Anthropic’s S-1 is here. Does AI pay off?

After weeks of speculation and leaks, Anthropic finally released the S-1 filing for its IPO, showing revenue of $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026, with a net loss of $80.7 billion. At around the same time, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer sparked a backlash after boasting about using her AI app Dazzle to answer questions about her daughter for a school presentation. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and Anthony Ha dig into the long-awaited financial details behind one of the industry’s biggest companies, looking at both the enormous opportunities and the many, many risks. They’re also joined by Amanda Silberling to discuss a more basic question facing the industry: Are AI execs too out-of-touch to build products for normal people? Listen to the full episode to hear more about: What Anthropic’s S-1 reveals about its enterprise strategy Why an Apollo economist said that AI has delivered “zero financial payoff” New funding for Bedrock Robotics, a startup building self-driving excavators Why manufacturing accelerator Re:Build just raised $2.1 billion 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.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.

• 0:05Kirsten Korosec?

  Anthropics S1 finally dropped, but one Apollo economist says AI has delivered a zero financial payoff outside of tech. So who's really benefiting from the AI boom? Also this week, Marissa Mayer's new AI assistant has sparked a wave of backlash over what tech leaders think people want from AI. And we're keeping an eye on a couple of deals, including a $600 million funding round for a startup that's building self-driving excavators. Stick around.

• 0:42Kirsten Korosec?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Kirsten Korsak, Transportation Editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined, as always, by our Weekend Editor, Anthony Ha, and Senior Reporter, Special Project, Sean O'Kane, and dot, dot, dot, we have a special guest today I'm very excited about. And this is one of our senior reporters who we talk about all the time. Amanda Silberling, thank you for coming on the show today to talk about what other exciting stuff you have going on in the AI internet culture world universe.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I'm happy to be here. I feel like this is a meta experience in that sometimes I will listen to Equity and then someone will be like, well, Amanda wrote this thing. And I'm like, oh, no, I've been perceived.

• 1:29Sean O'Kane?

  Now you're full spectrum perceived. Yeah.

• 1:32Anthony Ha?

  Well, Amanda, I heard you wrote a thing specifically about AI executives and how they might be out of touch. Do you want to just kind of recap that for our listeners?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Yes, so I've been noticing that AI executives, I think, are bad at promoting their products. And most recently, we've seen people get a little up in arms about the way that Marissa Mayer, who was one of the earliest Google engineers, former Yahoo CEO, with her new AI company, Dazzle, the way that she portrayed it made people kind of mad because the way she described it was that she was very impressed with this tool, which looks at your camera roll and then acts as an AI assistant that learns about you based on the pictures you

• 2:23Speaker 02

  take on your phone, which is an interesting idea because, yeah, like you're learning way more about a person than maybe just looking at their email or like their work life. But she used the bad example that gave her a bit of an uncharitable display in the media where she said that she asked it to make bullet points about her daughter so that she could tell her daughter's teacher, what are three things about my daughter that make her special?

• 2:53Kirsten Korosec?

  Pause for that. Let it all sink in. I have to say, as soon as I saw that, I just stopped and I kind of hung my head for a moment and I'm like, oh, please let this be out of context somehow. Please, please, please.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  I would say it's a little bit out of context. I guess we don't know what exactly happened in this interview with the New York Times where she said this, but after it was published, she was saying that she felt that the quote made it seem like she needed the AI to help her accomplish this, but rather she is the CEO of a company and is using the product she made to do various things. But basically what it came up with was that her daughter is creative, empathetic, and an animal lover. And the way that the AI worked was that it came across pictures of her daughter where

• 3:43Speaker 02

  she made little projects in kindergarten that were related to like sand cat playground, snake D venimer, which is very cute. And that does illustrate that she is empathetic, creative, and cares about animals. But I think that sometimes these executives are so out of touch that they don't understand that the general public is going to hear this and be like, oh, my God, why do you need an AI to tell you three fun facts about your daughter? And we see this happen repeatedly where Sam Altman often talks about how he thinks that parenting would be impossible without ChatGPT.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  We see like Mark Zuckerberg talk about how people typically only have three friends. I don't know where he's getting that statistic from, but that is what he said. But that we have the capacity for 15 and that AI is something that can stand in and help people achieve those 15 relationships. And again, I do think these quotes can be blown out of context where Mark Zuckerberg did say, as I said in my article, like, you know, like, there is benefits to personal relationships, but if you don't have access to that, then, you know, those extra 12 friends out of your 15 total friends that you want to have could be a computer, could be fun.

