Equity

SpaceX is reportedly lining up four major Wall Street banks for a 2026 IPO that could provide the reset the market needs.  The company just completed a tender offer at an $800 billion valuation, and secondary market demand is through the roof. If SpaceX goes public anywhere near its rumored $1.5 trillion valuation, it could trigger an IPO cascade for other late-stage unicorns like OpenAI, Stripe,...

The World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos felt different this year, and not just because Meta and Salesforce took over storefronts on the main promenade. AI dominated the conversation in a way that overshadowed traditional topics like climate change and global poverty, and the CEOs weren't holding back. There was public criticism of trade policy, warnings about AI bubbles popping, and a l...

Today on Equity, we're teaming up with our newest podcast, Build Mode. In this interview, Build Mode host Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Ross Fubini of XYZ Ventures and Leslie Feinzaig of Graham & Walker Ventures to pull back the curtain on how VCs build their own go-to-market strategies. They dig into what it’s really like raising a first fund, why founder-market fit applies to investors too...

AI companies are clustering around healthcare and fast.  In just the past week, OpenAI bought health startup Torch, Anthropic launched Claude for Health, and Sam Altman-backed MergeLabs closed a $250 million seed round at an $850 million valuation. The money and products are pouring into health and voice AI, but so are concerns about hallucination risks, inaccurate medical information, and massive...

AI agents are supposed to make work easier. Instead, they're creating a whole new category of security nightmares.    As companies deploy AI-powered chatbots, agents, and copilots across their operations, they're facing a new risk: how do you let employees and AI agents use powerful AI tools without accidentally leaking sensitive data, violating compliance rules, or opening the door to prompt-base...

After years of chatbots and image generators, AI is finally leaving the screen. At CES 2026, that shift became impossible to ignore.    The annual tech showcase in Las Vegas was dominated by "physical AI" and robotics, from Boston Dynamic's newly redesigned Atlas humanoid robot to AI-powered ice makers (yes, really). The companies in attendance clearly want consumers to know: AI isn't just capable...

Vanessa Larco, partner at Premise and former partner at NEA, thinks 2026 will finally be the year of consumer AI.  Larco, who's been investing in consumer and prosumer for years, thinks we're about to see a shift in how consumers spend time online, with AI powering “concierge-like” services. The question is, will legacy consumer products like WebMD and TripAdvisor continue to exist as standalone a...

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Fizz is betting that Gen Z is tired of performing their lives on Instagram and TikTok.   What started as a pandemic-era group chat frustration has turned into the dominant social platform on college campuses across the US, focused on the 99% of life that doesn't make it into a highlight reel. Capturing the attention of a demographic typically glued to Instagram and TikTok, the app's hybrid anonymo...

TechCrunch's Equity crew is bringing 2025 to a close and getting ahead on the year to come with our annual predictions episode! Hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan were joined by Build Mode host Isabelle Johansson to dissect the year's biggest tech developments, from mega AI funding rounds that defied expectations to the rise of "physical AI," and make their calls for 2026.  The...

There's plenty of hype around AI and robots in healthcare, but the problem that's actually costing hospitals money right now is operating room coordination. Two to four hours of OR time is lost every single day, not because of the surgeries themselves, but because of everything in between from manual scheduling and coordination chaos to guesswork about room turnover.      Today on TechCrunch’s Equ...

The hardware world had a brutal week, with iRobot, Luminar, and Rad Power Bikes all filing for bankruptcy.  Each company faces its own mix of tariff pressures, supply chain issues, and shifting markets, but together they tell a larger story about the challenges of building physical products in an era of global trade tensions and cheap overseas competition. From the Roomba maker that almost got acq...

Jiten Behl, partner at Eclipse Ventures and former chief growth officer at Rivian, thinks we're entering an era of major re-industrialization in the US — one where factories run on AI-powered robots, not cheap overseas labor.   Behl, who helped scale Rivian from a conference room idea in 2015 to a publicly traded EV maker, is now investing in the next wave of industrial and mobility startups, incl...

