inference chip built with Broadcom, joining Google, Apple, and SpaceX in a growing list of companies building their way out of single-supplier risk. The goal isn't a clean break so much as a hedge. Custom silicon means more control, hardware tuned to specific needs, and the kind of performance gains Apple unlocked when it ditched Intel.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what the custom chip trend means for the industry and a few deals of the week worth watching. Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
How Groq’s $650M raise after Nvidia swept away its top talent might be the comeback story of the year
AI agents getting loopy and why Claude Code creator Boris Cherny thinks these loops are “just as important and as big a step” as the leap from source code to agents
Whether the public markets are warming up to humanoid robots as Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC
A24 taking investment from Google DeepMind to develop a new AI toolkit for filmmakers
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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In this episode, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos talks with Goodwater Capital co-founder Chi-Hua Chien, whose career spans some of Silicon Valley’s biggest technology shifts, from helping source Accel’s investment in Facebook as a young associate to backing a new generation of consumer and AI startups. While much of the venture world is focused on models, chips, and infrastructure, Chi-Hua argues that history suggests the biggest long-term winners of the AI era may be the application companies built on top of them.
They talk about why AI startups are reaching unprecedented revenue levels with remarkably small teams, what’s driving today’s soaring valuations, and why he believes many infrastructure businesses will eventually face the same commoditization pressures seen in previous technology cycles. He also shares what he’s seeing inside consumer AI, from hyper-personalized entertainment and women’s health platforms to new products built around voice, agents, and individualized experiences. And they discuss the increasingly public tensions between founders and VCs, why some of the most interesting fintech innovation is happening outside the U.S., and why Chi-Hua believes one of the biggest opportunities in consumer technology may be helping people reconnect in the real world.
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Just as last week was ending, the US government forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5's guardrails.
Cybersecurity researchers have since signed an open letter calling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is this a genuine security concern, or just the latest chapter in a messy relationship between Anthropic and the Trump administration?
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, and Rebecca Bellan unpack what the ban means for developers building on Anthropic's platform and for anyone watching the IPO, why it might accidentally be good for the company, and more of the week’s headlines.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
Why the UK's social media ban for users under 16 might be the lesser of two evils
What the SpaceX-Cursor acquisition tells us about xAI's strategy (and its gaps)
Jeff Bezos's $12B bet on physical AI with Prometheus, the startup trying to build an "artificial engineer"
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.
This tension between hype and ROI is exactly where NEA partner Tiffany Luck lives these days. She got her start convincing companies that e-commerce was the future, and now she's all in on AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities for "magic moments" in the consumer business.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year's AI IPOs, and how startups are stepping in to help enterprises track return on AI spend.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
What the tokenmaxxing-to-ROI shift means for how companies measure AI spend.
Why forward deployed engineers are becoming a "Trojan horse" for AI adoption.
How enterprises are mixing and matching models instead of committing to one provider.
Why Tiffany thinks value is being created at every layer of the AI stack, not just at the model layer.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:51 Tiffany Luck's path from Lot18 to Amazon to VC
3:45 Magic moments: Waymo, healthcare, and the gap in personal agents
7:36 Privacy, security, and trusting AI with your life
10:39 IPO outlook: Anthropic vs. OpenAI on public markets
13:58 Compute, infrastructure, and where the value sits
15:41 What’s the ROI on tokenmaxxing?
27:07 Forward deployed engineers as a ‘Trojan horse’
32:49 Outro
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The biggest IPO in history dropped this morning on the Nasdaq — a debut so big, our team thought it deserved its own bonus Equity podcast episode.
On this special bonus episode, Senior Reporter Sean O'Kane called up our AI Editor Russell Brandom to help him break down the $2 trillion valuation, Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire, and what it all means for Anthropic and OpenAI still waiting in the wings.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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The IPO market is back, and it's not the same companies leading the charge. FAANG had a good run, but a new acronym is taking over: MANGOS — Meta (or Microsoft, depending on who you ask), Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX. Half of that bunch is heading to public markets in the same window, and it's a stress test for investors, for valuations, and for what we can even expect from a public tech company in 2026.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane break down what this IPO moment actually means beyond the headline numbers, and who stands to benefit.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
Why Apple's biggest WWDC announcement might matter less than how they showed it, and what a $250M settlement had to do with the change
How Waymo just turned Apple's abandoned self-driving dream into its next big proving ground
What a $920 million-per-month compute deal between Google and SpaceX says about who's leading the AI infrastructure race
How Sam Bankman-Fried's pardon request and a new Zuckerberg biopic somehow ended with the Equity team getting cast by ChatGPT
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign was based on a warning that automation and AI would hollow out the labor market and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. At the time, ideas like Universal Basic Income felt fringe. Now Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Bernie Sanders are all saying versions of the same thing.
