While the AI fundraising machine keeps breaking its own records, some founders are building in the other direction. 

Mirror founder Brynn Putnam just raised money for Board, a startup focused on bringing people together through in-person games and social experiences. Cyberdeck creators are going viral crafting whimsical DIY computers that literally encourage users to touch grass. Unlike the AI-free browser crowd, this doesn't just feel like backlash, but also people genuinely gravitating toward things that feel a little more human. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the week's headlines, from the "together tech" wave to what Anthropic's confidential IPO filing means against the backdrop of Alphabet's $80 billion AI raise, and whether the money is all flowing back to the big guys anyway. 

Listen to the full episode to hear: 

Why ex-Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer raised $250 million for climate tech specifically, at a moment when almost nobody else is 

How rocket engine startup Impulse raised $500 million — and is loudly emphasizing that those funds will be spent on people, not AI 

A look inside Anthropic's S-1, and what the team is looking forward to once we can finally compare the AI labs' financials 

What two YouTube directors cracking the box office tells us about creator economy power  

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

Chapters: 

00:00 Intro 

01:45 YouTubers are taking over the box office 

02:46 Everyone's fleeing climate tech — except this $250M fund 

07:03 Impulse Space raises $500M and is hiring humans 

13:03 Anthropic quietly files for IPO as Alphabet drops $85B on AI 

21:52 The token bubble is starting to burst 

26:08 From Board games to DIY cyberdecks, founders are betting on IRL 

33:09 Outro 

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

Defense tech is red hot right now, with a proposed 40% increase to the federal defense budget, Anduril doubling its valuation to $61 billion, and a wave of startups chasing government contracts. But according to Ross Fubini, the venture investor who wrote Anduril's first check, most of them won't make it. The valley of death between a prototype contract and a real production deal is about to claim a lot of companies. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan asks Fubini — the founder and managing partner of XYZ Venture Capital, built on the Palantir alumni network and now approaching $2B AUM — what separates the survivors from the rest. 

Listen to the full episode to hear: 

Why Ukraine and Iran have become live testing grounds for US defense startups, and which companies are getting in the field 

How other countries are building their own defense tech ecosystems, and what that means for where startups build and sell 

The sustainment problem nobody wants to talk about, and why autonomous logistics is the real moat 

Where Fubini is writing checks next, from AI-driven US manufacturing to government software for health and human services 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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

The people deciding that AI can replace your job are also the ones least likely to understand what your job truly involves, according to Box founder Aaron Levie, who pointed to this as an example of "AI psychosis.” Indeed, ClickUp recently cut 22% of its workforcefor AI agents, tech layoffs in 2026 are already nearly matching all of 2025, and DuckDuckGo installs are climbing from users who want Google to stop forcing AI into search and just give them links. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what happens when the AI-pilled and the AI-skeptical are both right at the same time, plus three deals worth knowing about and Waymo's new robotaxi hitting the road. 

Listen to the full episode to hear: 

Kirsten's first look at Waymo's new Ojai robotaxi in Phoenix, and the crew's thoughts on the company's path to profitability 

Cloud data storage giant Snowflake’s $6 billion five-year agreement with AWS 

Why Stord, the "anti-Amazon" fulfillment startup, just raised $250 million at a $3 billion valuation 

What OpenRouter's $113 million raise says about the picks-and-shovels layer, and how long that interest lasts 

How the AI agent wave is actually reshaping hiring, not just headcount 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

Chapters: 

00:00 Intro 

01:18 Waymo's new Ojai robotaxi 

06:41 Stord raises $250M to take on Amazon fulfillment 

12:46 Snowflake signs $6B deal with AWS 

15:39 OpenRouter raises $113M Series B 

20:07 The AI divide & anti-AI backlash 

27:31 AI psychosis & how AI is reshaping headcount and hiring 

37:04 Outro 

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

Google I/O made it official: AI-generated answers are now front and center in search, and most brands have almost no visibility into how AI is describing them to their customers. For anyone who has spent years building a strategy around 10 blue links, the rules just changed in a pretty significant way. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Matt Thompson, VP of partnerships at Scrunch, a startup positioning itself at the center of the AI search shift, to talk about what Google’s changes mean and marketers and founders should actually do about it. 

Listen to the full episode to hear: 

Why AI referrals are converting at 400% higher than traditional organic search, and what that means for how to think about traffic. 

How ChatGPT still has the lion's share of AI search traffic, and why optimizing only for Google means missing most of the market. 

Why Google's own SEO best practices might be leading marketers in the wrong direction. 

