Call it AI, call it Super Intelligence, only 2% of consumers are buying it

This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.” Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as “super intelligence,” and meanwhile, Meta and OpenAI are putting friendlier faces on their AI products, even as the biggest money in AI still appears to be coming from the enterprise. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into this week’s AI moves, the ugly economics of consumer AI, plus the shifting IPO market and a handful of startup deals. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: What Oura pulling its IPO, plus Anthropic’s leaked S-1 and OpenAI going back to private funding, says about how picky public markets have gotten Quartermaster’s $140M raise to bring real-time sensors to an industry that AI basically hasn’t touched yet: maritime shipping Why Atomic, a supply-chain startup from ex-Tesla vets, is already running 90% of DoorDash’s purchasing How Startup Battlefield finalist Charter Space raised $5M to bring insurance to satellites Speaking of Startup Battlefield, join us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where Equity will kick things off with a live show on the Builders Stage at 9 a.m. Get 25% off your tickets with code Equity25. Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 0:05Kirsten Korosec?

  This week, President Trump and some of the biggest names in AI are declaring the era of superintelligence, while the companies building it are still figuring out what that means. We're also taking a look at the IPO market, from Anthropic's massive potential debut to Aura pulling its offering. Plus, we're highlighting a couple of deals this week, including a startup that raised $140 million to track what's happening at seed.

• 0:36Kirsten Korosec?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, October 2. I'm Kirsten Korsak, Transportation Editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined, as always, by our Weekend Editor, Anthony Hahn, and Senior Reporter, Special Project, Sean O'Kane. And I'm gonna see you guys in like, days.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  It's coming around the corner. Just over a week from now, we're gonna be in San Francisco for Disrupt. We have a promo code for Equity listeners, Equity25. You're gonna get 25% off. And we're gonna be live recording an episode at Disrupt. I mean, there're gonna be so many other things happening. I'm gonna be hosting the Startup Battlefield. What else is going on?

• 1:15Kirsten Korosec?

  I will be interviewing RJ Scringe, who's the founder and CEO of Rivian, and there's a lot to talk to him about since he was on our stage four years ago. So I'm really looking forward to that. And then, Sean, you have a bunch of stuff going on.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yes, some really good panels. I think I'm also gonna be on stage with a robot at some point, so, you know, come see if a robot tries to fight me, or God knows what.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Or you try to fight a robot.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Listen, you know, if we sell out Disrupt, I'll do whatever the audience wants. And that is a promise I absolutely will keep.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was, I was looking at the, just, you know, the agenda right before we started recording. And I mean, we've got multiple, like, speakers from Anthropic, from Amazon, from OpenAI. Mark Wahlberg is gonna be there, the CEO. Flock is gonna be there. It's gonna be a very, very packed show, I think.

• 2:04Kirsten Korosec?

  My last big pitch is what I'll say. One of the things I really like about Disrupt, and I've gone for eight years now, I've been at TechCrunch for eight years, and the energy and like, all of the early-stage founders, like, it is like a networker's dream, kind of, in terms of finding, you know, your next employee or your next investor. And that's actually what I almost like even more than doing the interviews on stage, is like, just meeting all these founders. So, use that promo code, again, and it is Equity25.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  And also come to our live recording.

• 2:37Kirsten Korosec?

  I will say, I will say, yeah, come to our live recording. It's how we kick the whole event off in the morning. And I have fond memories of when our beloved former co-host, Alex Wilhelm, was on the show, and he had some super fans in the audience that were actually recording the show. So, we need that energy back. So, please come and help us kick off Disrupt.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, come bootleg the recording at the builder's stage on Tuesday of Disrupt.

• 3:08Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, that's our pitch. Let's talk about what happened this week. And a lot happened this week, including superintelligence. Anthony, what happened?

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we are officially, by order of the President of the United States, it's not artificial intelligence anymore, it's superintelligence. We were talking about this, I think, last week, because this is something he's been hinting at, or I'm not, he doesn't do hints. He's been saying for a while now, but now is signed into executive order, that, that, you know, everyone, if you're like, an official US representative, you are supposed to say, "superintelligence," not "artificial intelligence." And this was also part of this broader announcement around AI safety, which I think is both interesting for what the actual, there's this sort of pact that was announced, but also just the fact that it happened at all, seemed to come together fairly quickly. Because, again,

• 4:01Speaker 00

  just in the last, like, two weeks ago, a week ago, President Trump was saying, "We don't need any of this." Like, you know, "We need to lead in AI, we can't constrain it any way, we don't need any regulation. Anyone who's saying that there's any danger from AI is essentially like a Chinese or Democratic plant." And yet, all these AI CEOs got together with him earlier this week and signed this pact.

