Aktualno 202

Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its “Lego era,” with the basic building blocks like actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards still being rebuilt. This view runs counter to those who believe that robotics, powered by a general foundation model, is about to have its “ChatGPT moment” — that day when the shockingly capable chatbot was launched in late 2022. (General Intuition CEO Pim de Witte told Equity earlier this year that a single general foundation model would make much of today’s specialized robotics work redundant, and be that moment.) On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis caught up with Vishwanath to discuss where she’s writing first checks as the founder and managing partner of Techable VC. They also talked about what she’s learned as one of the first women executives to spin out of Nvidia and launch her own early-stage firm investing in physical AI across…

The Equity crew was live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026! Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane took over the Builders Stage Tuesday morning to tackle a growing challenge for the AI industry: what happens when AI agents go off-script, and who’s responsible for keeping them in check? Recent incidents, from Anthropic pulling internal evaluations off the live internet after agents misbehaved to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calling for an “emergency brake” on AI models, have brought agent security into focus. The Equity team unpacked whether the problem calls for better engineering, new regulation, or both, and why startups are raising millions to secure AI agents. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: The Anthropic agent mishaps, including a false police report that went nowhere after landing in a spam folder Nadella’s call for an AI emergency brake, and why the hosts wonder what took so long The funding race to secure AI agents, from AIR’s $50 million raise to Reco’s $55 million and Oak’s $60 million…

Amazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move from Microsoft earlier this year. Secrecy has fueled community backlash against AI infrastructure, with opposition leading to hundreds of proposed and enacted moratoriums from New York to San Francisco. Meanwhile, a wave of startups is betting that consumers will hand AI agents access to their inboxes, files, and credit cards — if they can get websites to let them in. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Anthony Ha, Sean O’Kane, and Rebecca Bellan dig into whether ditching NDAs will change how data center deals get done, why trust may be the real product for personal AI startups, plus a couple of deals of the week. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: The White House’s plans to make plans with its new Super Intelligence Force Ghost’s $3,499 computer built to run AI agents around the clock, and why the Equity crew doesn’t see it going mass market Tab, Underdog, and Hark…

Tristan Walker and Brynn Putnam both built and sold major consumer companies. Now, they’re building products designed to bring people together. Today on Equity, we’re bringing you a conversation TechCrunch AI editor Russell Brandom had on stage at the latest StrictlyVC event in New York. Russell sat down with Walker, who sold Bevel maker Walker & Company to Procter & Gamble and is now building leathercraft trade school Heirloom, and Putnam, who sold fitness startup Mirror to Lululemon and is now CEO of Board, a touchscreen console that combines board games and video games. The two repeat founders talk about what they learned from their first companies, why they’re focused on physical skills and shared experiences now, and how AI could make hands-on, human connection more valuable rather than less. Walker explains why he sees growing demand for mastery and trade skills, while Putnam talks about using technology to bring people together instead of pulling them into individual screens. Subscribe to Equity on…

This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.” Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as “super intelligence,” and meanwhile, Meta and OpenAI are putting friendlier faces on their AI products, even as the biggest money in AI still appears to be coming from the enterprise. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into this week’s AI moves, the ugly economics of consumer AI, plus the shifting IPO market and a handful of startup deals. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: What Oura pulling its IPO, plus Anthropic’s leaked S-1 and OpenAI going back to private funding, says about how picky public markets have gotten Quartermaster’s $140M raise to bring real-time sensors to an industry that AI basically hasn’t touched yet: maritime shipping Why Atomic, a…

Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health raised $700 million to build a business around scanning your body, but it’s not the only company centering its roadmap around a new kind of preventative healthcare. Midjourney is building its own body scanner, while Function Health has also raised significant capital to build out its preventative-health platform. Why are investors betting so big on this category? On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis talks with Farooq Abbasi, founder and general partner of Preface Ventures and an investor in Neko Health, about how Neko compares with other consumer-health startups. They discuss what has to happen for body scanning to become part of the broader healthcare system. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Farooq invested in Neko after trying the company's scan himself What Neko's $500 scan actually includes, and how the company keeps the price down Why Farooq thinks low primary-care utilization is one of the biggest problems in U.S.…

When AI leaders at OpenAI and Anthropic started talking about “pacing the frontier,” maybe someone should have asked: what pace? It’s turned into model drop week for both companies as Anthropic rolled out Opus 5.5, followed by OpenAI’s GPT-6 model updates just 90 minutes later. But the company that stole the spotlight this week was Meta, whose personal AI agent Muse is reportedly outpacing ChatGPT’s early numbers and is headed for smart glasses and a tiny Tamagotchi-style device next. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into Meta’s consumer AI strategy and what it means for the startups trying to build on top of this technology, from where the money is flowing to which AI products might actually become part of people's daily lives. They also get into a16z's new school for aspiring founders and two very different AI and hardware deals. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How a16z's Horowitz Andreessen Academy plans to pave a new path for…

