Equity

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

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 L

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 A

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 defin

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 

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  Wha

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 ta

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 differentl

A new era is on the way for Apple as Tim Cook plans to step down from his CEO role in September, handing the reins to hardware chief John Ternus.   Ternus may be inheriting one of the most durable businesses in tech, but he’s also stepping into a very different ecosystem than the one Cook spent decades shaping. The App Store’s 30% cut is under pressure, the behind-the-scenes power Apple once held over developers is being challenged, and AI-native apps are changing what it means to build on Apple’s platform.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what this transition means for startups and a closer look at some of the week’s biggest deals — including SpaceX's $60B option on Cursor.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  Why Anthropic’s Mythos model is raising questions about both safety and marketing  The $5 billion Amazon-Anthropic deal that looks a lot like every other circular AI infrastructure play  What the 

Fusion energy has been "20 years away" for decades, but has the science finally caught up? Private investment in fusion companies surged from $10 billion to $15 billion in just months, and the money is coming from places you wouldn't expect.  On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan and guest host Tim De Chant sit down with Rachel Slaybaugh, general partner at DCVC, to break down why serious investors are finally treating fusion as a real asset class, and what the return thesis actually looks like when no one expects a power plant in their fund lifetime.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  Why the investment thesis for fusion looks less like traditional VC and more like biotech or SpaceX, and what "fusion euphoria" has to do with it  What the Q value milestone actually means, and how close leading startups are to hitting the number that could trigger a public market opening  How superconducting tape and AI-assisted plasma physics are quietly doing as much w

The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps to talk shows, a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic unveiled a model it says is too powerful to release publicly ...but apparently not too powerful to demo to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.  On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what's actually being built in AI infrastructure, who's winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week's headlines.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  Why chipmakers AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm just piled $60M into UK self-driving startup Wayve, and what Uber's $300M milestone bid says about who's winning the AV race  How data center startup Fluidstack is positioning itself for the frontier labs, including a reported $50B agre

When Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Aloe Blacc got COVID despite being vaccinated and boosted, he tried to fund research for a better solution. What he quickly found out? You can't just write a check in biotech. Regulators require a commercialization plan, and philanthropy doesn't move science through clinical trials or get you a license on university IP. Now, he's bootstrapping a cancer drug platform targeting pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills 90% of its patients, and intentionally waiting to raise from his network until peer-reviewed papers can make his case.  On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Aloe Blacc to talk about what happens when a creator decides to build instead of just invest, how Aloe is watching AI reshape both the biotech and music industries in real time, and his thoughts on who actually wins.  Listen to the full episode to hear:  How he’s navigating a world where credibility is earned in data, not fame  How a University of Ho

LLMs may have kicked off this AI boom, but the ceiling is closer than the hype suggests. As models run out of text data to train on, the companies and investors paying attention are already moving on. The next wave isn't better chatbots; it's machines that can understand the physical world. Luma AI, the Bay Area lab that raised over $1.4 billion from a16z, Nvidia, and Amazon, is betting on exactly that.  On episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we’re bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan sat down with Amit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Luma AI, at Web Summit Qatar. Together, the pair dug into where the next trillion-dollar AI opportunity actually gets built, and whether the companies chasing it even know what they're building yet.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  Why video, audio, and images are the real frontier for AI training data, not text  What an "intelligent world model" actually is, and why Jain thinks most companies building them are getting it completely wrong 

Snowflake is betting that the future of AI isn’t just analyzing data, it’s acting on it. That means a shift away from chatbots and toward autonomous agents that can actually get work done. And Snowflake is reorganizing fast to keep up, from shipping hundreds of AI features to restructuring teams along the way.On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy to unpack the company’s transformation and what it signals about where AI is headed next. Listen to the full episode to hear: Why Ramaswamy believes the chatbot era is ending and the agentic era is beginning. How Snowflake is evolving from a data warehouse into an AI and applications platform. What “shipping with your data” actually looks like in practice. Why the company is making big internal changes to support its AI push. Subscribe to Equity on ⁠YouTube⁠,⁠ Apple Podcasts⁠,⁠ Overcast⁠,⁠ Spotify⁠ and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on⁠ X⁠ and⁠ Threads⁠, at @EquityPod. 