• 4:24Kirsten Korosec?

  So first of all, I'm wondering if any of you looked at the seating chart of this luncheon, which was pretty amazing. But leading up to that, we should say, not only was there, you know, pushback on like, regulation, and we can talk about whether this executive order even does any of that, which, you know, I would say, no, there's a little bit of theater there. But the important and interesting thing is that, just days ago, Anthropic was really in the doghouse, if you will, in terms of like, what was happening behind the scenes with, with President Trump. And that all changed when Dario Amodei was invited to a 10:00 PM dinner, he had this sit-down, and then just days later, we had this luncheon.

• 5:08Kirsten Korosec?

  And at this luncheon, we have pretty much every tech power broker from every major tech company. So, Amazon, so Mark Zuckerberg was there, Jeff Bezos was there, Elon Musk was there, Dario, of course, was there. But I guess my bigger question for both of you is, what does this all mean? And does it mean anything?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  How much time do you have? I mean, first off, I will say, you know, I get, sure, they had dinner, Trump and Dario. If you read the Time Magazine interview that Trump just did, your guess is as good as mine as to how informed he was that that dinner was even going to be happening, which is a strange reality to live in, but it's just the one we inhabit. And I will also say one other thing that, you know, makes me skeptical, surprise, surprise, of how repaired the relationship is between the White House, or the administration, I should say, and Anthropic, is that, for as much as there are clearly people trying to put those two, you know, groups together, the Defense Department is still, you know, very

• 6:12Speaker 02

  adamant that Anthropic is terrible and woke and a national security risk. Emile Michael, goes off on Anthropic sort of every other day on X, it seems. And so, so I think there's still some distance there, despite, you know, Dario showing up to this thing. As far as the agreement and all of that, you know, let's be real, like, they misspelled "United States" on the agreement that they all signed. Like, it is also just deeply non-binding. I mean, it is completely voluntary. I think my favorite aspect about it was that Trump described it as, quote, "morally binding," which is just a level of abstraction and, and terminology that I've never heard of before.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think just to amplify both of those points, in terms of the role of Anthropic and their relationship with the Trump administration, I think there's been a sort of lot of reporting, you know, in the last year, especially during that time of that big blow up with the Defense Department, is that it seemed like also, different parts of the White House had different relationships with Anthropic, and that, like, the Treasury Secretary seemed to be a big fan. Whereas the Defense Department, definitely not big fans, or, or at least unhappy with, with some of the conditions that Anthropic were trying to put on the use of their technology. And so, in that sense, it sort of feels like nothing has necessarily changed, right? That there are people in the White House who want to use Anthropic's technology, want them involved in these decisions, and others who

• 7:38Speaker 00

  really, really, really, really don't. And in terms of this agreement, I, I think, yeah, it seems just not super meaningful. And, and what is meaningful is just the fact that they felt that this was something worth doing, that they've like, kind of, you know, as indicated by the fact that they misspelled "United States," like, it seemed like they kind of rushed to put all of this together. And so, the fact that this kind of gesture was needed seems significant, even if I don't think the, the agreement itself is going to lead to any major changes. I thought, I think Mark Zuckerberg said that this is a first step, which, I mean, is, is pretty impressive when even Mark Zuckerberg is being like, "Yeah, this really isn't doing a lot, but at least we're all here saying we're

• 8:23Speaker 00

  gonna try to do good here."

• 8:25Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, let's all hold hands. I do think that there was one important thing that happened, and to me, this is the point of it, which was a rebranding exercise around AI. AI is going to kill us, it's scary, it is going to take jobs, but superintelligence is not. And to me, that was the message. This isn't my personal belief, to me, that was the message. And you saw that the naming is now "superintelligence" officially from the White House, so SI instead of AI. You saw a bunch of executives, notably Elon Musk, correcting himself with, you know, Trump saying, "It's SI." And so, and you see, then,

• 9:06Kirsten Korosec?

  just within the last day or two, any of these tech executives who have then posted on X using the term "superintelligence," the buzzy startup, "Safe Superintelligence," seems, you know, well-positioned now to take advantage of, of this renaming. But to me, that was the big purpose of this, was, "Let's rebrand, this isn't scary, we, we're on top of this, and proceed as normal."