• 5:06Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you talk about context because there's both the context of, you know, trying to be fair as journalists to what they're saying, you know, what was the larger conversational context? But there's also the context in which people are hearing these statements, right? And there's this general feeling, I think, right now where there's a lot of societal skepticism about AI, this feeling that, you know, the people running these companies don't have our best interests at heart, that they're out of touch. And so you would also just think, maybe don't make statements like that because of course, people are going to see them very skeptically. And so I think they are trying to walk this delicate balance of, on the one hand, they kind of feel there, you know, there's a tremendous financial incentive for them to make the

• 5:51Anthony Ha?

  case that you should use this technology in every aspect of your lives. But when you make that case, it actually paints not always a very appealing picture. In some cases, it's downright like dystopian.

• 6:05Kirsten Korosec?

  First of all, Anthony, if they took your advice, we would have nothing to talk about on this show. So, you know, but I will say this, there's, there's this whole idea like ChatGPT making and other AI tools making your life easier when it comes to personal relationships. And in many of these cases, it just seems to overcomplicate what would be like observing your child.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  But that might be hard for some people, the people who are building these products. And it doesn't necessarily relate to like everyone else out there in the world. And so it can just seem so incredibly disconnected when you see these quotes for, for everyone else. So it just, to me, it always comes back to like, who are they speaking to? Are there people out there who can relate? Maybe, maybe there are. Yeah, and I think that a lot of the time, other use cases we've seen people mention are like the Bumble CEO, Whitney Wolfe Hurd, has made comments about, well, what if we had like AI concierges among your dating, like your AI dates the other person's AI?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  And then if the AIs have a good date together, then they introduce the people. Or in the New York Times article, Marissa Mayer mentioned like, well, what if my AI could coordinate with my husband's AI and stuff like that? And I think that it feels like people are trying to over-optimize out of just having conversations with people. And I feel like I've already seen that happen in my generation where I do notice in myself that if I'm ordering takeout, it feels weird to call a place. Like, I'm just so used to like, well, obviously you can do it online and you don't have to talk to anyone. And I feel like there's just going to be more of these things where basic human interaction

• 7:54Speaker 02

  gets more and more optimized out of actually occurring. And call me old school, but I think that humans being able to talk to each other is probably a net positive for society.

• 8:09Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, but what's the ROI, Amanda? You know, how much, how much revenue can you generate of a conversation that somebody's having in meat?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  That is, that is the thing, though, is that it's like dating is really inefficient. Like, it sucks that you have to go on a bunch of dates with different people. You might waste an evening and be like, well, that was a bust. And so you can see why people are like, well, what if you didn't have to go on dates? What if your AI could go on dates for you? But like,

• 8:39Speaker 02

  There's just something not human there. And then also you are outsourcing the decision of who you are going to date to a computer that you are trusting knows you better than yourself, which I don't think is true.

• 8:53Kirsten Korosec?

  So one thing that I think is like worth sort of going back to, and I sort of hinted about this earlier, which is like, who are they talking to? Who is their, who is their audience? Like for all these like optimizations, you know, in your view, Amanda, it's, it sounds like I might know the answer to this, but is this, you know, a product problem? Right? It's like, you know, or is it a messaging problem? Like, are they just talking about it in the wrong way? And actually, there's like, there's really great value in here and it just seems out of touch with reality and humanity. But, but if they just talked about it differently, um, it would be better. Or is it, you know, like actually a product problem? And to your point, that we're focusing on optimizing sort of the wrong things with AI tools?

