Equity
Business & Finance
About
The intersection of technology, startups, and venture capital touches everything now. That’s why Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast, digs into the business of startups for entrepreneurs and enthusiasts alike. Every Wednesday and Friday, TechCrunch reporters keep you up-to-date on the world of business, technology, and venture capital. Equity is ranked the No.2 podcast in the Top 100 Venture Capital All time leaderboard on Goodpods—As well as No.17 for the Top 100 Finance All time chart and No.32 for the Top 100 Business News All time chart.
Episodes
- 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 in…
- 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 recent…
- 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…
- 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 tie…
- 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…
- 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 I…
- 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 c…
- 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 st…
- 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-…
- 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 co…
- 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 mill…
- 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…
- 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 expec…
- 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 ju…
- 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 co…
- 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; i…
- 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, fro…
- 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 a…
- 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…
- 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 stretc…
- 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. Thi…
- 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 “ OpenCl…
- 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 leaderb…
- 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…
- 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 assumptio…
- 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…
- 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 industr…
- 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,”…
- 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, player…
- 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 kic…
- 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…
- 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 i…
- 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 missi…
- 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…
- 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 intern…
- 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 hi…
- 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 Forre…
- 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 comp…
- 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 ro…
- 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…
- 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 cur…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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 n…
- 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 tim…
- How AI is reshaping work and who gets to do it, according to Mercor's CEO
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- 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%…
- 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 diss…
- 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 surgerie…
- 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 sto…