Equity
Equity is TechCrunch's flagship podcast that explores the intersection of technology, startups, and venture capital. Hosted by reporters Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, and Theresa Loconsolo, the show delivers news and analysis on the business of startups every Wednesday and Friday. It is ranked highly on Goodpods in the Venture Capital, Finance, and Business News categories.
Episodes
The SpaceX IPO has finally arrived
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 sti
It’s hot IPO summer, and the MANGOS are ripe
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 publ
Andrew Yang on Noble Mobile, UBI, and why he's done waiting for policy to catch up
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 h
The 'together tech' wave might be the most intriguing startup bet of 2026
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-fr
Every defense startup wants to be the next Anduril. Here's what one of its earliest backers is looking for now.
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
Does your CEO have AI psychosis? Aaron Levie thinks most of them do.
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 Go
Your SEO strategy is optimized for a search engine that no longer exists.
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, V
Elon Musk can't hear you over the sound of his $1.75 trillion IPO
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,
How Lucra raised $20M as an eSports play when every VC only wants 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 TechC
Well, do you trust Sam Altman?
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 Ko
Amazon's Steve Schmidt on why your AI agents are your biggest security risk (Live at HumanX)
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 con
The 'people’s airline,' SpaceXAI, and the Enterprise AI Race
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
Aurora's Chris Urmson on why self-driving trucks are finally ready (Live at HumanX)
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
Did you know you can't steal a charity? Don't worry. Elon Musk will remind you.
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
Is AI video just a prequel? Runway's CEO thinks world models are next
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 technol
Apple's new CEO, and why Elon Musk wants to buy Cursor for $60B
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
Fusion doesn't have a normal startup timeline, and investors are fine with that
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
Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI's shopping spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap
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
The musician-turned-biotech-founder waiting to fundraise
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
Luma AI's Amit Jain on why most world model companies are getting it completely wrong
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
Snowflake’s transition from storing data to shipping with it
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 C
Space: the final frontier of AI infrastructure
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
Why private wealth is cutting out the VC middleman
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.
O
VCs are betting billions on AI's next wave, so why is OpenAI killing Sora?
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 court
ReelShort made $1.2 billion on werewolf romances. Watch Club wants to do it better.
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. Th
Nvidia has an OpenClaw strategy. Do you?
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, fro
The PhD students who became the judges of the AI industry
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 val
Wiz's first investor breaks down Google's $32B acquisition
According to Index Ventures Partner Shardul Shah, cybersecurity startup Wiz sits “at the center of three tailwinds: AI, cloud, and security spend.” Those tailwinds powered what just became the largest venture-backed acquisition in history — Google's $32 billion deal, finalized after a declined 2024 offer, antitrust review on both sides of the Atlantic, and an extra $9 billion to sweeten the pot.
How Poppi went from a Shark Tank pitch to a $1.95B exit
For years, venture capitalists have been skeptical of beverage startups, citing thin margins and brutal distribution as reasons most brands never break out. But a new wave of “functional soda” companies has been challenging that assumption, including Poppi, the prebiotic soda brand that grew from a kitchen experiment into a $1.95 billion acquisition by PepsiCo.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Eq
Anthropic vs. the Pentagon, the SaaSpocalypse, and why competition is good, actually
The Pentagon has officially designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the two failed to agree on how much control the military should have over its AI models, including its use in autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. As Anthropic’s $200 million contract fell apart, the DoD turned to OpenAI instead, which accepted and then watched ChatGPT uninstalls surge 295%. As the stakes keep
How PopSockets broke the VC-backed consumer hardware mold
Does a consumer hardware company need to get on the VC treadmill to succeed? Eleven years and 290 million products sold across 115 countries later, PopSockets has proven that the bootstrapped, low-dilution path more viable than the industry gives it credit for. The global consumer hardware brand was built on less than $500k, no institutional capital, and a philosophy professor's determination.
Who's really running AI? Inside the billion-dollar battle over regulation, with Alex Bores
The Pentagon is playing chicken with Anthropic over who gets to control how the military uses AI while communities across the country are blocking data center construction. As the AI debate has been flattened to “doomers versus boomers,” one state legislator is attempting to walk a middle road.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Alex Bores, New York Ass
Is crypto growing up? Tether risk, Stripe’s stablecoin play, and the GENIUS Act explained
Crypto is creeping back into the startup conversation, but at ETH Denver last week, the buzz was as much about Washington as it was about tokens. Policy shifts are rippling through the market as Tether and stablecoins face scrutiny, players like Stripe re-enter the chat, and startups either find traction or flame out. The hype cycle is over, or at least taking a break. So what comes next?
