Equity

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

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 signed up to fund. As Musk keeps reminding the courtroom: “You can't steal a charity.” 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec and Sean O'Kane break down what's actually at stake in the courtroom and what to watch for as Altman and others take the stand, plus deals, defense tech, and what Big Tech's earnings week revealed about the limits of the AI spending era.

Listen to the full episode to hear about:

Why cloud was the winner of earnings week, and what AWS, Google, and Microsoft's numbers say about where enterprise AI spending is actually landing

The scholarship app founder taking Sallie Mae to court after they acquired his startup…and began selling its student data to ad networks and universities

BMW i Ventures new $300 million fund with its sights set on AI

How defense tech startup Scout AI is pitching “military AGI” using vision-language-action (VLA) models

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-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 technology goes way beyond making videos: it's now pushing into general world models with applications in gaming, robotics, and maybe something closer to general intelligence. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, host Rebecca Bellan sits down with co-founder and CEO Cristobal Valenzuela to talk about where video generation goes from here, and why Runway's ambitions now reach well beyond Hollywood. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why Valenzuela thinks the real constraint on filmmaking has never been technology, and what changes when it is 

How Runway thinks about world models differently than Google and other labs building in the space 

What "nonlinear media" means, and why real-time video generation opens up use cases way beyond content creation 

Why Valenzuela pushes back on the idea that AI companions are “inherently dystopian” 

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 

00:56 Can AI really replace Hollywood? 

04:18 Why "AI slop" fears miss the point 

08:23 Research lab, software company, or creative studio? 

13:42 From video generation to world models, explained 

17:36 Omni models and multimodal training 

17:50 The three pillars: linear media, non-linear media, physical AI 

19:31 Real-time video and the "Characters" product 

22:33 Are AI companions inherently dystopian? 

25:59 Physical AI and robotics 

28:35 Where growth is coming from: enterprise and prosumer 

29:31 Outro 

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

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 over developers is being challenged, and AI-native apps are changing what it means to build on Apple’s platform. 

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what this transition means for startups and a closer look at some of the week’s biggest deals — including SpaceX's $60B option on Cursor. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why Anthropic’s Mythos model is raising questions about both safety and marketing 

The $5 billion Amazon-Anthropic deal that looks a lot like every other circular AI infrastructure play 

What the SpaceX-Cursor agreement (and that $10 billion breakup fee) says about Elon Musk's AI strategy post-xAI merger 

Why fintech Revolut and AI chip startup Cerebras' public market plans have us wondering whether this is actually the year the IPO market reopens 

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 

00:26 Anthropic's Mythos accessed by “unauthorized groups” 

04:28 Is Amazon's $5B Anthropic investment just another circular deal? 

09:53 SpaceX and Cursor’s $60B option 

18:25 Is this finally the year of the IPO? 

21:38 SpaceX, Revolut, and Cerebras: the IPOs to watch 

26:41 Tim Cook's retirement plans 

29:15 What a new Apple CEO means for startups and the App Store 

35:59 Outro 

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

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 down why serious investors are finally treating fusion as a real asset class, and what the return thesis actually looks like when no one expects a power plant in their fund lifetime. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why the investment thesis for fusion looks less like traditional VC and more like biotech or SpaceX, and what "fusion euphoria" has to do with it 

What the Q value milestone actually means, and how close leading startups are to hitting the number that could trigger a public market opening 

How superconducting tape and AI-assisted plasma physics are quietly doing as much work as the big headline science breakthroughs 

Why one fusion company merging with Trump Media and Technology Group had Tim doing a double-take at his inbox 

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 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 Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what's actually being built in AI infrastructure, who's winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week's headlines. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why chipmakers AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm just piled $60M into UK self-driving startup Wayve, and what Uber's $300M milestone bid says about who's winning the AV race 

How data center startup Fluidstack is positioning itself for the frontier labs, including a reported $50B agreement with Anthropic 

What Claude Code's moment at the HumanX conference reveals about where the OpenAI vs. Anthropic rivalry is actually playing out 

Why tokenmaxxing, and Meta's leaked internal leaderboard, might say more about optics than actual productivity 

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 

00:25 Allbirds is now an AI company, apparently 

04:48 Why chipmakers are betting on Wayve 

12:01 Fluidstack wants $1B to build AI data centers 

16:24 OpenAI buys a finance app and a talk show 

21:27 Anthropic vs. OpenAI in enterprise 

24:15 The Anthropic model they won't release to the public 

26:47 Why AI feels so distant to everyone else 

30:47 What even is tokenmaxxing? 

34:49 Parasail's $32M bet on cheaper AI inference 

36:39 Outro 

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

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 platform targeting pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills 90% of its patients, and intentionally waiting to raise from his network until peer-reviewed papers can make his case. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Aloe Blacc to talk about what happens when a creator decides to build instead of just invest, how Aloe is watching AI reshape both the biotech and music industries in real time, and his thoughts on who actually wins. 

Listen to the full episode to hear: 

How he’s navigating a world where credibility is earned in data, not fame 

How a University of Houston molecule discovery platform could cut years off drug development timelines 

Why he thinks record labels, not artists or AI companies, will ultimately control the economics of AI-generated music 

What Suno taught him about prototyping, and why his next album will still be recorded with live musicians 

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

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 that. 

On episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we’re bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan sat down with Amit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Luma AI, at Web Summit Qatar. Together, the pair dug into where the next trillion-dollar AI opportunity actually gets built, and whether the companies chasing it even know what they're building yet. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why video, audio, and images are the real frontier for AI training data, not text 

What an "intelligent world model" actually is, and why Jain thinks most companies building them are getting it completely wrong 

The case for why AI won't kill creative jobs, and why Jain thinks studio heads are the real problem 

How the path from video generation to robotics to AGI is simpler than anyone's making it sound 

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 

01:13 Why LLMs are hitting a ceiling 

02:43 The data problem & what comes after LLMs 

04:30 What actually makes a world model a world model 

06:05 Why 3D data is a dead end 

07:39 What Luma is building next 

09:08 How much humans stay in the loop 

10:00 Near-term use cases for agentic video 

11:22 Will AI kill jobs in film & production? 

13:30 Why the entertainment industry is already dying 

15:27 Why we actually need more content, not less 

17:46 Luma's roadmap: generation, understanding, and robotics 

19:54 Outro 

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

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 CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy to unpack the company’s transformation and what it signals about where AI is headed next.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

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:

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