Equity

Tristan Walker and Brynn Putnam both built and sold major consumer companies. Now, they’re building products designed to bring people together.

Today on Equity, we’re bringing you a conversation TechCrunch AI editor Russell Brandom had on stage at the latest StrictlyVC event in New York. Russell sat down with Walker, who sold Bevel maker Walker & Company to Procter & Gamble and is now building leathercraft trade school Heirloom, and Putnam, who sold fitness startup Mirror to Lululemon and is now CEO of Board, a touchscreen console that combines board games and video games.

The two repeat founders talk about what they learned from their first companies, why they’re focused on physical skills and shared experiences now, and how AI could make hands-on, human connection more valuable rather than less. Walker explains why he sees growing demand for mastery and trade skills, while Putnam talks about using technology to bring people together instead of pulling them into individual screens.

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This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.” Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as “super intelligence,” and meanwhile, Meta and OpenAI are putting friendlier faces on their AI products, even as the biggest money in AI still appears to be coming from the enterprise. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into this week’s AI moves, the ugly economics of consumer AI, plus the shifting IPO market and a handful of startup deals. 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

Speaking of Startup Battlefield, join us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where Equity will kick things off with a live show on the Builders Stage at 9 a.m. Get 25% off your tickets with code Equity25. 

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Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health raised $700 million to build a business around scanning your body, but it’s not the only company centering its roadmap around a new kind of preventative healthcare. Midjourney is building its own body scanner, while Function Health has also raised significant capital to build out its preventative-health platform. Why are investors betting so big on this category? 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis talks with Farooq Abbasi, founder and general partner of Preface Ventures and an investor in Neko Health, about how Neko compares with other consumer-health startups. They discuss what has to happen for body scanning to become part of the broader healthcare system. 

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

Chapters:

00:00 — Can Tech Reinvent Preventative Healthcare?
01:44 — Why Spotify’s Founder Built Neko Health
06:22 — Why Healthcare Is So Hard to Fix
08:23 — Inside a $500 Neko Health Scan
12:35 — Can Preventative Healthcare Scale?
14:20 — The Risks of VC-Backed Healthcare
17:28 — How AI Is Changing Medicine
22:55 — Is AI in Healthcare Worth the Risk?

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When AI leaders at OpenAI and Anthropic started talking about “pacing the frontier,” maybe someone should have asked: what pace? It’s turned into model drop week for both companies as Anthropic rolled out Opus 5.5, followed by OpenAI’s GPT-6 model updates just 90 minutes later. But the company that stole the spotlight this week was Meta, whose personal AI agent Muse is reportedly outpacing ChatGPT’s early numbers and is headed for smart glasses and a tiny Tamagotchi-style device next. 

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into Meta’s consumer AI strategy and what it means for the startups trying to build on top of this technology, from where the money is flowing to which AI products might actually become part of people's daily lives. They also get into a16z's new school for aspiring founders and two very different AI and hardware deals. 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

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As concern over AI safety and rogue agents continue to make headlines, it’s no surprise that cybersecurity stocks are rising, or that investors are pouring massive amounts of capital into startups trying to build the next generation of security for an AI-native world. We’re even seeing companies like Instinct and Simile bring in nine-figure checks and valuations that wouldn't have made sense a few years ago. 

With a front row seat to it all is Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures who’s spent nearly two decades investing in cybersecurity and enterprise software — including six consecutive rounds in cloud security startup Wiz, which Google acquired for $32 billion earlier this year in one of its largest acquisitions ever. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Shah joins Rebecca Bellan to break down why he thinks periodic, human-in-the-loop security can’t keep up anymore, and why Index continues investing in AI-native security companies at stages that once required much more proof. 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

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 

02:02 Why AI is creating a new cybersecurity category 

05:16 The cyber insurance layer most companies overlook 

09:15 Why Index is betting on AI-native security platforms 

12:40 Will Wiz become a talent factory for new startups? 