• 9:35Speaker 02

  I think that makes a lot of sense, but I also want to point out, I think there's like, multiple levels of delusion happening here. One, is that just the rebranding and the renaming is gonna, is gonna change things. What people are asking for is, you know, a more transparency, more detail about what this technology is going, how it's gonna be implemented, how it's gonna affect them. What does it really mean to have a data center in your backyard? Why does it have to be negotiated in secret? Like, those are the reasons that people are pushing back on this stuff, more than anything else. And so, just changing the name and moving the goalposts that are like, 100 years out anyways, doesn't seem like it's gonna move the needle for me. And to me, it's, you know, it's very similar.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  I just published a story yesterday about Elon Musk and Tesla, still a year out, struggling to define, quote-unquote, "amazing abundance." And it's just very clear that all of these folks have communication problems. The other levels of delusion are, like, David Sacks posting on X that this is like, the modern-day Bretton Woods, which is like, the conference that was called, "Together after the World War II to reset the world order," which is just, whoa, boy, there's a lot to unpack there. You know, and it's just, I don't know, that's, that's all I gotta say about that.

• 10:47Kirsten Korosec?

  I'm sure that there was a lot of deal-making happening with that many people together. Let's just, but, I mean, so, so I think that there is a lot that happens in the background that is critically important and will probably shape history in many ways, but not in the way that it's been framed.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Yes, but it's not like these people were not already, it's not like these people were not already really close to each other and involved in each other's business, right? Like, this was not like some, "Oh, they're finally all in a room together." Like, they, they all have pieces of each other's business in different ways.

• 11:15Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't raise it to that level of importance. You know, I think that while this is happening, and it feels a little bit theatrical, it feels like a branding exercise, it feels like a lot of these other things, at the same time, there are consumer AI

• 11:29Kirsten Korosec?

  Product announcements happening and it has a very different feel, a very, let's say, warm and fuzzy feel to it. And I'm kind of talking about, of course, Muse and its Jolly Avatar, but also OpenAI just launched this past week, Dots, which is this little bubbly, floating cartoon that you can shape in different ways, Dot. And then, of course, there's been endless, you know, memes and rivalry from the folks at Meta using Jolly to, you know, throw shade on Dots. But there's this general effort while this White House meeting and luncheon was happening, while all this was happening at a very high, you know, federal policy level,

• 12:13Kirsten Korosec?

  then actual products coming out. And it feels like we're living in a little bit two separate worlds there.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, although, again, they, they do feel linked because you did say before, right, the main thing to come out of this White House meeting was essentially a rebranding effort. And on some level, what we're talking about with both Meta and now OpenAI are new products, but we're also talking about an attempt on some level to rebrand AI and make it kind of more cutesy, more friendly. In the case of Dots in particular, I found it, I mean, actually, I think in both cases, I found it a little bit strange and baffling, not in the sense that, I mean, why wouldn't, if you're making a consumer product, you'd want to make it seem kind of cuddly and cute. But in both cases, it seemed like a slightly awkward fit in the case of like the Meta, you know, Avatar, that basically they're

• 13:01Speaker 00

  like, this is for adults, this is for adults. Like, why does it look like it's for children, then? This is so strange. And then in the case of the OpenAI Avatar, you know, it seemed like, or the agent, you know, the use cases that were being described in, at least in the TechCrunch story about it, were all these not super consumer use cases. It was about programming, it was about scientists. And so it was strange to think, well, why would somebody like that need this kind of, you know, very friendly packaging when you're talking about like, scientific or enterprise use cases? I, it seemed like, again, as much a branding exercise as it was sort of a product exercise.

• 13:41Kirsten Korosec?

  And we talked about this last week with like, Meta, that seems to make sense. With OpenAI, to your point, it was a little bit of a mismatch because, sure, push into consumer AI, but then have the tool, this dot, do the thing that a consumer would be using it for. And so I'm gonna make a prediction right now, I know we usually do this at the end of the year, but I don't think Dots is gonna go far. That's just, no shade on OpenAI, I just, I do think, or it's gonna go through like, a pretty extreme pivot to get to where it needs to be.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, because once again, we're dealing with sort of a communication issue, but also I think in this case, maybe more of a, more of a fundamental philosophical issue, which is that what these things are being pitched as useful for is, you know, often out of touch with how most consumers use technology, or like what they even need, you know, solutions for, right? So often, we see these agents being used to, you know, the, I think the one that everybody has settled on this week to sort of pick apart as a bad example is like, making restaurant reservations, or like, making multiple restaurant reservations, or getting reservations at the hard-to-get reservation spot, you know, like, all this

