This week, we invited Senior Data Editor at Crunchbase News Gené Teare to come back on the podcast. We'll dig into Q4 2023 venture capital results, and what is coming up this year. Gené and Alex are talking stages, sectors — including both AI and web3 — and where we are seeing both weakness, and strength.

This week on Equity, Plural VC announces a new fund, Fantuan teams up with Chowbus, Vroom leaves the car selling business, and we chat through what's happening over at Brex.

This is our startup-focused, Wednesday episode, so today we're counting down important venture rounds, and chatting our way through other startup and VC news. This week, Artisse AI raised a new round, Bilt Rewards was proof that fintech is still alive and kicking, and there's new M&A in Venture Capital Land.

Equity is starting the week with a look at stocks, crypto's post-ETF boom, the newest AI unicorn, how Canva is getting bigger, and developer sentiment around the Apple Vision Pro.

Today on Equity, Alex and Mary Ann are chewing through funding rounds galore from Pomelo, Tandem and Briq. We also discuss how C-Suite executives feel about AI and the enterprise, and the potential for valuations to recover in 2024.

Today on Equity, we invited Cowboy Ventrues’ Aileen Lee to chat through her massive new entry concerning the unicorn world. If you didn’t know, Lee initially coined the term “unicorn” in a TechCrunch article back in 2013. Together, Alex, Mary Ann and Aileen are diving deep into how the concept has evolved over the last 10 years, where unicorns are based today, why seed rounds are getting bigger, and what we can expect from US unicorns in the decade to come.

Our newly revamped Wednesday show focuses on all things startups and venture capital. This week, we're digging into raises from Vertice, Electra, and Build a Rocket Boy, and what Thomvest plans to do with its new $250 million fund.

Today on Equity, we're covering the weekend's headlines and prepping for the week ahead with a look at stocks around the world, key earnings and what's happening with crypto. Elsewhere, Uber is shutting down Drizly, Spot Technologies and Kuda are raising fresh capital, and changes are coming for Apple, Microsoft and OpenAI.

This week, we talked to Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, a founder collective and early-stage (think pre-seed) venture firm. Besides founding her own venture firm, Jenny previously worked as a managing director for accelerator Techstars and founded several companies including mobile software company Switch Mobile, which was acquired by Via One. Jenny and Mary Ann discussed a wide variety of topics, including startups’ flight to quality in 2024 and how smaller firms are competing with larger firms in the current investment landscape. We also dug into the “great VC resignation” so stay through to the end for that.

This week on Equity, Shimmer raises fresh capital to offer 1:1 personalized ADHD coaching, vacation rental startup Overmoon shows impressive growth, and we're also taking a deeper look at how the IPO window is reopening in 2024. We grabbed our friends Kirsten Korosec and Haje Jan Kamps to close out the show and bring us the latest from CES.

This is our newly revamped Wednesday episode, and we’re going to be digging deep into critical startup and venture capital news. This week, PhotoRoom is raising more money, Treasure Financial is cutting staff, and two micromobility companies are tying the knot to try and use scale to their advantage. We'll also take a look at what's going on in the world of AI hardware, why Keith Rabois is heading back to Khosla Ventures, and Seedstars Africa Ventures added $30 million to its upcoming fund.

Equity is kicking off the week with an update on Bitcoin ETFs, why Carta is in trouble (again), new competition for SpaceX in the form of the ULA, and what we're keeping an eye out for ahead of the GPT store launch.

This week on Equity, we kicked things off with news of Ruth Foxe Blader leaving Anthemis to launch Foxe Capital and Exponent announcing their second fund. We then dove deep into layoffs and shutdowns for Frontdesk and Countdown Capital, respectively, and new efforts to support tech startups in both Israel and Palestine.

