Equity

Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic — the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Ode’s leaders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who founded Fractional AI, the applied AI services startup that Ode acquired earlier this year to serve as the new venture’s core. The three discuss why so many enterprise AI pilots never make it to production and why they think AI-native services are about to become one of the biggest categories in tech.



Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

The case for AI-native services, and why Ode believes small teams of applied AI engineers can unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in business value.

Why the company is hiring experienced generalists and former founders instead of AI researchers, and how it's turning them into elite FDEs.

Whether an AI services company can scale like software, yet maintain a boutique feel, and why Taylor believes Ode could one day become a trillion-dollar business.

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:30 Fractional AI becomes "Ode with Anthropic"

1:13 Why non-AI companies are the real AI winners

2:04 Working with Blackstone, Anthropic, and beyond

3:05 Inside a real project: fixing LogicGate's bottleneck

7:29 How long does it take from hypothesis to production?

9:19 Measuring ROI: revenue, efficiency, and evals

16:37 Model choice vs. workflow redesign, and why it's Claude-first

23:10 Hiring generalists over specialized AI talent

26:39 Can this scale without turning into another consulting firm?

30:49 Outro
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Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he's worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything.



Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

How Chinese labs are producing the majority of open models being downloaded in the U.S., and why Delangue thinks that's a problem worth fixing rather than a reason to distrust open source itself.

How Hugging Face is choosing capital efficiency over the usual Silicon Valley fundraising playbook, including why the company turned down a large investment from Nvidia last year.

Why he sees robotics as an even more urgent case for open, transparent AI than chatbots or coding tools, given how much of your home and family life a robot ends up seeing.

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

00:33 Breaking down open source growth data

04:34 What's driving the open source resurgence

08:47 Who’s using Hugging Face, and how?

10:28 China overtakes the US in open model downloads

16:34 Safety, access, and the risk of AI power concentration

24:03 Hugging Face's approach to legal risk

28:00 Turning down Nvidia

31:47 Underinvested opportunities: local AI, bio, robotics
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When it comes to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models just don’t have what it takes. Models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at text, but they're less skilled at understanding how things actually move through space and time — an essential skill for producing intelligence that generalizes. That gap, it turns out, might be filled by gaming data. That's the bet behind General Intuition, a Bezos-backed, New York-based startup valued at $2.3 billion that just closed a $320 million round with Coatue, Eric Schmidt, and researchers at MIT and Google DeepMind joining its list of investors.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, General Intuition CEO Pim de Witte joins Rebecca Bellan to dig into why world models trained on gaming data might be the next big leap in physical AI, how the company spun out of gaming platform Medal TV, and where the ethical red lines are when your models could end up being used for defense applications.



Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

How eight minutes of real-world data was enough to get a robot navigating an office cold.

Why General Intuition turned down an acquisition offer reportedly from OpenAI to stay independent, and why having investors who back your mission is essential to building a generational company.

How the company is trying to get ahead of AI job displacement by building Nerve, a marketplace connecting gamers to data labeling and teleoperations work.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Instead of our usual news rundown, Equity is sending you off into the 4th of July weekend with a special episode of our sister podcast Build Mode.

Season 3 launches July 9th, but before it does, Build Mode is revisiting some of the best fundraising and startup advice from the investors featured in last season.

From choosing the right investors to building a differentiated go-to-market strategy, these venture capitalists and founder-turned-investors share hard-earned lessons on fundraising, portfolio dynamics, investor-founder relationships, and what separates the companies that successfully raise their next round from those that don't.

In this episode, you'll hear from:


⁠⁠Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst⁠⁠


⁠⁠Ross Fubini, managing partner at XYZ Venture Capital⁠ and Leslie Feinzaig, founder and general partner at Graham & Walker⁠⁠


⁠⁠Paul Irving, partner at GTMfund⁠⁠


⁠⁠Leah Solivan, founder of TaskRabbit and founder of Precedent VC⁠⁠

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:19 Yuri Sagalov (General Catalyst): The three types of investors and who founders should avoid

03:29 Ross Fubini (XYZ VC) & Leslie Feinzaig (Graham & Walker): What great investors actually bring to the table

08:36 Paul Irving (GTMfund): The go-to-market signals investors look for

12:30 Leah Solivan (TaskRabbit / Precedent VC): Understanding the competition inside your investors' portfolios

14:30 Outro

Subscribe to Build Mode on⁠⁠ ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠ ⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠, or⁠⁠ ⁠wherever you like to listen⁠⁠⁠. And watch the full videos on⁠⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠.
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We've said it before, and we'll say it again: the autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money's flowing back, and it's the people who lived through that first wave who are building the next one. 

Humble Robotics founder and CEO Eyal Cohen is one of them. Cohen was at Otto when Uber came calling, later followed Anthony Levandowski to Pronto, and after two decades bouncing between deep tech bets in the Bay Area, his new company came out of stealth in April with $24 million to build a fully autonomous, cabless electric hauler for freight. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Cohen joins Kirsten Korosec to talk about AV déjà vu and what he's learned from 15 years of building startups across electrification, solar, and robotics.  

 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 


The bet behind Humble's cabless design and why "the simplest possible robotics platform" was the starting point 


How vision models are replacing months of hand-built engineering work that used to go into recognizing things like traffic cones and stop signs 


Why Cohen thinks culture beats out compensation when it comes to securing talent in robotics these days 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 
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