On
Build Mode: Compensation, culture, and cap tables with Yuri Sagalov, GeneralCatalyst
TechCrunch's founder-focused podcast, Build Mode, is back. This season we’re breaking down what it really takes to build a world-class founding team starting with your cap table, equity structures, and startup compensation strategy.
We kick off with Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst and former founder, YC partner, and seed investor at Wayfinder Ventures. Yuri has worked with hu
Why creators are ditching ad revenue for chocolate bars and fintech acquisitions
The creator economy is evolving fast, and ad revenue alone isn't cutting it anymore. YouTubers are launching product lines, acquiring startups, and building actual business empires. Even MrBeast's company bought fintech startup Step, and his chocolate business is outearning his media arm. This isn't just one creator's strategy. It's the new playbook.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity pod
Google Cloud's VP for startups on reading your "check engine light" before it's too late
Startup founders are being pushed to move faster than ever, using AI while facing tighter funding, rising infrastructure costs, and more pressure to show real traction early. Cloud credits, access to GPUs, and foundation models have made it easier to get started, but those early infrastructure choices can have unforeseen consequences once startups move beyond free credits and into real cloud bills
AI burnout, billion-dollar bets, and Silicon Valley's Epstein problem
AI companies have been hemorrhaging talent the past few weeks. Half of xAI’s founding team has left the company — some on their own, others through “restructuring” — while OpenAI is facing its own shakeups, from the disbanding of its mission alignment team to the firing of a policy exec who opposed its “adult mode” feature.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, A
Glean’s fight to own the AI layer inside every company
Enterprise AI is shifting fast from chatbots that answer questions to systems that actually do the work across an organization. But who will own the AI layer that powers all of it?
Glean, which started as an enterprise search product, has evolved into what it calls an “AI work assistant,” aiming to sit underneath other AI experiences, connecting to internal systems, managing permissions, and de
This Sequoia-backed lab thinks the brain is 'the floor, not the ceiling' for AI
AI lab Flapping Airplanes just landed $180 million in seed funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Index to do something most labs have quietly given up on: making models learn like humans instead of vacuuming up the internet. The founding team, made up of brothers Ben and Asher Spector and co-founder Aidan Smith, is betting that radically more data-efficient training could open th
How far will Elon Musk take the ‘everything’ business as SpaceX and xAI merge?
Elon Musk has merged SpaceX and xAI, creating what might be the blueprint for a new Silicon Valley power structure. With his $800 billion net worth already rivaling historic conglomerate GE's peak market cap, and Musk being vocal about his view that "tech victory is decided by velocity of innovation," the question isn't whether a personal conglomerate can be built, but rather how far Musk himself
What a16z is actually funding (and what it's ignoring) when it comes to AI infra
Andreessen Horowitz just raised a whopping new $15 billion in funding. And a $1.7 billion chunk of that is going to its infrastructure team, the one responsible for some of its biggest, most prominent AI investments including Black Forrest Labs, Cursor, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Ideogram, Fal and dozens of others.
A16z general partner with the infra team Jennifer Li (who oversees such investments as
Uber puts another chip on the self-driving roulette table
Self-driving truck startup Waabi's billion-dollar fundraise isn't just about trucks.
The deal, for $750 million up front plus another $250 million from Uber tied to deployment milestones, marks a major expansion into robotaxis for the company founded by former Uber AI chief Raquel Urtasun. It also feels like another chip from Uber on the autonomous vehicle roulette table. With more than 20 A
The SpaceX IPO could finally happen (and it's a big deal)
SpaceX is reportedly lining up four major Wall Street banks for a 2026 IPO that could provide the reset the market needs.
The company just completed a tender offer at an $800 billion valuation, and secondary market demand is through the roof. If SpaceX goes public anywhere near its rumored $1.5 trillion valuation, it could trigger an IPO cascade for other late-stage unicorns like OpenAI, Stripe,
AI CEOs transformed Davos into a tech conference
The World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos felt different this year, and not just because Meta and Salesforce took over storefronts on the main promenade. AI dominated the conversation in a way that overshadowed traditional topics like climate change and global poverty, and the CEOs weren't holding back. There was public criticism of trade policy, warnings about AI bubbles popping, and a l
Build Mode: Capital is a commodity (but your investor relationships aren’t)
Today on Equity, we're teaming up with our newest podcast, Build Mode.