An entrepreneur at heart, Yang has found a new way to put money back into the hands of the people — one phone bill at a time. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks to Yang about his startup Noble Mobile, which pays you to use your phone less, ways to combat the “attention economy,” and what startups can do when the government won't move.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
Why Yang thinks the $100 billion gap between what Americans and Europeans pay for wireless is a startup opportunity.
How a partnership with the Light Phone fits into the growing "together tech" movement, and why Yang has been throwing no-phone parties in LA and NYC.
What he actually thinks of Bernie Sanders' proposed AI sovereign wealth fund, and why he's skeptical the money should flow through government at all.
Why UBI isn't a salary replacement but a "landing pad,” and what Noble Mobile's $600-a-year savings has to do with it.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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While the AI fundraising machine keeps breaking its own records, some founders are building in the other direction.
Mirror founder Brynn Putnam just raised money for Board, a startup focused on bringing people together through in-person games and social experiences. Cyberdeck creators are going viral crafting whimsical DIY computers that literally encourage users to touch grass. Unlike the AI-free browser crowd, this doesn't just feel like backlash, but also people genuinely gravitating toward things that feel a little more human.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the week's headlines, from the "together tech" wave to what Anthropic's confidential IPO filing means against the backdrop of Alphabet's $80 billion AI raise, and whether the money is all flowing back to the big guys anyway.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
Why ex-Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer raised $250 million for climate tech specifically, at a moment when almost nobody else is
How rocket engine startup Impulse raised $500 million — and is loudly emphasizing that those funds will be spent on people, not AI
A look inside Anthropic's S-1, and what the team is looking forward to once we can finally compare the AI labs' financials
What two YouTube directors cracking the box office tells us about creator economy power
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:45 YouTubers are taking over the box office
02:46 Everyone's fleeing climate tech — except this $250M fund
07:03 Impulse Space raises $500M and is hiring humans
13:03 Anthropic quietly files for IPO as Alphabet drops $85B on AI
21:52 The token bubble is starting to burst
26:08 From Board games to DIY cyberdecks, founders are betting on IRL
33:09 Outro
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Defense tech is red hot right now, with a proposed 40% increase to the federal defense budget, Anduril doubling its valuation to $61 billion, and a wave of startups chasing government contracts. But according to Ross Fubini, the venture investor who wrote Anduril's first check, most of them won't make it. The valley of death between a prototype contract and a real production deal is about to claim a lot of companies.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan asks Fubini — the founder and managing partner of XYZ Venture Capital, built on the Palantir alumni network and now approaching $2B AUM — what separates the survivors from the rest.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
Why Ukraine and Iran have become live testing grounds for US defense startups, and which companies are getting in the field
How other countries are building their own defense tech ecosystems, and what that means for where startups build and sell
The sustainment problem nobody wants to talk about, and why autonomous logistics is the real moat
Where Fubini is writing checks next, from AI-driven US manufacturing to government software for health and human services
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The people deciding that AI can replace your job are also the ones least likely to understand what your job truly involves, according to Box founder Aaron Levie, who pointed to this as an example of "AI psychosis.” Indeed, ClickUp recently cut 22% of its workforcefor AI agents, tech layoffs in 2026 are already nearly matching all of 2025, and DuckDuckGo installs are climbing from users who want Google to stop forcing AI into search and just give them links.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what happens when the AI-pilled and the AI-skeptical are both right at the same time, plus three deals worth knowing about and Waymo's new robotaxi hitting the road.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
Kirsten's first look at Waymo's new Ojai robotaxi in Phoenix, and the crew's thoughts on the company's path to profitability
Cloud data storage giant Snowflake’s $6 billion five-year agreement with AWS
Why Stord, the "anti-Amazon" fulfillment startup, just raised $250 million at a $3 billion valuation
What OpenRouter's $113 million raise says about the picks-and-shovels layer, and how long that interest lasts
How the AI agent wave is actually reshaping hiring, not just headcount
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:18 Waymo's new Ojai robotaxi
06:41 Stord raises $250M to take on Amazon fulfillment
12:46 Snowflake signs $6B deal with AWS
15:39 OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
20:07 The AI divide & anti-AI backlash
27:31 AI psychosis & how AI is reshaping headcount and hiring
37:04 Outro
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Google I/O made it official: AI-generated answers are now front and center in search, and most brands have almost no visibility into how AI is describing them to their customers. For anyone who has spent years building a strategy around 10 blue links, the rules just changed in a pretty significant way.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Matt Thompson, VP of partnerships at Scrunch, a startup positioning itself at the center of the AI search shift, to talk about what Google’s changes mean and marketers and founders should actually do about it.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
Why AI referrals are converting at 400% higher than traditional organic search, and what that means for how to think about traffic.
