This week on Equity are some deals that are unusual for a few reasons — some good, some… well, we’ll find out.
First up is the $80 million round for Story, which is trying to apply that ol’ web3 magic to AI and talent management. As one investor puts it, “What Bitcoin did for money and finance, Story is doing for content and IP.” That may well be true, but perhaps not in the way he means it.
Next, Mary Ann attempts to untangle the knotty, weird term sheet for Bolt: $450 million. But is that real money or “marketing credits”? The latter, at least in significant part. And the actual money, is it from regular investors, or through multiple private equity shell companies operating through the Caymans and UAE? Well, the second one. But at least Ryan Breslow is coming back — that should simplify things!
A new face (and voice) on Equity, Margaux MacColl over in DC, explained Balaji Srinivasan’s private island “technocapitalist college town” where “those with a fondness for the current world order need not apply.” I said it sounds like a cult, and look, cults can be fine in moderation, but I’m worried about this one.
Not wanting to stop talking, I went on to get into two AI companies I covered this week that aren’t enterprise LLM stuff. Reliant AI is focused on researchers (especially in pharma) who need to analyze thousands of papers at once, and it seems like it could be super useful to data scientists. And BeyondMath is working with Formula 1 companies to create a “digital wind tunnel” that does high-accuracy physics-based computational fluid dynamics simulations in near real time. When was the last time ChatGPT made a race car faster?
Margaux wrapped us up with the increasing activity level in defense tech acquisitions. Investors are seeing this once-taboo market in a different light (now that it’s making money) recently, but that doesn’t mean you can expect an AI-type bubble — this is a different world with different definitions of success and reasonable exits. But with more than $100 billion invested since 2021, no one can afford to ignore it any longer.
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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