• 9:38Speaker 02

  I think it's a little bit of both, but I think that the marketing problem comes from when you have these high up people at these massively valuable companies in a room together, talking about the pain points in their lives. And it's like making dinner reservations, booking flights and like, everybody does those things, but like, I'm not booking flights once a week. Like, I'm not making dinner reservations all the time. Like, yeah, I mean, obviously people find value from things like ChatGPT and Claude. But I think the value that the average person is finding isn't necessarily like booking a flight for me.

• 10:17Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, I totally agree that like, that, you know, it just seems like so much of their experience is, you know, maybe a little different from the average person. And of course, like, all these things are sort of abstractions. Like, what is the average person? I mean, there, there's millions of different average people, right? One of the things I've also been thinking about is like, when I was, you know, because I'm incredibly old, I'm like, you know, there are companies like Uber that when it first launched, it was sort of targeting this kind of tech early adopter set in San Francisco. And I remember being very confident, like, this will never catch on more broadly. This is just, um, like it's for a very narrow audience of young, urban, like millennials who have money to spare on cars. And it works specifically well in San Francisco.

• 10:57Anthony Ha?

  And so like, for a lot of things, the tech industry has succeeded by betting that, you know, hey, like people have not kind of caught up with us, but we are sort of the leading edge. And then we reflect kind of what the consumer of the future looks like, the family of the future looks like. And in this case, it just seems like that, that is sort of not borne out yet. I mean, for a variety of reasons, partly because I think the society that this technology is being promoted into is very different when people are starting to say like, I don't love the influence that this technology is having in my life. I don't love that you're pitching this as something where all, like every experience is my life that I should be optimized out of, but actually I want to live my own life. I actually want to parent my own children.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that it's not a coincidence that at the same time, we see this over-optimization happening among people in tech, that there's also a movement of people that are reverting back to wanting to use flip phones, which I've talked about on Equity before, or people who are buying CDs because they're tired of an algorithm telling them what they want to listen to. And it is just an interesting cultural tension that's happening where we haven't found the balance of what optimization actually helps us and what optimization just makes us feel like we aren't as human as we want to be.

• 12:20Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, Amanda, you'll be happy to know that I have a massive, massive CD and even tape collection. So if you're ever looking to, you know, go really analog, just, you know, give me, give me a ring and I'll, I'll happily share them with you. We do have to say goodbye to Amanda for now. Thanks so much for coming on. I hope you come on a lot more often.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. I hope to be back more often as well. And I hope that people know things about their kids, is what I'll say.

• 12:52Anthony Ha?

  So I think one of the reasons we're talking about this question of do tech CEOs, do AI CEOs know what people actually want, is because we're now at the point where some of these companies are actually going public. And the Anthropic S1, which we've talked about in pretty much every episode of this show is now officially available to the public. We've written about it a bunch at TechCrunch. Sean, I know, like, you know, on, on a weekly basis, you will talk about your excitement about seeing the S1. So what jumped out to you?

• 13:21Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the big thing is that we have pretty much what looks like a, an actual business here. This is a company that we've talked about before, has been kind of remarkably focused from day one. It hasn't gone on all these, you know, quote unquote, side quests that OpenAI has gone on. You know, to some extent, it needs to do that because it's not a company like Google where it can generate a whole bunch of revenue from a, a search and ads business or, or Waymo, you know, like it does not have the luxury of buffering against this incredibly expensive play. It doesn't own its own compute, so it's paying kind of through the nose for that. But it, that focus has paid off. We have a company that, you know, is, is really growing its revenue like crazy.

• 14:04Sean O'Kane?