In this interview, Build Mode host Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Ross Fubini of XYZ Ventures and Leslie Feinzaig of Graham & Walker Ventures to pull back the curtain on how VCs build their own go-to-market strategies.
They dig into what it’s really like raising a first fund, why founder-market fit applies to investors t
OpenAI and Anthropic are making their play for healthcare, and we're not surprised
AI companies are clustering around healthcare and fast.
In just the past week, OpenAI bought health startup Torch, Anthropic launched Claude for Health, and Sam Altman-backed MergeLabs closed a $250 million seed round at an $850 million valuation. The money and products are pouring into health and voice AI, but so are concerns about hallucination risks, inaccurate medical information, and massiv
The multibillion-dollar AI security problem enterprises can't ignore
AI agents are supposed to make work easier. Instead, they're creating a whole new category of security nightmares.
As companies deploy AI-powered chatbots, agents, and copilots across their operations, they're facing a new risk: how do you let employees and AI agents use powerful AI tools without accidentally leaking sensitive data, violating compliance rules, or opening the door to prompt-ba
CES 2026 was all about “physical AI” and robots, robots, robots
After years of chatbots and image generators, AI is finally leaving the screen. At CES 2026, that shift became impossible to ignore.
The annual tech showcase in Las Vegas was dominated by "physical AI" and robotics, from Boston Dynamic's newly redesigned Atlas humanoid robot to AI-powered ice makers (yes, really). The companies in attendance clearly want consumers to know: AI isn't just capab
Investing in the consumer AI products OpenAI ‘won’t want to kill’
Vanessa Larco, partner at Premise and former partner at NEA, thinks 2026 will finally be the year of consumer AI.
Larco, who's been investing in consumer and prosumer for years, thinks we're about to see a shift in how consumers spend time online, with AI powering “concierge-like” services. The question is, will legacy consumer products like WebMD and TripAdvisor continue to exist as standalone
How AI is reshaping work and who gets to do it, according to Mercor's CEO
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Fizz CEO on why anonymous social is winning with Gen Z
Fizz is betting that Gen Z is tired of performing their lives on Instagram and TikTok.
What started as a pandemic-era group chat frustration has turned into the dominant social platform on college campuses across the US, focused on the 99% of life that doesn't make it into a highlight reel. Capturing the attention of a demographic typically glued to Instagram and TikTok, the app's hybrid anonym
Equity's 2026 Predictions: AI Agents, Blockbuster IPOs, and the Future of VC
TechCrunch's Equity crew is bringing 2025 to a close and getting ahead on the year to come with our annual predictions episode! Hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan were joined by Build Mode host Isabelle Johansson to dissect the year's biggest tech developments, from mega AI funding rounds that defied expectations to the rise of "physical AI," and make their calls for 2026.
The
Why the operating room is ripe for AI, according to Akara
There's plenty of hype around AI and robots in healthcare, but the problem that's actually costing hospitals money right now is operating room coordination. Two to four hours of OR time is lost every single day, not because of the surgeries themselves, but because of everything in between from manual scheduling and coordination chaos to guesswork about room turnover.
Today on TechCrunch’s E
Hardware's brutal week: iRobot, Luminar, and Rad Power go bankrupt
The hardware world had a brutal week, with iRobot, Luminar, and Rad Power Bikes all filing for bankruptcy.
Each company faces its own mix of tariff pressures, supply chain issues, and shifting markets, but together they tell a larger story about the challenges of building physical products in an era of global trade tensions and cheap overseas competition. From the Roomba maker that almost got ac
Eclipse's Jiten Behl thinks the next unicorns won't be built in software
Jiten Behl, partner at Eclipse Ventures and former chief growth officer at Rivian, thinks we're entering an era of major re-industrialization in the US — one where factories run on AI-powered robots, not cheap overseas labor.
Behl, who helped scale Rivian from a conference room idea in 2015 to a publicly traded EV maker, is now investing in the next wave of industrial and mobility startups, inc
Netflix growing up, data center jet engines, and the circular AI economy
A baby was born in a Waymo this week, and it wasn't even the first one.
What started as a novelty story quickly became a reminder of how autonomous vehicles have quietly become part of everyday life, complete with all the messiness that entails. The real coming-of-age story this week, however, wasn't happening in San Francisco's robotaxis. It was playing out in Hollywood, where Netflix made an $
ElevenLabs just hit $6.6B, but its CEO says the real money isn't in voice anymore
ElevenLabs has made a name for itself building realistic AI voices.