As concern over AI safety and rogue agents continue to make headlines, it’s no surprise that cybersecurity stocks are rising, or that investors are pouring massive amounts of capital into startups trying to build the next generation of security for an AI-native world. We’re even seeing companies like Instinct and Simile bring in nine-figure checks and valuations that wouldn't have made sense a few years ago. With a front row seat to it all is Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures who’s spent nearly two decades investing in cybersecurity and enterprise software — including six consecutive rounds in cloud security startup Wiz, which Google acquired for $32 billion earlier this year in one of its largest acquisitions ever. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Shah joins Rebecca Bellan to break down why he thinks periodic, human-in-the-loop security can’t keep up anymore, and why Index continues investing in AI-native security companies at stages that once required much more proof. Listen to the…

A week after an Anthropic researcher's doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company's CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development. The proposal leans on independent safety evaluators and coordination between AI labs in democratic countries, and it's already picked up some industry support, along with some pointed pushback from Nvidia's Jensen Huang. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into whether companies can agree on what slowing down means and who gets to police it. Plus, WordPress parent Automattic's boardroom coup, and a couple of the week's biggest deals. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: The golden parachute deals struck during Matt Mullenweg's 33-hour ouster from Automattic, and why the drama could give him even more control over technology that powers much of the web Whether May Mobility's SPAC can deliver more than $300 million in potential funding, and why becoming a “public…

“Why do I have to beg my grandparents to put on their hearing aids, but no one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses?” That’s the question that drove Matthew de Jonge to spend six years building Fortell, an AI hearing aid startup that recently raised $163 million from the likes of Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias. The buzzy startup aims to build hearing aids that understand the sounds around you in real time, figure out what’s important and turn down the rest — instead of turning everything up at the same time, as most hearing aids do. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by de Jonge to break down what it takes to disrupt a decades-old industry where five companies make 97% of the products, insurance won’t cover the cost, and innovation has been slow to arrive. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How de Jonge went from mechanical engineering and a hedge fund career to building handheld ultrasound…

An Anthropic researcher resigned this week, warning in a post on X that the company is “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. The company's own alignment lead even co-signed the message rather than walking it back. It's the kind of doomer warning the AI industry has flirted with before, but the timing, with Anthropic reportedly preparing for an IPO, makes it land differently. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the latest AI safety warning and what it says about the industry's race toward increasingly capable models. Plus, Apple's first big event under new CEO John Ternus and more of the week's headlines. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Apple leaned hard into AI at its hardware event, and how always-on features baked into the Watch and AirPods may matter more than the splashy new foldable iPhone How Stokes Space's $1 billion raise reflects a launch market that's suddenly wide…

AI companies have been talking about superintelligent AI like it's inevitable, but recent safety incidents like OpenAI's Hugging Face breach are demonstrating the potential dangers of deploying AI systems that are more capable than humans. So what happens when we can't reliably control what these systems do? On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, entrepreneur, and now the U.S. Executive Director of nonprofit ControlAI, which is pushing for a far more radical approach to AI safety: stopping companies from developing superintelligence altogether. Leahy explains why he thinks the risks have become too great to manage through alignment and containment alone, and how what sounded far-fetched six months ago is now being backed by a wave of new legislation. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: His take on the Sanders-Casar “Ban Superintelligence Act,” the parallel legislation in the U.K. that Control AI advised on, and why he thinks the…

It's officially the Ternus era at Apple. Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a “huge launch next week” — timing that puts Apple's next iPhone event on his desk before he's even settled in. Cook isn't going far, though: he's staying on as executive chairman, focused on the kind of policy relationships that recently turned something as small as a map label into a very public balancing act. All of which raises an obvious question: what does the Ternus era look like, and how much rope will shareholders give him to figure it out? On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec and Sean O'Kane unpack what Ternus is walking into, why he may actually be better positioned to make progress on software than hardware in this new AI era, and more of the week's news. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Nvidia keeps making moves that look less like a chipmaker and more like a company trying to own…

The internet has a trust problem, and it’s not just because social media feeds are filling up with AI slop. AI-generated text and images are now making their way into job applications, product reviews, and even insurance claims, leaving platforms and users alike scrambling to figure out what’s real. A handful of startups have cropped up in the past couple of years to become the “trust layer” the internet needs — including Pangram. The startup recently snapped up $9 million for its AI detection system and landed a partnership with Substack, which is now using Pangram’s tech to show readers which of their favorite authors use AI to write their newsletters. Pangram also recently dropped a new AI image detection tool. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Pangram co-founder and CEO Max Spero joins Rebecca Bellan to dig into the promise of AI detection tools and where to draw the line between AI assisted and AI generated. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Spero thinks the internet could…

