Equity

This week, two major AI companies scored early wins in court, with federal judges siding with Meta and Anthropic in separate lawsuits over how their models were trained on copyrighted material. The decisions represent the first real legal validation of AI companies’ argument that training models on books, images, and other creative works can be considered “fair use” — even if those materials weren’t obtained with permission. It’s a big deal for companies building generative AI, and a potential turning point for the many lawsuits still in motion.  Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Max Zeff and Anthony Ha were joined by Sean O’Kane (who graciously stepped in while Kirsten headed off to the Nevada desert to see the next big act of Redwood Materials, the battery recycling and materials startup founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel) to dive deeper into the rulings. While neither case sets a precedent yet, Anthony noted that appeals are likely, and broader challenges could ultimately shape how AI com

Cow burps are a climate problem, and one startup wants to reprogram them. Hoofprint Biome is using enzymes to rewire the cow’s microbiome from the inside out, cutting methane production and improving feed efficiency along the way. The company just raised a $15 million Series A round from investors including Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, and they’re just getting started. Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Tim De Chant sat down with Kathryn Polkoff, co-founder and CEO of Hoofprint Biome, to talk through it all. Listen to the full episode to hear about: How enzymes and AI are helping fight climate change (seriously). What it takes to raise money for biotech in a sea of SaaS. Why thinking like a farmer, rather than a climate scientist, was Polkoff’s superpower. As she put it, “That’d be like if you were engineering a car but had never changed the engine — that’s where all the energy comes from.” The future of methane reduction and feed efficiency at scale. Equity will be back Frid

OpenAI recently announced a $200 million deal with the U.S. Department of Defense, which has us wondering: Could this further strain the company’s relationship with its biggest backer, Microsoft? After all, there have been numerous reports about growing tensions between the two companies, particularly as they become more competitive over enterprise deals. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Anthony Ha and Max Zeff discuss how the OpenAI/DoD deal reflects Silicon Valley’s increasingly cozy relationship with the military and why industry leaders are calling for an AI “arms race.” Listen to the full episode to hear more highlights from the week, including: Whether it’s a good thing that Vice President JD Vance joined Bluesky (and was briefly suspended) What it means that Wix acquired a six-month-old “vibe coding” startup for $80 million (and why Anthony hates the phrase “vibe coding”) A panel in which investor Ali Partovi and Cognition President Russell Kaplan discuss what technical

AI investments hit $110 billion in 2024, and the funding landscape in 2025 is more competitive than ever. For early-stage startups, that means more money in the market but also more pressure to stand out. At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, Rebecca Bellan sat down with three experienced investors: Jill Chase, Partner at CapitalG; Kanu Gulati, Partner at Khosla Ventures; and Sara Ittelson, Partner at Accel. They broke down what they are really looking for when evaluating AI startups from seed through Series C. Their message to founders? Forget the perfect pitch. Focus on building trust, surviving the hype cycle, and being ready for copycats the moment you find product-market fit. Listen to the full episode of Equity to hear about: Why VCs say founders are over-indexing on pitch decks instead of relationships What it takes to go up against big incumbents without getting crushed Why consumer focus (and speed) still win, even in B2B AI How agents and automation are already reshaping the startup p

Meta just made a $14.3 billion bet on data-labeling company Scale AI, but it’s not a traditional takeover: Meta’s taking a 49% stake in the company and adding Scale’s co-founder Alexandr Wang to its team. Today on Equity, we break down what this means for Meta’s AI ambitions and revisit Wang’s early AI predictions. Listen to the full episode to hear more highlights from the week, including: How Chime’s IPO priced above expectations at $27 per share and jumped in early trading, and Anthony’s not-so-hot takes on what this signals for the tech IPO market Why Y Combinator’s Demo Day was packed with “agentic” AI startups building autonomous software, and how a recent chat with Fiverr’s CEO sheds light on AI-driven task automation in the gig economy How Jony Ive’s LoveFrom spent 18 months quietly collaborating with Rivian on their first electric bike, a spinout product confirmed to have a bike-like form factor Equity will be back next week, so stay tuned! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podc

Generative AI is reshaping the way people work, from full-time employees to freelancers. As coding copilots, design assistants, and AI-powered writing tools become more capable and accessible, creative and technical roles are starting to shift – if not become eliminated entirely. The pressure to adapt is growing across the board.  Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, isn’t sugarcoating it. In a recent open letter to staff, he warned that AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, and the only way to stay relevant is to embrace AI tools and automation. Get better, get faster, or get left behind.  Kaufman joined Rebecca Bellan on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast to help unpack what all of this means for the future of work – be it freelance or employed – and what you can do to survive.  Listen to the full episode to hear about: How Fiverr plans to stay relevant as a human-powered marketplace in an AI-driven world Why Kaufman believes AI will raise the bar for everyone, but top talent can still stand out and earn more

