Equity

Equity

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

May 22, 2026 34 mins
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 Se...
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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 ...
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May 15, 2026 40 mins
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 ...
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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 S...
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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 Koros...
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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 ...
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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 r...
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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: ...
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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 challenge...
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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 fin...
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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 Powel...
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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 cance...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 and Bluesky’s latest AI backlash, and the message is clear: The future of AI is being shaped as much by ambition and hype as it is by real-world constraints.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equit...
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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. In February alone, family offices made 41 direct investments, including one Midwest-based firm that led a $230 million Series B into an AI chip startup.    On this episode of TechCrunch's Equi...
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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 stretches further into the real world, the real world is starting to push back.  That tension is everywhere this week, from OpenAI shutting down its Sora app to courts finally starting to hold social p...
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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. Think soap opera meets TikTok, complete with secret billionaire romances, disapproving werewolf mothers-in-law, and cliffhangers engineered to keep users tapping. The leading app, ReelShort, made $1.2...
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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 “OpenClaw strategy,” and closing with a rambling Olaf robot that had to get its mic cut. The message was hard to miss: Nvidia wants to be foundational to everything, from AI training to autonomous vehicle...
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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 leaderboard for frontier LLMs, influencing funding, launches, and PR cycles. In just seven months, the startup went from a UC Berkeley PhD research project to being valued at $1.7 billion.  On this epis...
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