  It was up to sort of more than $16 billion in the first half of this year, which is an enormous jump from last year where there were basically just about a billion. And they have, I think the, one of the things that really stuck out to me was they have a ton of customers, like an enormous number of customers who are paying sort of more than a hundred thousand dollars a month. And, you know, they've just really laser focused in on enterprise work and all this stuff, and it seems to really be paying off. I think there are still very big questions about the amount of money they have committed to companies like SpaceX to pay for compute down the road. They have, I think if you total it all up, it, it's kind of not a hundred percent clear in the document, but it's, I mean, we're, we're talking about like approaching a trillion

• 14:46Sean O'Kane?

  dollars that they've committed to pay out over the next like decade or couple of decades, which is a lot of money. And, and so there are questions about how they're going to be able to, to hit all that. But, you know, there were no like giant bombs hiding in here. And I think they properly address the existential risks that they face too. They seem to have addressed pretty much every risk. Their risk factor section is like, uh, nearly a hundred pages long. So yeah, there's, there's a lot here to dig into.

• 15:15Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I was going to say the, the risk factors section, which I do want to talk about in, in a sec, um, to me was, you know, maybe not a bomb. I guess I should have expected it, but it was unusually long. To your point earlier, we're still waiting on a couple more details, but I do want to note that they don't just have customers. Their revenue is insane. I mean, 16.3 billion in the first six months of the year. That's versus 1.2 billion the same period, um, same six month period the year before. Those losses though, to your point of paying for compute and other things, obviously are stacked up 80 billion, I believe, um, in the first half of the year.

• 15:58Kirsten Korosec?

  So to me, they have a real business case. We wrote about this a little bit, which is that they're really trying to put their hooks into the enterprise customer, which seems to be a very important, you know, revenue driver for them. And now it's like, can they start closing that loss? Because shareholders aren't going to accept that forever. Right now they're fine with it, right? We're talking about a company that's probably going to be valued at a trillion dollars. They're okay with it, but eventually you got to close that gap.

• 16:29Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, although there's a very surprising kind of nuance to the loss discussion as well, uh, which is that I think 80 billion is the net loss for the first half of the year. But the, the operating loss is 693 million. So, I mean, you know, orders of magnitude different. And as I understand that, so that like most of that loss is reflective of kind of all this debt and commitments that they're carrying. And so in theory, that if they need to sort of get to profitability quickly, they can. But like, you know, that debt doesn't just disappear, right? People are going to get, want to get paid for whatever it is Anthropic has committed to paying for. Every company today is looking for an edge.

• 17:14Anthony Ha?

  Better insights, faster decisions, greater resilience. But as AI drives new growth, it also creates new demands on energy and infrastructure. Schneider Electric is connecting energy, automation and digital technologies to help organizations make smarter decisions and operate more efficiently. Because the future won't be shaped by AI alone. It will be shaped by energy and industrial intelligence. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 17:38Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, and you know, I'll say, I think one of the big things that I took away from this is that while they're in position to do basically what you just said of like, move into the world of profitability and create a business that's sustainable. I don't think it's sustainable in the sense that we normally think about when we think about a company that is trying to make an entire business out of something. It's like their big problem is they need to keep investing in all of these really expensive things that make the technology possible, like renting out GPUs and renting out data center space. And there, you know, if you read kind of not even necessarily between the lines, but you read this S1, the thing that stands out is they're basically saying, we need to keep

• 18:20Sean O'Kane?

  growing in able to like, they cannot just like sort of like, you know, coast at this point. They need to keep growing because they need more money to keep investing, to keep improving the product, to keep, you know, it's just, it's this perpetual motion machine until it isn't if something breaks bad. So there's a lot to consider, I think, for people who are looking at this as a public investment. Anthropic's pitch on that is sort of like, you know, we're going to be able to do all these incredible things with biotech, with, with research, with science. And so, you know, they kind of frame it in the S1, certainly in the letter from the co-founders up top, that like, you know, think of this almost less as like an investment in a company where you're going to get dividends or something and more like being a part of

• 19:01Sean O'Kane?

  this sort of potential revolution in how we live our lives, which, you know, that's up to everybody to decide how much they want to buy into that, if they're really going to invest in this company as a public company.