Tech companies are racing to build data centers in space, pitching orbital compute as the next frontier for AI infrastructure, even as the technical and economic realities remain far from clear. Add in OpenAI’s massive $122 billion round and Bluesky’s latest AI backlash, and the message is clear: The future of AI is being shaped as much by ambition and hype as it is by real-world constraints.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane unpack these massive capital bets, user backlash, and off-world compute plans along with Whoop’s major valuation and the literal downfall of robot Olaf.   Listen to the full episode to hear about:  OpenAI’s $122 billion fundraise and what its near-trillion-dollar valuation says about expectations for AI.   Whoop’s $575 million raise and the shift toward “wearables 2.0” (and what happens to all that data).   Bluesky’s AI-powered feed builder and why it triggered a major user backlash.   The rise of

The VC middleman is getting cut out faster than anyone expected. Family offices and private wealth firms are going direct: writing checks, taking board seats, even incubating companies from scratch. And more founders are starting to notice. In February alone, family offices made 41 direct investments, including one Midwest-based firm that led a $230 million Series B into an AI chip startup.    On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Mitch Stein and Ari Schottenstein, founder and head of alternatives at ARENA Private Wealth, to find out what this shift means for founders, cap tables, and the future of AI investment.    Listen to the full episode to hear:  How Arena landed the lead on Positron's $230 million Series B, and why the CEO specifically wanted them on his cap table  How Arena does due diligence on technical companies  What "tourist capital" actually looks like, and the red flags founders should watch for as family offices flood into AI dea

When an 82-year-old Kentucky woman was offered $26 million from an AI company that wanted to build a data center on her land, she said no. Sure, that same company can try to rezone 2,000 acres nearby anyway, but as AI infrastructure stretches further into the real world, the real world is starting to push back.  That tension is everywhere this week, from OpenAI shutting down its Sora app to courts finally starting to hold social platforms accountable. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what it looks like when the AI hype cycle meets reality.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  Why rival prediction market CEOs of Kalshi and Polymarket are co-investing in a $35M VC fund  How drone startups like Zipline, Lucid Bots, and Brinc are finding real traction where other robotics plays have stalled  What Kleiner Perkins' $3.5B raise says about where the biggest VC firms think the next AI wave is going  Why two separ

Over the past few years, a new category of mobile apps has quietly exploded into a multi-billion dollar business. They're called “micro dramas” — short-form, mobile-first scripted shows designed to be watched vertically on your phone. Think soap opera meets TikTok, complete with secret billionaire romances, disapproving werewolf mothers-in-law, and cliffhangers engineered to keep users tapping. The leading app, ReelShort, made $1.2 billion in consumer spending last year alone.   On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan and TechCrunch senior reporter Amanda Silberling sit down with Henry Soong, founder of Watch Club, who thinks the micro drama industry is still "in its MySpace era." He has a vision for what the Facebook moment could look like.  Listen to the full episode to hear:  Why micro dramas took off in China while Quibi burned through $2 billion and failed in the U.S., and what that gap reveals about content, product, and business model.  How Watch Club is targeting a

Jensen Huang took the stage at Nvidia's GTC conference this week in his signature leather jacket to deliver a two-and-a-half-hour keynote, projecting $1 trillion in AI chip sales through 2027, declaring that every company needs an “OpenClaw strategy,” and closing with a rambling Olaf robot that had to get its mic cut. The message was hard to miss: Nvidia wants to be foundational to everything, from AI training to autonomous vehicles to Disney parks.  On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane break down what Nvidia's growing web of AI infrastructure partnerships actually means for startups, and more of the week's headlines.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  Travis Kalanick’s return building a "wheelbase for robots" with his new startup Atoms, and the crew has questions about Kalanick’s acquisitions along the way  Rivian’s partnership with Uber to build robotaxi versions of its R2 in a deal worth up to $1.25 billion, while pushing back

Artificial intelligence models are multiplying fast, and competition is stiff. With so many players crowding the space, which one will be the best — and who decides that? Arena, formerly LM Arena, has emerged as the de facto public leaderboard for frontier LLMs, influencing funding, launches, and PR cycles. In just seven months, the startup went from a UC Berkeley PhD research project to being valued at $1.7 billion.  On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan catches up with Arena co-founders Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang to determine how a team like theirs can build a neutral benchmark when the companies they’re ranking are also their backers.  Listen to the full episode to hear:  How Arena actually works, and why its founders say you can't game it the way you mighta static benchmark.  What "structural neutrality" actually means, and whether taking money from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic is a conflict of interest.  How Arena is moving beyond chat to b