• 15:01Speaker 02

  kind of stuff that like, man, most people are like, running out of money because groceries keep getting more expensive and gas is outrageous. And it's just like, not a thing that people understand is, like, oh, that's gonna, it's just not gonna change their lives materially. And I still think that there's a lot of work to be done by these companies if they think that it's gonna happen to find use cases that make sense for a majority of people. And it's just not, it's just not there.

• 15:32Speaker 00

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• 16:08Speaker 00

  Our colleague Russell did a really good piece about sort of the kind of landscape around consumer AI right now, what the obstacles are. And, you know, I think he makes, tries to lay out sort of what the optimistic case might be, but then I think drills in on why not to be optimistic. And he talked about this, you know, Andreessen Horowitz presentation, which they tried to spin as a positive thing, but I found pretty surprising is just that right now, I think, and I think this is probably in the United States, but basically like, 2% of people are currently paying for AI, some sort of AI product. And you're not seeing, you know, sometimes, of course, you look at a startup's growth curve, right? And the numbers are very low, but every month, you see this huge exponential increase. And so

• 16:51Speaker 00

  if you kind of just keep drawing that line out, you know, for another year, it gets to very high. But actually, in terms of like, paid growth for consumer, that's not the case. It just seems to be, you know, a slight tick up every month. And obviously, with a lot of this negative sentiment around AI, it's not clear that that line, that there's gonna be a dramatic change in that growth trajectory. So it's, again, very clear then why a lot of these companies, as they're preparing to go public, are focusing on the enterprise side instead, because, you know, enterprise has money to spend. And so it's this interesting dilemma of, I think that, that it seems like consumer is not where the money is going to be, at least in the near term. But also to sort of justify these

• 17:32Speaker 00

  kinds of valuations, these kind of promises of how much AI is gonna change the world, I think they also need to have some degree of a consumer presence as well, or I think on some level, they're just not gonna sort of live up to the hopes that people have for them.

• 17:48Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up the sort of justifying the, the valuations. And that 2% number is, it is pretty wild, because if you were to focus on certain circles in, in social media, or, you know, certain, like, X accounts, you would think that 90% of the population is using these AI tools. And there's just not. But I will say that in spite of that, we do see IPO activity happening, which I do want to get into. Um, it's an interesting thing that's happening right now, which is you've had a couple of

• 18:28Kirsten Korosec?

  really positive IPOs. And Sean, I'm, you're probably gonna disagree with me, but I'll put SpaceX in the camp of, of a positive IPO. I mean, I know that it hasn't maintained some of the heights it had in the beginning, but it is a company that has been able to maintain. Then you have Anthropic, which appears to be going forward with its IPO, its, its S1 was leaked. But then you have companies that have pulled back, like Aura, which just pulled back its IPO. So it seems like there's this mixed bag. And you have maybe two companies, I think, that are holding on to, like, most of the valuation of recent

• 19:10Kirsten Korosec?

  IPOs. And one is SpaceX, and one is SK Hynix. And other than that, like, that's like the bulk of all of the, the value that's come out since, whatever, the summer. So what does this mean, I guess, for both of you, moving forward? I mean, Sean, I'm sure you have an opinion on this of like, is the IPO window closing?

• 19:36Speaker 02

  I mean, certainly, that's the question of the back end of this year, right? Like, Aura pulling its IPO would indicate, you know, that that's, that there is a slowing down or more caution in the world, and in the market. And I think the other thing to point out is that, you know, Sam Altman finally sort of came out and said, in a more explicit way, you know, previously, this had just been sort of reported from some other news outlets, but, you know, came out and said, basically, We're probably holding our IPO, even though they've confidentially filed until they feel that sort of quote unquote, their technology is safe, which, boy, how do you define that?

