Equity

Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic — the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others.  

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Ode’s leaders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who founded Fractional AI, the applied AI services startup that Ode acquired earlier this year to serve as the new venture’s core. The three discuss why so many enterprise AI pilots never make it to production and why they think AI-native services are about to become one of the biggest categories in tech. 

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  

00:30 Fractional AI becomes "Ode with Anthropic" 

1:13 Why non-AI companies are the real AI winners 

2:04 Working with Blackstone, Anthropic, and beyond 

3:05 Inside a real project: fixing LogicGate's bottleneck 

7:29 How long does it take from hypothesis to production? 

9:19 Measuring ROI: revenue, efficiency, and evals 

16:37 Model choice vs. workflow redesign, and why it's Claude-first 

23:10 Hiring generalists over specialized AI talent 

26:39 Can this scale without turning into another consulting firm? 

30:49 Outro 

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Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he's worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything. 

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 

00:33 Breaking down open source growth data 

04:34 What's driving the open source resurgence 

08:47 Who’s using Hugging Face, and how? 

10:28 China overtakes the US in open model downloads 

16:34 Safety, access, and the risk of AI power concentration 

24:03 Hugging Face's approach to legal risk 

28:00 Turning down Nvidia 

31:47 Underinvested opportunities: local AI, bio, robotics 

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When it comes to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models just don’t have what it takes. Models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at text, but they're less skilled at understanding how things actually move through space and time — an essential skill for producing intelligence that generalizes. That gap, it turns out, might be filled by gaming data. That's the bet behind General Intuition, a Bezos-backed, New York-based startup valued at $2.3 billion that just closed a $320 million round with Coatue, Eric Schmidt, and researchers at MIT and Google DeepMind joining its list of investors. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, General Intuition CEO Pim de Witte joins Rebecca Bellan to dig into why world models trained on gaming data might be the next big leap in physical AI, how the company spun out of gaming platform Medal TV, and where the ethical red lines are when your models could end up being used for defense applications. 

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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Instead of our usual news rundown, Equity is sending you off into the 4th of July weekend with a special episode of our sister podcast Build Mode.

Season 3 launches July 9th, but before it does, Build Mode is revisiting some of the best fundraising and startup advice from the investors featured in last season.

From choosing the right investors to building a differentiated go-to-market strategy, these venture capitalists and founder-turned-investors share hard-earned lessons on fundraising, portfolio dynamics, investor-founder relationships, and what separates the companies that successfully raise their next round from those that don't.

In this episode, you'll hear from:

⁠⁠Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst⁠⁠

⁠⁠Ross Fubini, managing partner at XYZ Venture Capital⁠ and Leslie Feinzaig, founder and general partner at Graham & Walker⁠⁠

⁠⁠Paul Irving, partner at GTMfund⁠⁠

⁠⁠Leah Solivan, founder of TaskRabbit and founder of Precedent VC⁠⁠

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:19 Yuri Sagalov (General Catalyst): The three types of investors and who founders should avoid

03:29 Ross Fubini (XYZ VC) & Leslie Feinzaig (Graham & Walker): What great investors actually bring to the table

08:36 Paul Irving (GTMfund): The go-to-market signals investors look for

12:30 Leah Solivan (TaskRabbit / Precedent VC): Understanding the competition inside your investors' portfolios

14:30 Outro

Subscribe to Build Mode on⁠⁠ ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠ ⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠, or⁠⁠ ⁠wherever you like to listen⁠⁠⁠. And watch the full videos on⁠⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠.

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We've said it before, and we'll say it again: the autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money's flowing back, and it's the people who lived through that first wave who are building the next one. 

Humble Robotics founder and CEO Eyal Cohen is one of them. Cohen was at Otto when Uber came calling, later followed Anthony Levandowski to Pronto, and after two decades bouncing between deep tech bets in the Bay Area, his new company came out of stealth in April with $24 million to build a fully autonomous, cabless electric hauler for freight. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Cohen joins Kirsten Korosec to talk about AV déjà vu and what he's learned from 15 years of building startups across electrification, solar, and robotics.  