How ChatGPT still has the lion's share of AI search traffic, and why optimizing only for Google means missing most of the market.
Why Google's own SEO best practices might be leading marketers in the wrong direction.
What it actually means to make your website "agent ready" and why most enterprise sites aren't.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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The SpaceX S-1 is finally here, and the story it tells goes way further than rockets. The filing runs to 36 pages of risk factors alone, and the numbers inside match the ambition: a $28 trillion total addressable market, a pay package tied to establishing a Mars colony, and a valuation target that would make it the largest IPO in American history.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what the filing actually says, what it leaves out, and whether any of this math connects to reality.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
Why NanoCo turned down a $20 million buyout to raise a $12 million seed instead
Anthropic’s acquisition of SDK startup Stainless, and why taking a tool off the table matters as much as the $300 million price tag
What happened when commencement speakers started talking up AI in front of graduating classes, and why the students weren't having it
Google’s I/O announcements claiming search as you know it is over, and what the AI makeover could mean for the open web
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Slapping "AI" on your startup’s pitch deck is basically table stakes right now. When a founder raised $20 million from Cathie Wood's ARK Invest for an eSports gamification loyalty startup without those two letters in the spotlight, it got us wondering how the conversation even started — especially when ARK had already been burned by a company operating in the same space.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Julie Bort sits down with Dylan Robbins, founder and CEO of Lucra, the white-label platform turning friendly competitions into loyalty programs for brands like golf courses, arcades, and pickleball clubs.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
How Dylan met his ARK connection over a game of darts at a New York City bar
Why pitching a non-AI company in peak AI fundraising season meant addressing it head-on, even when it had nothing to do with his business
How being honest with investors about what wasn't working yet actually helped him close the round
Why Lucra pivoted from consumer to B2B in 45 days (and why that pivot is what convinced ARK they weren't looking at another Skillz).
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The Musk v. Altman trial came to a close this week, and the final arguments kept circling back to one question: can we trust the people in charge of AI? All of this is playing out as SpaceX charges toward what could be one of the largest IPOs in American history, with a whole generation of founders already spinning out of the Musk empire.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane break down the trial's closing stretch and what the growing Elon Musk founder ecosystem actually looks like on the ground, and the other deals that caught our eye this week.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
How Anduril landed a $5 billion Series H, more than doubling the valuation it landed just under a year ago
Why investors just can’t say no to RJ Scaringe, who’s raked in over $1 billion for Rivian spinout Mind Robotics
How voice AI startup Vapi beat out over 40 other companies to secure a contract handling all of Ring's customer support
What an Anthropic report about an AI agent blackmailing its own developers says about where the industry actually is
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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AI may be changing how companies build, but it's also changing how they get attacked, often by their own tools. Amazon Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt has watched threat actors at every skill level get sharper, faster, and harder to contain. The risk he's most focused on, however, isn't coming from outside the firewall.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan had with Schmidt at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. The two dug into what AI is already doing to the threat landscape and how Amazon is rethinking identity, containment, and human oversight to keep agents in check.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
Why shadow AI inside your own organization may be a bigger liability than the hackers trying to get in
What agentic identity means in practice, and how Amazon traces every agent action back to a human
How startups with five people (and no CISO) can manage their AI security, and why containment is becoming the defining security challenge of the agentic era
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Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie, and this week, we saw a string of companies making their moves. From Anthropic and OpenAI announcing new joint ventures targeting enterprise AI deployment to SAP dropping $1B on German AI startup Prior Labs, it's becoming clear that if you're a startup building enterprise tools, you're likely an acquisition target.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the week's enterprise AI deals, the xAI-Anthropic compute arrangement, and what it all means ahead of what could be a big IPO season.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
Why a TikToker is trying to crowdfund the purchase of Spirit Airlines, and whether anyone really loves Spirit enough to make it work
Why Katie Haun's venture fund and Andreessen Horowitz are both raising billions to back a crypto comeback
Aurora Innovation's milestone commercial trucking contract with a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, announced shortly after we caught up with Aurora’s CEO, Chris Urmson, at HumanX
The Pentagon's latest AI spending spree, inking deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:31 Spirit Airlines & the crowdfunded "people's airline"
03:25 xAI x Anthropic deal: is xAI becoming a NEO cloud?