• 20:21Speaker 02

  The more that we learn how unsafe it can be. But I think that the point there, they're not only holding back, but there are now a bunch of reports that they are turning back to the private markets for another massive funding round, which I think that to me is maybe the most important thing. I mean, certainly not every company is OpenAI and isn't going to be able to raise like OpenAI. But we've talked about it a little bit earlier in this episode and certainly in weeks past. There is so much, especially from exits like the SpaceX IPO, there's so much money in the venture world right now, and there are these massive funds. So like, the idea that that has been tapped out and these companies

• 21:00Speaker 02

  had to go to public markets is not necessarily true. And so I think OpenAI turning back to the private markets in the next six months or so, it makes me think that more people, more companies will probably hesitate a little bit at going public than they had six months prior to this. Last thing I'll say about that is that it makes me wonder, there are a couple of other companies outside the AI-specific world that we know are kind of heading towards an IPO. Like, the one that really comes to mind for me is Waymo. Waymo just wrapped up, I think it was what, $16 billion funding round earlier this year, I think in February. And so many people thought that their next step would be an IPO and

• 21:41Speaker 02

  some sort of either spin out or separation a little bit from Alphabet. If they turn back to the private markets for another round, I think then, yeah, we're really in the conversation of the IPO market really cooling off, for tech at least.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have to imagine a lot of that is also going to depend on how the Anthropic IPO goes. And that if it is really as spectacularly successful as I think everyone is hoping, then that doesn't, I think there's not a lot of other companies that are quite in that category. But at least then there's like, a sign that there's some positive reception here, some hope. Versus if it is kind of a mixed bag, then I think you're definitely going to see the window close, because it'll be like, if Anthropic can't do well on the public markets, who can? I also wanted to zoom in a little on the OpenAI side for a second, because like you said, Sam Altman has now been giving a couple of interviews and statements about this idea that, oh, we have to focus on safety rather than going

• 22:39Speaker 00

  public. And I think that, it's not that I necessarily think that that's an entirely deceptive statement, but certainly, there's a lot of reporting that suggests that's not the only reason that they're delaying it. And that, for example, I think there was a feeling, or again, a reported feeling, that they looked at the SpaceX IPO and they were like, that's not quite how we would want ours to go, that it started really high, but then it did, wasn't able to hold on to all of that value. And if our financials are kind of evaluated in the same way, we could have a similar experience, and that's not what they want. So it'll be certainly very interesting to see what happens there.

• 23:21Kirsten Korosec?

  Sure, capital markets, public markets, provide a lot of capital, and a lot of companies make that choice. But there is also a lot more eyes on your balance sheet, and you have to justify those valuations. You have, shareholders are putting a different level of risk than a VC that knows the founder and is willing to take a bet. And so I think that a company that is still figuring out its business model, I might hesitate to go into the public markets as well. Not saying that any of these companies have ever followed that path, by the way, because we have plenty of examples of that. But I do think that

• 24:05Kirsten Korosec?

  that's an important thing to remember, is that the siren call of the public markets, can be hard to deny. But once you get there, the people evaluating you, the investors and shareholders, they don't mess around, and they have very specific expectations. And so if you're a company like OpenAI that has users and is growing, but is burning through a lot of capital, maybe you pause. I don't know.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we should say, Reuters did some really good reporting, they clearly got a hold of part or all of Anthropic's S1. And we're talking $42 billion lost last year alone, spending more than $7 billion on compute last year. The revenue, as many people have reported over the last few months, has been going up. Clearly Anthropic wanted to sort of cede that, or somebody at Anthropic or on the cap table wanted to cede that ahead of the actual S1 filing coming out. But we also got some details from what we've been waiting to see, which was what they're warning about in this. The risk factors section alone

• 25:13Speaker 02

  is 80 pages, which is, even I don't think I've ever seen one that long before. Usually risk factor sections are, I don't know, 20 to 40, 40 being on the high end. And in particular, warning that the AI could pose, quote, catastrophic or existential risks to humanity because of behaviors that it's exhibited in the past, like, quote, resisting shutdown, or concealing or manipulating information, or other behavior, quote, resembling blackmail. So we've got some, we've got some reading ahead of us in the coming weeks.

• 25:48Kirsten Korosec?

  Small risk, small risk factors there.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  I did want to mention one other financial thing that I think came out in the reporting, which again, it's not public yet. I certainly haven't gotten a chance to read it. I'm excited to take a look when it does. I think that there has been reporting that they said that they are, they did recent, have had profitable months in the last few months, and that is, was surprising. I guess this has come out a little bit before, but it also depends on how you're adjusting certain things and what you're accounting for in the cost. But that, hey, like Anthropic maybe is a profitable company, or will be a profitable company when it goes public?

• 26:25Kirsten Korosec?