• 19:13Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, speaking of buying, one of the ways that the company is growing is through acquisitions. And I spent a little bit of time going through the S1. We've reported on some of these. Coefficient bio was one. We don't exactly know, I think, with the acquisition of prices. There's some questions on valuation on that one. But if you look through the S1, they've made, I calculated about excluding coefficient bio, something like $737 million worth of acquisitions. About 260 million of those, they don't disclose. But then there's been some reporting over the past six months or so of revealing some of these, some of these companies. And there's some really remarkable ones in there.

• 19:57Kirsten Korosec?

  There is a, not disclosed in the S1, but a one-person biotech company that Anthropic bought. So to me, that's very interesting. There is the classic growth story, but they are still doing acquisitions and they seem to be focusing on very specific slices of how AI tools could be used. So biotech is one of those. And I think we're going to see more of that activity, certainly over the next year or so. So I can't wait to see what they're, what they're going to buy next. I'm sure there's a lot of founders out there who are hoping it's them.

• 20:35Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, I mean, it speaks to, I think, probably one of the, the balance that they're probably continually trying to have to strike that we've already alluded to, which is essentially, you know, that the part of the reason that they are doing relatively well right now is, is that they've been, again, relatively speaking, focused on, you know, some core use cases, enterprise customers, building a real business as opposed to just like trying to apply LLMs to everything possible. But at the same time, they need to grow, right? And, and so that they're going, I imagine that there's probably a lot of push and pull of like, we need to like move into new areas like biotech, but we have to also be somewhat strategic about it. But, you know, one of the things we also touched on earlier was risk factors.

• 21:19Anthony Ha?

  So I'm curious if anyone has a favorite or favorites of the risk factors that are worth highlighting here.

• 21:25Kirsten Korosec?

  I have a couple, but I will reserve time for Sean as well, because I know he has some as well. One, that models could be so resistant to being shut down that they may use blackmail.

• 21:37Anthony Ha?

  That's happened in testing.

• 21:38Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah. Also that it's AI tech could create liabilities. That's not very exciting. But the caveat is, is that it would be too large, not just for its own insurance coverage, but for the entire insurance industry to cover, which seems like a problem if that were to happen. And then finally, very quickly, there is an interesting one that I'm not going to get too deep into because we don't have enough time. But basically how the corporate structure is set up in a way and how it matches up with how the co-founders have sort of dedicated 80% of their personal equity to philanthropic causes.

• 22:21Kirsten Korosec?

  And the end result of this is that these founders may end up with more like great voting control and maintaining that, but less economic power. So that is kind of an interesting risk factor that, I don't know, I don't think we're going to see it play out for a long time, but that is one I'll be definitely paying attention to.

• 22:44Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of fun ones, like, you know, including some that have been reported in the run-up to the release of this, like, you know, the existential risk to humanity and all that fun stuff. I think the, I think the insurance one is, is one of my favorites because it's just like one of the most over the top things to have to point out. Like, I got to imagine the lawyers sitting in a room and being like, well, I guess we technically do need to disclose that this could run way past what the entire insurance industry is, is willing to do. Instead of focusing necessarily on like one more specific risk factor, because I think those are pretty good examples. But one other thing I want to point out about it is, you know, I'm a fan of language and words and word choice. And I thought it was really interesting.

• 23:28Sean O'Kane?

  There are two things in this document that I found really interesting. One, in the risk factor where it describes how being designated a supply chain risk by the DoD, you know, can be material to the business. Anthropic's lawyers decide to call it the Department of War, which is the sort of chosen name of the Pentagon at the moment. And that's an interesting place to go along with that idea. In contrast to that, in the definitions section of the S1, they do define SI, but it is not super intelligence. It is systems integrators, yes. So they are, they are using AI throughout this document in sort of contrast to the Trump

• 24:10Sean O'Kane?

  administration and reserving the term SI that the administration prefers so much these days for systems integrators. So I just thought those were two interesting choices because it's like where they think they want to be able to curry like a little tiny bit of favor, they'll go with what the Department of War is calling itself. And, and where they don't want to, they'll stay on their ground for now.