13:47 Haun Ventures & a16z's crypto comeback
17:48 Aurora Innovation lands a commercial trucking contract
19:27 A big week for enterprise AI: who's actually making money?
26:45 The Pentagon's AI spending spree
31:04 Outro
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Self-driving has been "almost here" for over a decade. But somewhere between DARPA challenges and a handful of driverless trucks hauling freight between Dallas and Houston, Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson’s story changed. The self-driving truck company started commercial driverless operations last April and is now scaling from a handful of trucks to hundreds this year.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan had with Urmson at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. The pair dug into the long road from lab to highway and how physical AI differs from the LLM boom everyone else is chasing.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
Why long-haul trucking may crack the autonomy business case before robotaxis ever do
What "verifiable AI" means and why Urmson thinks end-to-end systems are a liability when lives are on the line
The surprisingly common-sense solution to the driverless truck safety triangle problem
What Aurora's roadmap looks like beyond trucking, and which companies in the autonomy space have Urmson genuinely excited
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the witness stand this week in his lawsuit against OpenAI, and it's already getting messy. Emails, texts, and his own tweets are surfacing in court, and there are plenty more witnesses to come. Musk's argument against OpenAI? By converting the company to a for-profit model, Sam Altman betrayed the “nonprofit for the benefit of humanity” mission Musk signed up to fund. As Musk keeps reminding the courtroom: “You can't steal a charity.”
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec and Sean O'Kane break down what's actually at stake in the courtroom and what to watch for as Altman and others take the stand, plus deals, defense tech, and what Big Tech's earnings week revealed about the limits of the AI spending era.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
Why cloud was the winner of earnings week, and what AWS, Google, and Microsoft's numbers say about where enterprise AI spending is actually landing
The scholarship app founder taking Sallie Mae to court after they acquired his startup…and began selling its student data to ad networks and universities
BMW i Ventures new $300 million fund with its sights set on AI
How defense tech startup Scout AI is pitching “military AGI” using vision-language-action (VLA) models
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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AI-generated video has gone from novelty to creative tool in AI-generated video has gone from novelty to creative tool almost overnight, and Runway has a front-row seat to the shift. The New York-based company has raised close to $860 million at a $5.3 billion valuation, and its models are going toe-to-toe with the most well-funded labs in the world, including Google and OpenAI.
And the technology goes way beyond making videos: it's now pushing into general world models with applications in gaming, robotics, and maybe something closer to general intelligence.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, host Rebecca Bellan sits down with co-founder and CEO Cristobal Valenzuela to talk about where video generation goes from here, and why Runway's ambitions now reach well beyond Hollywood.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
Why Valenzuela thinks the real constraint on filmmaking has never been technology, and what changes when it is
How Runway thinks about world models differently than Google and other labs building in the space
What "nonlinear media" means, and why real-time video generation opens up use cases way beyond content creation
Why Valenzuela pushes back on the idea that AI companions are “inherently dystopian”
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:56 Can AI really replace Hollywood?
04:18 Why "AI slop" fears miss the point
08:23 Research lab, software company, or creative studio?
13:42 From video generation to world models, explained
17:36 Omni models and multimodal training
17:50 The three pillars: linear media, non-linear media, physical AI
19:31 Real-time video and the "Characters" product
22:33 Are AI companions inherently dystopian?
25:59 Physical AI and robotics
28:35 Where growth is coming from: enterprise and prosumer
29:31 Outro
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