  I'm a skeptic on that one, I would say. We do have, as much as I love talking about IPOs, we do have two deals that I want to at least dive into a little bit. And one was a story, actually, I think a couple of them. Sean, you've got the whole perspective here. But one of them was maritime intelligence startup Quartermaster. And this one got my attention, not just because of the amount, which was $140 million, but what they're doing. And it is kind of interesting.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, not just that, but the fact that they are already raising a Series B after closing their A, which was also a pretty sizable $43 million back in May. So they are, this was a very quick turnaround. And in fact, their round got preempted by an investor. So they had planned on going back to the markets and raising some more money relatively soon, but it happened even quicker. And I talked to the founder, Neil, who is a really interesting guy, and I think is just a perfect example of kind of right place, right time with an idea. Basically speaking, they have this thing that they call smart mast. Imagine the mast or any kind of high up spot on a ship, and it could really be anything, cargo

• 27:38Speaker 02

  ship, all the way down to smaller vessels. And they're just adding sort of weather hardened sensors, some stuff that's just like off the shelf, too. This isn't really anything like crazy events. They're not throwing like 40 LiDARs up on a mast or anything like that. They really are just sort of like, looking at this maritime space as one that has been sort of left behind by a lot of this technology, and the ability to apply AI and interpret what's going on. And the idea being, you now just have, if you use their technology, you have way more awareness of what is happening on the ocean. And not only from an operator perspective, and like liability, just general sort of like, what

• 28:20Speaker 02

  happened, and can we make sure we know for sure what happened, but also from an insurance perspective, and also for the people on the shores, like the sort of local governments that have these vessels come in and out of port. And so, yeah, they raised $140 million Series B. And it's just, I think, the other piece that I wrote about in the story that I think is also clear, speaking of right place, right time, with everything that's been happening in and around the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz, is just, at least the way that Neil was talking to me about it, is now even more abundantly clear to potential investors, how much of an opportunity they have ahead of them in this space.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Reading the story, I just thought, this is like, sounds like very, very cool. And like, there's a pretty big opportunity here. I also just, yeah, I like the name, I like the name of the product, which is, I feel like increasingly rare with tech companies nowadays. I was curious, like, you touched on a little bit in the story, also just sort of the competitive landscape. I mean, it seems like this was not an area where there's too many other companies trying to do something similar.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Not really, and not at this scale. I think this is one of those instances where they really did find something that was pretty novel and hadn't really been explored. And not just right place, right time for funding right now, but right place, right time as a company to be doing this at a time when you can really maximize what you're able to get out of putting these sensors on there, versus if you do this 10 or 15 years ago, you're talking about. You know, capturing footage locally, offloading it at the end of a trip, maybe, you know, spending days or weeks analyzing it. This is far more real time. They have something like, I think it's like tens of gigabytes of data they're generating with these things per day,

• 30:05Speaker 02

  per vessel, and they have 650 equipped vessels now with deliveries out for 800 of them around the world. And they're, they're all over too, up in the Arctic and the, and the Subarctic. And so they're also proving out that the technology can withstand what can be pretty brutal, brutal environments on the sea.

• 30:21Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah. To me, what was most interesting, I guess, or surprising is that no one's done this before. Um, because it just, it's like one of those ideas where you're like, oh, I just assumed that something like this existed and it clearly doesn't. And the large amounts of data, I'm very curious to see how the company evolves with what it does with all of that data and information. Uh, there's another company that you wrote about that is also kind of tackling, again, like one of these areas of industry that you're like, oh, why surely someone's doing that already. And that's, you know, really dealing about supply chains. So this is a company, it's called Atomic, I believe. And it was what,

• 31:04Kirsten Korosec?

  founded by some ex Tesla folks? And what is it that they're doing that's so special?

• 31:09Speaker 02

  There's three of these guys. One of them is now joining the company. There was only two of them originally last year, but these were three of the guys that were basically doing the supply chain work on things like the Model 3 and the Model Y. Model 3 in particular, famously quote unquote, production hell. You know, they were solving problems about how to, how to get and move and all the parts in the most sort of extreme environment you could imagine in the automotive world, moving is faster than anybody had. And so their idea was, you know, let's take that learned experience and build a whole company around that with more modern AI assisted technology. And so that's basically what they're doing. And they have gone from last year to now, working with major technology companies like DoorDash