Instead of our usual Friday news rundown, we’re bringing you a conversation from this week’s TC Sessions: AI event out in San Francisco. Our friend and co-host Max Zeff sat down with Jared Kaplan, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at Anthropic. If you’ve been following Anthropic, you’ll know it’s been a busy year for the AI startup. Back in March, the company announced it raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion valuation in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Since then, it’s launched a blog for its Claude models and, according to Bloomberg reporting, partnered with Apple to power a new “vibe-coding” software platform. Listen to the full conversation to hear more about: ⁠Who has direct access to Claude’s AI models⁠, Windsurf’s response, and how it all ties into Anthropic’s broader goals around openness, safety, and sustainability. The company’s pivot away from chatbots and toward agentic AI systems that can perform real tasks. How internal tools like Claude Code are shaping the fu

Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Crowdstrike co-founder and former CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch, to talk about the evolving cybersecurity landscape, the role of startups, and why he says we’re living in a World on the Brink. Listen to the full episode to hear about: What early-stage secure-by-design startup founders are missing when it comes to maintaining security while building quickly and crisis management.  How AI export controls and global rivalries are reshaping innovation. What investors are really looking for when backing cybersecurity startups today. Equity will be back Friday with a behind-the-scenes look at TC Sessions: AI, so don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.  Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out

Elon Musk has officially announced he’s stepping down as a U.S. special government employee and the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE. The move follows Musk’s cooling relationship with the Trump administration and slumping Tesla sales tied to his political advocacy. Today on Equity, Kirsten, Max and Anthony unpack who else is departing DOGE, and why Silicon Valley’s relationship with politics is entering, as Kirsten put it, the “find out” stage. Listen to the full episode for more of the week’s tech headlines including: GameStop bought $500 million of bitcoin, and the move is giving us 2021 déjà vu Neuralink’s $600 million raise, valuing Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface startup at $9 billion The New York Times and Amazon’s landmark AI licensing deal and what it signals for how editorial content powers generative AI Nvidia’s tale of two earnings, and why the forecast is not as bleak as CEO Jensen Huang makes it seem Equity will be ba

Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan caught up with  Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, to break down what this means for startups, innovation, and democracy. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril leveraged insider networks to win major defense deals. Changing ethics safeguards, and why that matters for founders entering government spaces. What this all means for fair competition and startups trying to break in. Equity will be back Friday with our weekly news round-up. Don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.  Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa

OpenAI just made its biggest acquisition yet, scooping up Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s secretive device startup, io, in a $6.5 billion all-equity deal. Ive, the legendary designer behind the iPhone and other iconic Apple products, will now lead creative and design work at OpenAI through his firm LoveFrom. The goal? To take AI “beyond the screen” and build a new generation of AI-powered consumer devices. Beyond the tech, there’s a clear narrative play here. OpenAI is framing Altman as the Jobs-esque visionary and Ive as the design genius who makes it all real. Social media had a field day with the staged buddy shots of the duo, but the messaging is hard to miss: Take the iPhone launch, and make it AI. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, and Anthony Ha unpack the deal, dive into AI wearables, and discuss more of this week’s tech headlines. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Max’s inside scoop from Google I/O: the return of Google Glass and developers’ reactions to

Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Ali Kashani, co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics, to unpack how Serve is navigating public markets, scaling real-world robotics, and building what it hopes is the future of last-mile delivery. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How Serve went from a lidar-focused startup to a publicly traded company via reverse merger in 2023 What it takes to scale a delivery fleet across cities like L.A., Miami, and Dallas Why Kashani says Serve’s sidewalk bots collect four times more visual data per day than GPT-4’s vision model How ground robots and drones might work together to finally crack last-mile logistics Equity will be back Friday with our weekly news round-up, and special Google I/O coverage from Max. Don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.  Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on

Databricks just snatched up another AI company. This week, data analytics giant announced a $1 billion acquisition of Neon, a startup building an open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres. It’s the latest in a spree of high-profile buys, joining MosaicML and Tabular, as Databricks positions itself as the place to build, deploy, and scale AI-native applications.  Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, and Anthony Ha unpack the Databricks–Neon deal, where Neon’s serverless Postgres tech fits into the larger vision, and whether $1 billion still counts as “a lot of money” these days (spoiler: Kirsten and Anthony are on the fence). Listen to the full episode to hear about: Chime’s long-awaited IPO plans and what the neobank’s S-1 did (and didn’t) reveal. AWS entering a ‘strategic partnership’ that could shake up cloud infrastructure, especially as the Middle East ramps up its AI ambitions The return of the web series. Yes, really. Short-form scripted conten