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

The bet behind Humble's cabless design and why "the simplest possible robotics platform" was the starting point 

How vision models are replacing months of hand-built engineering work that used to go into recognizing things like traffic cones and stop signs 

Why Cohen thinks culture beats out compensation when it comes to securing talent in robotics these days 

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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Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market for years, but the era of total dependence might be ending.  

OpenAI just shared its plans to spice things up with Jalapeño, its custom inference chip built with Broadcom, joining Google, Apple, and SpaceX in a growing list of companies building their way out of single-supplier risk. The goal isn't a clean break so much as a hedge. Custom silicon means more control, hardware tuned to specific needs, and the kind of performance gains Apple unlocked when it ditched Intel. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what the custom chip trend means for the industry and a few deals of the week worth watching. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

How Groq’s $650M raise after Nvidia swept away its top talent might be the comeback story of the year 

AI agents getting loopy and why Claude Code creator Boris Cherny thinks these loops are “just as important and as big a step” as the leap from source code to agents 

Whether the public markets are warming up to humanoid robots as Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC 

A24 taking investment from Google DeepMind to develop a new AI toolkit for filmmakers 

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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In this episode, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos talks with Goodwater Capital co-founder Chi-Hua Chien, whose career spans some of Silicon Valley’s biggest technology shifts, from helping source Accel’s investment in Facebook as a young associate to backing a new generation of consumer and AI startups. While much of the venture world is focused on models, chips, and infrastructure, Chi-Hua argues that history suggests the biggest long-term winners of the AI era may be the application companies built on top of them.

They talk about why AI startups are reaching unprecedented revenue levels with remarkably small teams, what’s driving today’s soaring valuations, and why he believes many infrastructure businesses will eventually face the same commoditization pressures seen in previous technology cycles. He also shares what he’s seeing inside consumer AI, from hyper-personalized entertainment and women’s health platforms to new products built around voice, agents, and individualized experiences. And they discuss the increasingly public tensions between founders and VCs, why some of the most interesting fintech innovation is happening outside the U.S., and why Chi-Hua believes one of the biggest opportunities in consumer technology may be helping people reconnect in the real world.

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Just as last week was ending, the US government forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5's guardrails. 

Cybersecurity researchers have since signed an open letter calling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is this a genuine security concern, or just the latest chapter in a messy relationship between Anthropic and the Trump administration? 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, and Rebecca Bellan unpack what the ban means for developers building on Anthropic's platform and for anyone watching the IPO, why it might accidentally be good for the company, and more of the week’s headlines. 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 

Why the UK's social media ban for users under 16 might be the lesser of two evils 

What the SpaceX-Cursor acquisition tells us about xAI's strategy (and its gaps) 

Jeff Bezos's $12B bet on physical AI with Prometheus, the startup trying to build an "artificial engineer" 

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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Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. 

This tension between hype and ROI is exactly where NEA partner Tiffany Luck lives these days. She got her start convincing companies that e-commerce was the future, and now she's all in on AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities for "magic moments" in the consumer business. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year's AI IPOs, and how startups are stepping in to help enterprises track return on AI spend. 

Listen to the full episode to hear: 

What the tokenmaxxing-to-ROI shift means for how companies measure AI spend. 

Why forward deployed engineers are becoming a "Trojan horse" for AI adoption. 

How enterprises are mixing and matching models instead of committing to one provider. 

Why Tiffany thinks value is being created at every layer of the AI stack, not just at the model layer. 

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 

00:51 Tiffany Luck's path from Lot18 to Amazon to VC 

3:45 Magic moments: Waymo, healthcare, and the gap in personal agents 

7:36 Privacy, security, and trusting AI with your life 

10:39 IPO outlook: Anthropic vs. OpenAI on public markets 

13:58 Compute, infrastructure, and where the value sits 

15:41 What’s the ROI on tokenmaxxing? 

27:07 Forward deployed engineers as a ‘Trojan horse’ 

32:49 Outro 

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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 still waiting in the wings. 

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

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