14:46 What actually makes a founder worth betting on 

16:11 The hard part of knowing when to double down 

18:53 Why Shardul says he’s not a visionary investor 

21:16 How AI could reshape the entire security stack 

24:18 What makes an AI security startup defensible 

25:14 Why he doesn’t want to find “the next Wiz” 

26:48 Why investors are writing huge checks so early 

29:39 What happens to AI valuations if the frontier gets paced 

31:01 Outro 

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A week after an Anthropic researcher's doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company's CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development. The proposal leans on independent safety evaluators and coordination between AI labs in democratic countries, and it's already picked up some industry support, along with some pointed pushback from Nvidia's Jensen Huang. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into whether companies can agree on what slowing down means and who gets to police it. Plus, WordPress parent Automattic's boardroom coup, and a couple of the week's biggest deals. 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

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

00:00 Intro

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“Why do I have to beg my grandparents to put on their hearing aids, but no one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses?” 

That’s the question that drove Matthew de Jonge to spend six years building Fortell, an AI hearing aid startup that recently raised $163 million from the likes of Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias. The buzzy startup aims to build hearing aids that understand the sounds around you in real time, figure out what’s important and turn down the rest — instead of turning everything up at the same time, as most hearing aids do.  

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by de Jonge to break down what it takes to disrupt a decades-old industry where five companies make 97% of the products, insurance won’t cover the cost, and innovation has been slow to arrive. 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

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 

1:14 Why Matt built Fortell 

 5:16 The problem with hearing aids: everything's just... loud 

 7:36 How Fortell's AI separates important sound from noise 

 12:12 The funding pitch that won over Founders Fund and Thrive 

 16:31 Hearing aids vs. AI wearables (Meta, Apple, Legato) 

 20:34 Pricing, insurance, and the hearing aid "cartel" 

 23:25 Scaling up: new clinics and remote fitting 

26:57 Outro 

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An Anthropic researcher resigned this week, warning in a post on X that the company is “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. The company's own alignment lead even co-signed the message rather than walking it back. It's the kind of doomer warning the AI industry has flirted with before, but the timing, with Anthropic reportedly preparing for an IPO, makes it land differently. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the latest AI safety warning and what it says about the industry's race toward increasingly capable models. Plus, Apple's first big event under new CEO John Ternus and more of the week's headlines. 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

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 

3:28 Anthropic researcher's resignation warning 

9:33 What's actually being done about AI risk? 

15:56 Apple's AI-first hardware event 

19:56 The case against a standalone AI wearable 

21:53 Always-on listening: watch, AirPods, and privacy tradeoffs 

26:43 The foldable iPhone's odds 

27:16 Stoke Space raises $1B for a reusable rocket 

31:17 Cognition raises $2B, betting on room for more AI coding players 

34:13 BlueCore Energy's floating nuclear reactors 

37:38 Outro 

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AI companies have been talking about superintelligent AI like it's inevitable, but recent safety incidents like OpenAI's Hugging Face breach are demonstrating the potential dangers of deploying AI systems that are more capable than humans. So what happens when we can't reliably control what these systems do? 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, entrepreneur, and now the U.S. Executive Director of nonprofit ControlAI, which is pushing for a far more radical approach to AI safety: stopping companies from developing superintelligence altogether. Leahy explains why he thinks the risks have become too great to manage through alignment and containment alone, and how what sounded far-fetched six months ago is now being backed by a wave of new legislation. 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

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

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It's officially the Ternus era at Apple.  

Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a “huge launch next week” — timing that puts Apple's next iPhone event on his desk before he's even settled in. Cook isn't going far, though: he's staying on as executive chairman, focused on the kind of policy relationships that recently turned something as small as a map label into a very public balancing act. All of which raises an obvious question: what does the Ternus era look like, and how much rope will shareholders give him to figure it out? 
 
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec and Sean O'Kane unpack what Ternus is walking into, why he may actually be better positioned to make progress on software than hardware in this new AI era, and more of the week's news. 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

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 

1:12 Tim Cook steps down & John Ternus takes over as CEO 

13:33 Nvidia's spreading its AI bets 

21:58 A big week for robotaxis: Tesla, Waymo, Zoox & Uber 

29:09 a16z's $1.1B "machine age" fund and $8.5B growth fund 

32:39 GoPro's $285M acquisition and pivot to AI/defense 

36:34 Outro 

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