A baby was born in a Waymo this week, and it wasn't even the first one.  What started as a novelty story quickly became a reminder of how autonomous vehicles have quietly become part of everyday life, complete with all the messiness that entails. The real coming-of-age story this week, however, wasn't happening in San Francisco's robotaxis. It was playing out in Hollywood, where Netflix made an $8...

ElevenLabs has made a name for itself building realistic AI voices.     What started as two Polish engineers annoyed by terrible movie dubbing has grown into a profitable company now valued at $6.6 billion, doubling its valuation from just nine months ago. The company recently announced a $100 million tender offer led by Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from a16z and others, as its tech powe...

AWS announced a wave of new AI agent tools at re:Invent 2025, but can Amazon actually catch up to the AI leaders? While the cloud giant is betting big on enterprise AI with its third-gen chip and database discounts that got developers cheering, it's still fighting to prove it can compete beyond infrastructure.  This week on Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the ROI on A...

Tech is racing ahead while society struggles to keep up. Masha Bucher, founder and GP of Day One Ventures, built her firm around closing that gap by combining venture capital with hands-on PR to help portfolio companies not just raise money, but actually break through the noise.   Day One's been an early backer of companies like World, Superhuman, and Remote.com, with 12 of its portfolio companies...

Vibe coding has taken the tech industry by storm, and it's not just the Lovables and Replits of the world that are winning. The startups building the infrastructure behind them are cashing in too.  Supabase, the open-source database platform that's become the backend of choice for the vibe-coding world, raised $100 million at a $5 billion valuation just months after closing $200 million at $2 bill...

Ten years ago, raising €1 million in Copenhagen was enough to make waves in the region’s tech scene. Today, the Nordics are turning out billion-dollar companies like Lovable — which hit $200M in revenue just 12 months after launching.    Dennis Green-Lieber, founder of AI-powered customer intelligence platform Propane, has had a front-row seat to that shift over the last 15 years. His take? The re...

AI companies are spending so much on infrastructure that Nvidia's data center business now brings in nearly $50 billion. But is this sustainable growth or just the latest tech mania? And should we even be calling it a "bubble" when the belief in AI's future is what's holding the whole ecosystem together?  This week on Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into Nvidia's massive e...

While everyone's chasing the next AI infrastructure play in San Francisco, some of the most defensible AI companies are being built by founders with deep expertise in legacy industries — and they're not getting funded. January Ventures aims to fill that gap, writing pre-seed checks for underrepresented founders transforming healthcare, manufacturing, and supply chain with AI.   At TechCrunch Disru...

TechCrunch has new podcast! Build Mode brings you candid startup wisdom from the people who build, break, and build again. Build Mode is hosted by our very own Startup Battlefield Editor, Isabelle Johannessen who is joined by founders, investors, and operators to dig into the uncomfortable truths about startup life. Think cap table drama, co-founder breakups, and pivot panic. We're sharing their f...

A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that $580 billion will be spent globally on AI data centers in 2025 alone. This is $40 billion more than will be spent on new oil supplies — leading us to conclude that data centers are the new oil fields. But is this a net positive for the environment or just a different kind of resource drain?  On TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten...

Many see OpenAI as the ChatGPT company while rivals like Anthropic and Cohere eye the enterprise space. Marc Manara, OpenAI's head of startups, says the reality looks different: AI-native companies are hitting $200 million in ARR, and product cycles have shrunk from two-week sprints to single days.  Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Russell Brandom sat down with Manara at TechCrunch Disrupt 20...

SoftBank and OpenAI announced a new 50-50 joint venture this week to sell enterprise AI tools in Japan under the brand "Crystal Intelligence." On paper, it's a straightforward international expansion deal. But SoftBank’s role as a major investor in OpenAI is raising questions about whether AI's biggest deals are creating real economic value or just moving money in circles.  On TechCrunch's Equity ...