What started as two Polish engineers annoyed by terrible movie dubbing has grown into a profitable company now valued at $6.6 billion, doubling its valuation from just nine months ago. The company recently announced a $100 million tender offer led by Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from a16z and others, as its tech po
Nothing wants your money, AWS wants your trust, and Spotify wants your data
AWS announced a wave of new AI agent tools at re:Invent 2025, but can Amazon actually catch up to the AI leaders? While the cloud giant is betting big on enterprise AI with its third-gen chip and database discounts that got developers cheering, it's still fighting to prove it can compete beyond infrastructure.
This week on Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the ROI on
This VC charges $0 for PR, and has 12 unicorns to show for it
Tech is racing ahead while society struggles to keep up. Masha Bucher, founder and GP of Day One Ventures, built her firm around closing that gap by combining venture capital with hands-on PR to help portfolio companies not just raise money, but actually break through the noise.
Day One's been an early backer of companies like World, Superhuman, and Remote.com, with 12 of its portfolio companie
Supabase CEO on the "painful" decisions that built a $5B company
Vibe coding has taken the tech industry by storm, and it's not just the Lovables and Replits of the world that are winning. The startups building the infrastructure behind them are cashing in too.
Supabase, the open-source database platform that's become the backend of choice for the vibe-coding world, raised $100 million at a $5 billion valuation just months after closing $200 million at $2 bil
The Nordic startup scene has quietly become one of tech’s fastest-growing hubs
Ten years ago, raising €1 million in Copenhagen was enough to make waves in the region’s tech scene. Today, the Nordics are turning out billion-dollar companies like Lovable — which hit $200M in revenue just 12 months after launching.
Dennis Green-Lieber, founder of AI-powered customer intelligence platform Propane, has had a front-row seat to that shift over the last 15 years. His take? The
AI mania is making Nvidia a lot of money
AI companies are spending so much on infrastructure that Nvidia's data center business now brings in nearly $50 billion. But is this sustainable growth or just the latest tech mania? And should we even be calling it a "bubble" when the belief in AI's future is what's holding the whole ecosystem together?
This week on Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into Nvidia's massive
January Ventures bets AI's biggest winners won't come from Silicon Valley
While everyone's chasing the next AI infrastructure play in San Francisco, some of the most defensible AI companies are being built by founders with deep expertise in legacy industries — and they're not getting funded. January Ventures aims to fill that gap, writing pre-seed checks for underrepresented founders transforming healthcare, manufacturing, and supply chain with AI.
At TechCrunch Dis
Introducing TechCrunch's new podcast: Build Mode
TechCrunch has new podcast! Build Mode brings you candid startup wisdom from the people who build, break, and build again. Build Mode is hosted by our very own Startup Battlefield Editor, Isabelle Johannessen who is joined by founders, investors, and operators to dig into the uncomfortable truths about startup life. Think cap table drama, co-founder breakups, and pivot panic.We're sharing their fi
Are data centers the new oil fields?
A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that $580 billion will be spent globally on AI data centers in 2025 alone. This is $40 billion more than will be spent on new oil supplies — leading us to conclude that data centers are the new oil fields. But is this a net positive for the environment or just a different kind of resource drain?
On TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten
What startups are building next, according to OpenAI’s Head of Startups
Many see OpenAI as the ChatGPT company while rivals like Anthropic and Cohere eye the enterprise space. Marc Manara, OpenAI's head of startups, says the reality looks different: AI-native companies are hitting $200 million in ARR, and product cycles have shrunk from two-week sprints to single days.
Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Russell Brandom sat down with Manara at TechCrunch Disrupt 2
SoftBank is back, and the AI hype cycle is eating itself
SoftBank and OpenAI announced a new 50-50 joint venture this week to sell enterprise AI tools in Japan under the brand "Crystal Intelligence." On paper, it's a straightforward international expansion deal. But SoftBank’s role as a major investor in OpenAI is raising questions about whether AI's biggest deals are creating real economic value or just moving money in circles.
On TechCrunch's Equity
From Air Force officer to space defense CEO: Why Even Rogers left to build weapons for orbit
Even Rogers spent a decade as an Air Force weapons officer watching China and Russia build space weapons while the U.S. had "nothing in our arsenal." So he left the military to solve the problem himself.
Now, as co-founder and CEO of True Anomaly, he's building the first exclusively defense-focused space superiority company, developing autonomous spacecraft, sensors, and software designed specif
Equity Live: From $300M seed rounds to data center builds, AI is feeling bubbly
The Equity crew was live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025! Hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, and Anthony Ha took over the Builders Stage on Monday morning to kick off the event with the question everyone's asking: are we in an AI bubble?