What it actually means to make your website "agent ready" and why most enterprise sites aren't. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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

The SpaceX S-1 is finally here, and the story it tells goes way further than rockets. The filing runs to 36 pages of risk factors alone, and the numbers inside match the ambition: a $28 trillion total addressable market, a pay package tied to establishing a Mars colony, and a valuation target that would make it the largest IPO in American history. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what the filing actually says, what it leaves out, and whether any of this math connects to reality. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why NanoCo turned down a $20 million buyout to raise a $12 million seed instead 

Anthropic’s acquisition of SDK startup Stainless, and why taking a tool off the table matters as much as the $300 million price tag 

What happened when commencement speakers started talking up AI in front of graduating classes, and why the students weren't having it 

Google’s I/O announcements claiming search as you know it is over, and what the AI makeover could mean for the open web  

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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

Slapping "AI" on your startup’s pitch deck is basically table stakes right now. When a founder raised $20 million from Cathie Wood's ARK Invest for an eSports gamification loyalty startup without those two letters in the spotlight, it got us wondering how the conversation even started — especially when ARK had already been burned by a company operating in the same space. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Julie Bort sits down with Dylan Robbins, founder and CEO of Lucra, the white-label platform turning friendly competitions into loyalty programs for brands like golf courses, arcades, and pickleball clubs. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

How Dylan met his ARK connection over a game of darts at a New York City bar 

Why pitching a non-AI company in peak AI fundraising season meant addressing it head-on, even when it had nothing to do with his business 

How being honest with investors about what wasn't working yet actually helped him close the round 

Why Lucra pivoted from consumer to B2B in 45 days (and why that pivot is what convinced ARK they weren't looking at another Skillz). 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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

The Musk v. Altman trial came to a close this week, and the final arguments kept circling back to one question: can we trust the people in charge of AI? All of this is playing out as SpaceX charges toward what could be one of the largest IPOs in American history, with a whole generation of founders already spinning out of the Musk empire.

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane break down the trial's closing stretch and what the growing Elon Musk founder ecosystem actually looks like on the ground, and the other deals that caught our eye this week.

Listen to the full episode to hear about:

How Anduril landed a $5 billion Series H, more than doubling the valuation it landed just under a year ago 

Why investors just can’t say no to RJ Scaringe, who’s raked in over $1 billion for Rivian spinout Mind Robotics

How voice AI startup Vapi beat out over 40 other companies to secure a contract handling all of Ring's customer support

What an Anthropic report about an AI agent blackmailing its own developers says about where the industry actually is

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

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

AI may be changing how companies build, but it's also changing how they get attacked, often by their own tools. Amazon Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt has watched threat actors at every skill level get sharper, faster, and harder to contain. The risk he's most focused on, however, isn't coming from outside the firewall.

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan had with Schmidt at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. The two dug into what AI is already doing to the threat landscape and how Amazon is rethinking identity, containment, and human oversight to keep agents in check.

Listen to the full episode to hear about:

Why shadow AI inside your own organization may be a bigger liability than the hackers trying to get in

What agentic identity means in practice, and how Amazon traces every agent action back to a human

How startups with five people (and no CISO) can manage their AI security, and why containment is becoming the defining security challenge of the agentic era

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

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

Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie, and this week, we saw a string of companies making their moves. From Anthropic and OpenAI announcing new joint ventures targeting enterprise AI deployment to SAP dropping $1B on German AI startup Prior Labs, it's becoming clear that if you're a startup building enterprise tools, you're likely an acquisition target. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the week's enterprise AI deals, the xAI-Anthropic compute arrangement, and what it all means ahead of what could be a big IPO season. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why a TikToker is trying to crowdfund the purchase of Spirit Airlines, and whether anyone really loves Spirit enough to make it work 

Why Katie Haun's venture fund and Andreessen Horowitz are both raising billions to back a crypto comeback 

Aurora Innovation's milestone commercial trucking contract with a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, announced shortly after we caught up with Aurora’s CEO, Chris Urmson, at HumanX 

The Pentagon's latest AI spending spree, inking deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

Chapters: 

00:00 Intro 

00:31 Spirit Airlines & the crowdfunded "people's airline" 

03:25 xAI x Anthropic deal: is xAI becoming a NEO cloud? 

13:47 Haun Ventures & a16z's crypto comeback 

17:48 Aurora Innovation lands a commercial trucking contract 

19:27 A big week for enterprise AI: who's actually making money? 

26:45 The Pentagon's AI spending spree 

31:04 Outro 

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

Self-driving has been "almost here" for over a decade. But somewhere between DARPA challenges and a handful of driverless trucks hauling freight between Dallas and Houston, Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson’s story changed. The self-driving truck company started commercial driverless operations last April and is now scaling from a handful of trucks to hundreds this year. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan had with Urmson at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. The pair dug into the long road from lab to highway and how physical AI differs from the LLM boom everyone else is chasing. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why long-haul trucking may crack the autonomy business case before robotaxis ever do 

What "verifiable AI" means and why Urmson thinks end-to-end systems are a liability when lives are on the line 

The surprisingly common-sense solution to the driverless truck safety triangle problem 

What Aurora's roadmap looks like beyond trucking, and which companies in the autonomy space have Urmson genuinely excited 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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