Despite courtroom chaos, Rippling is still going full steam ahead. The HR tech startup at the center of an increasingly dramatic legal battle with rival Deel just raised a fresh $450 million in funding at a $16.8 billion valuation, and launched a new “Startup Stack” to woo early-stage companies—winning over Y Combinator as both an investor and a client. The funding lands amid the company’s high-profile legal fight with Deel, which Rippling accuses of movie-worthy corporate espionage, complete with secret crypto payments and decoy Slack channels. Deel has denied the claims and fired back with its own lawsuit, calling Rippling’s accusations a “distraction.” Today on Equity, Mary Ann Azevedo and Charles Rollet are digging into the HR tech showdown from legal drama to IPO implications and global intrigue. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: The alleged spy, Rippling’s evidence, and Deel’s denials YC’s involvement in Rippling’s latest project, and why the move is raising eyebrows The

At Stripe’s Sessions conference this week, Mark Zuckerberg pitched what he calls the “ultimate business machine”: a fully automated, end-to-end AI ad engine promising to replace agencies, creatives, and media buyers. You just need to connect your bank account first.  Zuckerberg claims this could be one of the most valuable AI systems ever built, generating thousands of image ads and testing them in real time, but it raises a bigger question: is this the future of advertising, or just another wave of AI slop flooding your feed? Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff and Anthony Ha are unpacking why Zuckerberg’s vision could be a marketer’s dream or creative agency’s worst nightmare, and what else caught our eye in tech this week. Listen to the full episode to hear about: How Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro managed to beat Pokémon Blue. Max was unimpressed, but the Equity crew thinks gamifying AI benchmarks might be the way to go. The countertop robot that handles some part

Today, we're bringing you an episode of our sister podcast, StrictlyVC Download. StrictlyVC's Alex Gove caught up with Eric Slesinger from 201 Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on seed-stage defense tech startups in Europe. They discuss Eric's journey from CIA to investor and how he recognized the untapped potential in European defense tech while others were dismissive, and how he's working to overcome the cultural taboo that once made defense investments "bad manners" in European VC circles. Equity will be back on Friday with our weekly news roundup, so stay tuned! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.  Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. W

What if cheating was just…the future of work? That’s the pitch behind Cluely, the viral AI startup that claims its stealthy browser overlay is “undetectable” and can help users bluff their way through everything from job interviews to exams. The company has raised $5.3 million and sparked a wave of backlash from startups building tools to catch cheaters. Cluely’s response? They’ll just build smart glasses or brain chips.  Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff and Anthony Ha are getting into the week’s headlines, including whether Cluely’s viral strategy is genius, gross, or both, and what it says about the future of work in the AI age. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Sam Altman’s latest World event in San Francisco where eyeball scans met privacy concerns Why Shein’s IPO is under threat from new tariffs, and how companies like Amazon are bracing for 100%+ duty increases on Chinese goods Waymo and Toyota’s agreement to explore autonomous tech integr

Retail investors are increasingly shaping the secondary market. In Q4 2024, platforms like EquityZen reported that 86% of total transaction volume came from retail participants—an eye-catching shift as tools like Forge and EquityZen promise broader access to private shares. But does more access mean more opportunity, or more risk? Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Jared Carmel of Manhattan Venture Partners to dig into what he calls a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” in secondaries, and why he sees this market as a “pressure relief valve” that could keep startups private well past their startup years. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why a sluggish IPO market is pushing more action into secondaries How this creates a flywheel for venture capital And why Jared thinks robust secondary markets will delay (or eliminate) the need for IPOs altogether Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.  Subscr

Today on Equity, we're digging into the week’s headlines, from browsers and search to AI and social, and why Google and Meta's antitrust cases have us wondering if they’re really breaking up monopolies or just passing the baton to the next dominant player.  Listen to the full episode to hear about: Tesla’s massive 71% profit drop and how Elon Musk is doubling down on Tesla and AI How Mati Carbon took home the grand prize from this year’s Xprize Carbon Removal competition Vibe coding, Cursor, and which AI-powered coding tool OpenAI has its sights on acquiring next The $91.5 billion raised by U.S. startups in Q1—and why more than half of it went to just 10 companies Equity will be back next week, so stay tuned! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.  Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who pref

Trump’s tariffs have upended global trade and created an environment of uncertainty. But this situation wasn’t created in a vacuum. The rules of business have been shifting for years as technology moves quicker than regulation, geopolitics descend into turmoil, and the law erodes and becomes weaponized.  Businesses might be asking themselves, how are they meant to keep their heads above water? And what can they do to fight back?   Hence AI co-founder Sean West has some answers. With a team spread across the U.K., Rwanda, the U.S., and the Netherlands, the London-based startup has raised $5.2 million to date with a mission to democratize access to high-level business intelligence—something traditionally reserved for the biggest companies with the biggest budgets. Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan sat down with West, who recently published the book Unruly: Fighting Back When Politics, AI, and Law Upend the Rules of Business, to dig into how companies should respond to rising geopolitical risk, the macro cost o