Between valuations that have tripled in months, $300M seed rounds, and $100B commitments flying around, the money is moving fast — maybe too fast. The Equity team brea
Startups should rethink how they pursue sales and traction, according to VC Tim Chen
After a small startup exit and being turned down by every VC firm he applied to, Tim Chen began angel investing and eventually stumbled into raising his own fund.
Now, as the solo investor behind Essence VC, he just closed his fourth fund at $41 million "without even trying." Chen's secret weapon? Being technical enough to debate PhD founders on implementation details while understanding the ma
OpenAI wants to power your browser, and that could be a security nightmare
The browser wars are heating up again, this time with AI in the driver’s seat.
OpenAI just launched Atlas, a ChatGPT-powered browser that lets users surf the web using natural language and even includes an “agent mode” that can complete tasks autonomously. It’s one of the biggest browser launches in recent memory, but it's debuting with an unsolved security flaw that could expose passwords, emai
Sam Altman’s eye-scanning startup wants to prove humanity in the age of AI bots
Ever wonder if you’re talking to a real person online or just another bot? As bots increasingly outnumber humans online, leading to an explosion of deepfakes and AI-driven fraud, one company has a solution straight out of sci-fi: scanning your iris to verify your identity.
Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan spoke with Adrian Ludwig, Chief Security Officer and Chief Architect at
From SB 243 to ChatGPT: Why it's ‘not cool' to be cautious about AI
Silicon Valley’s rule? It’s not cool to be cautious. As OpenAI removes guardrails and VCs criticize companies like Anthropic for supporting AI safety regulations, it’s becoming clearer who the industry thinks should shape AI development.
On this episode of Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Max Zeff discuss how the line between innovation and responsibility is getting blurrier, plus what h
Disruption via doping: Enhanced Games founder on the controversial 'future of sports'
Can performance-enhancing drugs push the limits of human potential? The creators of the Enhanced Games say yes — and they’re building a new sporting event to prove it.
Backed by Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital, the Enhanced Games aims to disrupt the Olympics with a competition that allows athletes to dope. Launching in Las Vegas in May 2026, the games promise $1 million bounties
AI goes enterprise, AltStore raises $6M, and Tesla's FSD investigation
AI companies are making their much-anticipated enterprise plays, but the results are wildly inconsistent. Just this week, Deloitte announced it's rolling out Anthropic's Claude to all 500,000 employees. On the very same day, the Australian government forced Deloitte to refund a contract because their AI-generated report was riddled with fake citations. It's a perfect snapshot of where we are: comp
Why the new H-1B policy helps outsourcers, not startups
The Trump administration recently announced a massive change to the H-1B visa program, raising the application fee from $2,000-$5,000 to $100,000 per visa. The change has sent shockwaves through the startup world, with founders warning it could price them out of hiring international talent and undermine U.S. innovation.
Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis was joined by Jere
AI slop, government stops, and startup uncertainty
The U.S. government shutdown that began this week is the first in seven years. While it might not feel immediately disruptive, for startups waiting on permits, visas, or regulatory approvals, even a few weeks can become an existential problem.
On this episode of Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Max Zeff talk through how uncertainty is affecting startups in ways people might not realize,
California just drew the blueprint for AI safety regulation with SB 53
California just made history as the first state to require AI safety transparency from the biggest labs in the industry. Governor Newsom signed SB 53 into law this week, mandating that AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic disclose, and stick to, their safety protocols. The decision is already sparking debate about whether other states will follow suit.
Adam Billen, vice president of public policy
From $100B OpenAI deals to $100K visa fees
From $100 billion OpenAI commitments to $100,000 visa fees, this week showed just how much the tech landscape is shifting. On the latest episode of Equity, Anthony Ha and Max Zeff unpack the AI infrastructure gold rush and tech's talent shuffle. Listen to the full episode to hear about:
TikTok’s potential new home, and why Oracle is positioned to win big from the deal
Oura Health's
How Chipiron's rethinking the future of MRI
Medical device funding is hitting levels we haven't seen since 2021, with investors pouring billions into diagnostics and imaging companies. But while innovation has raced ahead, a fundamental problem still hasn't changed: critical medical hardware like MRI machines cost millions of dollars and are gatekept by large hospitals. So how do you take one of the most expensive, hospital-bound technologi
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