• 31:54Speaker 02

  and HelloFresh. Now, the, the basic idea here being like, you want to minimize, you want to strike a balance as a company that's working with any kind of inventory of minimizing the amount of inventory you have at any given moment, but also being constantly ready to provide your customers, whether that's other companies or, or, you know, regular consumers with what they want, when they want it. And that can get really tricky, especially again, nowadays, when like modern supply chains are getting sort of barreled left and right by unforeseen things. And so they've had a lot of success with this. They were, interestingly enough, they're one of these companies that was sort of incubated at DVX, which is John McNeil, the former Tesla president, his VC firm, but done in a way that is a little different from what they normally do. Normally they will come up with an idea and match a

• 32:39Speaker 02

  CEO to it. This one was a little bit more organic, where Michael Rossiter and his co-founders had the idea and wanted to, wanted to pursue this and they, they started within DVX and then spun out.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  One of the really striking things in your stories was also, you mentioned DoorDash was one of the customers and already that's like, I think, pretty impressive for an early stage startup. Um, you know, especially for a company like DoorDash where logistics is so crucial. But apparently like, it sounds like, like 90% of their purchasing is being run through the atomic system. And I was then struggling to reconcile that a little bit with the fact that, I mean, these are relatively small rounds so far. I think it's a $12.5 million round, maybe 15 million raised so far. Um, I feel like, I don't know, a few months ago, an AI company that was like working with these kinds of big customers would be raising like 10x this. Am I, am I crazy?

• 33:29Speaker 02

  I don't think you're crazy. I think that's a good thing to think about. I think the, the explanation there is sort of like twofold. One, this is just their series A. And I think, you know, speaking to, I spoke to John McNeil for this story. He seems to think that, you know, things are about to pick up with what they're doing. Uh, and, and especially now that they have a bunch of revenue growth that they can show by onboarding some of these customers and they've really proven out the model. He thinks that it could probably move pretty quickly from here. I think the other thing to consider too is like, this is a pretty small team. I don't remember the exact number of folks, but this is one of the more sort of software heavy companies in, in a space like this. They're

• 34:14Speaker 02

  not dealing with big assets or anything like that. And so without a big team and without that piece of it, there's just a naturally lower number that they're going to be working with. Whereas like Quartermaster, they're manufacturing those smart masts all themselves uh, on top of, you know, doing all the sales and AI and everything else. So I think those are the things that are really feeding into why it feels like a smaller round.

• 34:36Kirsten Korosec?

  I want to squeeze in one more deal very briefly because um, it's very timely. So another story that you wrote, again, Sean, Charter Space raises $5 million to bring insurance to the stars. And we're not talking about Hollywood stars. We're talking about space. And the reason why I wanted to bring it up is that they were a startup battlefield finalist last year. And that is one of the more exciting pieces of disrupt and it's coming up. So how timely. They've found some success, it sounds like, from, um, you know, gaining some interest, going through the competition, obviously having a sound enough business plan to raise some money.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it would surprise most people that despite the increased activity in space and the amount of satellites being launched and everything, uh, that many of those are not insured. And so this whole, you know, Charter's whole thing is, you know, finding a way to make a marketplace for insurance for, you know, space based objects, satellites or, or otherwise. Uh, and it really started from a place where they were developing this kind of engineering software because the founder, Yu Chi Chan, was sort of disillusioned with the state of space engineering software and how disparate it was. And so he wanted to build a centralized thing and then realized that there was value uh, in plugging that into like an insurance underwriting marketplace, basically, because one of the reasons that

• 36:04Speaker 02

  satellites aren't often insured is because it just costs a lot of money to insure them because typical insurance underwriters don't have an understanding of what goes into these or they'll see a piece on, on a satellite that's like a, you know, a fuel tank and think that's, that's increasing the risk by X amount because it could explode, right? So their whole thing was trying to like, start this kind of, you know, essentially from first principles and rework a new insurance marketplace for space. And, and it's, uh, you know, it was cool. They were one of the more energetic startups last year, uh, just like so like fully believe in themselves, uh, on stage and backstage. And, you know, it was cool to see them like really translate that to some success in, in less than a year.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was a great way to put it, Sean. I, I definitely remember their presentation and I remember meeting them that they were, I mean, they were great and they were, as you said, they, they were very confident. They absolutely believed in themselves. I'm glad to hear that that confidence is paying off. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but Equity will be back next week. And until then you can follow us at Equity Pod on X and Threads.

• 37:09Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is hosted by TechCrunch senior reporters and produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Cal. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.