Earlier this week, Meta agreed to pay $18 billion and make sweeping changes to how minors access its social networks to settle a lawsuit brought by 29 states. But the eye-popping settlement figure wasn't what caught the attention of the Equity podcast team. Instead, it was what Meta did next. The social media giant sent an open letter to TikTok and YouTube asking the companies to join it in setting industry-wide standards for teens, including daily time limits, blocking access to apps at night, and restricting notifications during school hours. But will these other companies follow? The Equity team doesn't think they will. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, and Sean O'Kane dig into the Meta settlement, what it could mean for other social media companies, and more of the week’s headlines. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How investors are pouring money into robotics startups and driving up valuations. For instance, Generalist reached a $3 billion…

Vibe-coding darling Lovable just raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, roughly doubling its worth in eight months. But Lovable isn’t the only Stockholm startup putting up huge numbers lately — legal AI company Legora and health tech startup Neko Health are right there with it. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis is joined by Sophia Bendz, a partner at Cherry Ventures and longtime fixture of Europe’s startup scene, to unpack what’s driving startup growth in the Nordic ecosystem, from Sweden’s social safety net to the wave of U.S. capital flowing in. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How the “Spotify Mafia” set the template for founders funneling their time, capital, and hard-won lessons back into Stockholm ecosystem, and how the same cycle may be starting again with the “Lovable Mafia” Why Sweden’s social safety net might be fueling founders’ willingness to take bigger swings Why Bendz is seeing American investors flying into Stockholm and handing out…

Andreessen Horowitz has two partners sitting on the boards of companies that now compete with each other: Ben Horowitz at Databricks and Martin Casado at Fivetran. Nothing too scandalous on the surface, except the Department of Justice has reportedly been investigating the arrangement for almost a year, dusting off a 112-year-old antitrust law that's rarely used against VCs. Board conflicts aren't exactly new, and these companies weren't necessarily direct competitors when a16z first invested in them. But as portfolio companies expand into each other's markets, the DOJ's scrutiny raises a much bigger question for venture firms: How do you manage board seats when the boundaries between your portfolio companies keep moving? On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the a16z probe, what it could mean for VCs, and more of the week’s headlines. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Stripe paid $7.5 billion for AI model router OpenRouter, and…

The AI buildout shows no signs of slowing. And with hundreds of billions of dollars a year going into data centers and GPUs, compute has become the single biggest cost for anyone building AI products. But for all that spending, there still isn’t a straightforward way to put a price on compute — or for firms to hedge their exposure when the price changes. Silicon Data just closed a $30 million Series A to change that. The startup aims to become the reference price for GPU rental and an index that a Wall Street futures contract would settle against. The company plans to launch its compute futures trading on the CME October 5th, pending regulatory approval. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Steve Hou, head of research at Silicon Data, to discuss the health of the AI buildout, and why the data is telling a different story than the doom and gloom headlines about depreciating chips and stalled data centers. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: What happens if…

Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled by a handful of labs, but as Equity’s hosts point out, the vision comes with some asterisks. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan take a look at Glimmer, Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word manifesto, and more of the week’s headlines, from the true cost of the AI industry’s energy needs to a $250M acquisition gone very wrong. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Who’s on the market for a $300 cocktail robot? Why Anthropic is adding watermarks to its generated text, and users are not happy. The potential cost Amazon’s planned data center in Texas and the startups racing to fix the grid, including Form Energy’s $750M raise for…

AI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way. One of the companies chasing that bet is Sandbar, the startup behind the private voice ring Stream, which has raised $36 million to date, including a $23 million Series A led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Sandbar co-founder and CEO Mina Fahmi about why he thinks so many voice hardware devices before Stream struggled to break through, and why he's betting that keeping the human firmly in control is what it'll take to get wearable tech right. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Fahmi designed Stream to be push-to-talk instead of always-on, and what he thinks “social…

Historian Jill Lepore has a theory about why tech companies often use soaring language to describe their products — almost as if they're forming a new government. And whether you're thinking of Twitter's old “town hall in your pocket” or Anthropic's Claude constitution, it's a theory that doesn't paint Silicon Valley in a very flattering light. In Lepore's upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian and New Yorker writer argues that tech companies are gradually taking on the functions of democratic government — whether that’s Twitter giving a distorted picture of the electorate or Facebook displacing local news. In her view, these leaders often mistake technological advancement for political progress, all while outright declaring their intention to replace the nation-state. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Anthony Ha talks with Lepore about her book and why she thinks today's AI leaders — who promise a future where AI makes government…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…