Today, we’re bringing you a special mini episode led by TechCrunch’s very own Morgan Sung. During this year’s Disrupt, Morgan caught up with Shruti Dwivedi, the co-founder and CEO of health-tech startup, Duly. Duly, which is focused on simplifying & personalizing contraception for young women in India & beyond, was part of this year’s Startup Battlefield 200. The pair talked about the stigma around contraception, cultural roadblocks Duly faces that its US and UK counterparts may not have to consider and of course, what’s next for the startup.

Welcome to 2024, everybody! Equity is back with a look at the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. We're talking through the New York Times suit against OpenAI, how X's value continues to fall, climate tech's job growth and more.

We're saying goodbye to 2023 with an Equity tradition: our predictions episode. As we try to do every year, we brought in a number of voices to ensure that we covered a good amount of ground. And, we went back and vetted our predictions from last year as well, in case you wanted to see how off we were! We bucketed our predictions into a few categories, including startup trends, media, proptech, AI, and transport. There are other themes mixed in as well, but find your headphones and get ready for some Hot Takes, yeah?

We’re spinning the globe with not one but two interviews thanks to our friend and colleague Rebecca Bellan, who’s been in Auckland, New Zealand for the past three years. She recently hopped across the Tasman to Australia to report on the startup scene in Australia, and is coming back to us with a temperature check on VC in the Antipodes. For this episode, she spoke to two Aussie VCs: Dan Krasnostein from Square Peg and Gabrielle Munzer from Main Sequence. Rebecca and our guests dug into why early stage funding is popping off in the region, the government's role in growing a startup ecosystem, fintech, climate tech, and what it’s like to compete and collaborate with Silicon Valley.

Today, we're joined by Deepka Rana, a London-based Principal at Northzone focused on early-stage companies across consumer internet and B2B SaaS. Alex and Deepka dove into the where venture capital is heading in the new year, the prognosis for startups at different stages of maturity, why 2023 was the year of adjustment and 2024 could be the new venture-startup normal.

This is the second of a two-part series looking back at 2023. Mary Ann and Alex called on two colleagues to help us chat through some of the year’s biggest events. We're rewinding the clock to the The fall of SVB, SBF's long and tedious trial, and catching up on what's next for OpenAI with Sam Altman back at the helm.

Today, we’re bringing you a special mini episode led by TechCrunch senior reporter and co-host of our sister podcast, Found, Dominic Madori-Davis. During this year’s Disrupt, Dom caught up with Hilary Mason from Hidden Door, an AI-driven narrative game engine. Dom and Hilary got into how generative AI is changing online gaming, building a team of creatives, fundraising in the gaming space, and more.

It was a very, very busy year in the worlds of technology, startups, and venture capital, and the Equity crew is talking through key themes from 2023. Alex and Mary Ann are looking at the year's venture capital numbers, fintech's hot start then cool down on the M&A front, the creator economy in 2023, and why OpenAI's upheaval got us thinking about the return of key-person syndrome.

Today on Equity, we kicked off our recording with a breaking story from Cruise which announced it will be cutting 24% of its staff. Steering away from layoffs, we turned to Prevu's $6 million Series A and why Verve Motion just raised $20 million for supportive lifting suits, what's bubbling up in the French venture ecosystem, and how a few mega-deals are changing the numbers for AI.

This week, Equity brought Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress onto the show, along with Kishan Bagaria, the founder of Texts.com. Automattic bought all-in-one messaging app Texts.com for $50 million back in October, and today, we're digging into the transaction and what it means, and also the state of the written word online.

Today on Equity, the end of tech earnings is in sight as Adobe and Oracle report this week. Elsewhere, Mistral raises again while the EU gets its regulatory plan in place for AI, TikTok loves ecommerce, and fintech is far from dead.

Over on Chain Reaction, Jacquelyn interviewed David Pakman, managing partner and head of venture investments at CoinFund. Before CoinFund, David spent 14 years at the venture capital firm Venrock. He also led the Series A and B rounds at Dollar Shave Club which was acquired by Unilever for $1 billion.