• 24:30Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously making any predictions is always just an exercise in like making yourself look like an idiot six months from now. But I will say that I would be very, very surprised if any of the major executives are still using super intelligence as their primary like term of art six months from now. I feel like we're going to look back and like, oh, isn't that weird that they tried to make that happen? But, you know, we'll see if I get that right. I think one other thing I want to highlight that's not so much like a singular risk factor, but, but felt like an interesting juxtaposition and, and a big question for companies like Anthropic was, over the weekend, Apollo, the, the private equity firm, you know, their chief economist put out a little note that basically said, there's been no economic value provided by AI so far, specifically at, at large corporations.

• 25:15Anthony Ha?

  Like if you take the S and P 500, you subtract, you know, the seven big tech firms, there, that essentially there's no sign that revenue is improving, revenue per employee is improving. And yet these companies have made major investments in AI. So there's a question of what is all this spending actually buying? And I think you can make a very good argument that it's simply too early to, to, to see that. But I think it speaks to the fact that we're at the point where companies are going to need to start seeing that return. And if they don't start seeing that return, I think those kind of, like those, the serious contracts that you're seeing reported in the S1, those could start going down. They could start going in the wrong direction if companies are not actually seeing a real payoff. But I think that's probably all the time we have to talk about Anthropic because we

• 26:00Anthony Ha?

  have two other deals we want to get to. The first one being a startup that does self-driving excavation. Is that right, Kirsten?

• 26:09Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, yeah. So this is a company called Bedrock Robotics. They've got this really interesting pedigree of folks who come from Waymo and sort of the robotics field. And they created this, basically this self-driving kit that can be put on to construction equipment, the excavator being like the really important one because it's such a highly skilled job. And they had a couple of breakthroughs besides just raising 600 million in new funding. They also, the same week,

• 26:43Kirsten Korosec?

  Basically now have like commercial, real commercial operations happening. And that is an important point because this company is two years old. So that's like really satisfying, right? Because oftentimes we see years of pilots and promises and MOUs and things like that. And here we have like the beginning of a real business.

• 27:04Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, it's like a cliche at this point that we go to CES every year and John Deere is talking about, or Caterpillar is talking about, you know, new ways to automate their heavy machinery. And so to see startups continue to come into this space. I mean, we've heard for so long, right? Like that autonomy was going to become a thing that was more applicable in these kinds of off-road fields. Like you're not having to worry about other traffic. Like certainly there's safety concerns, but there are reasons why it can work here in a way that it can't elsewhere. And I think that's really interesting. Also, this is just one of those companies, like you mentioned, they're only two years old. I remember when we first came across them and we were trying to run down the story about what is this company operating in stealth? Like we know Boris Softman, he's a known quantity in this space.

• 27:47Sean O'Kane?

  What is he up to for a guy who worked on big vehicles like Waymo and worked on small vehicles like little toy cars at Anki? And it's just, it's really interesting to see them move so fast. And I think it's a testament to the focus that I think that has cohered in Silicon Valley on the VC side. We had Aiden Madigan Curtis from Eclipse onstage at Disrupt just a few weeks ago. She's one of the people who led that investment into Bedrock, one of the earlier investments into Bedrock. And she is just super convicted. It was really interesting to hear her talk about sort of deploying AI like this on the edge in an area where you can't really constantly update it or tweak it and the challenges that brings.

• 28:30Sean O'Kane?

  But it just shows that like some of these VCs are so bought into these ideas now that they're willing to throw this much money at a company that seems to be gaining real traction.

• 28:38Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, and I will say also that we've seen attempts to apply, you know, machine learning AI to robotics in the form of agriculture that hasn't totally borne out. I mean, we've seen some pretty interesting acquisitions. We've also seen the downside of, you know, Sean, you've done some reporting on this, on companies that made some big promises around autonomy and tractors and things like that, applying it to farming and it really did not go well. Construction feels like the next hot area and we are seeing like quite a bit of competition in this space. Bedrock Robotics is definitely not the only one.

• 29:18Kirsten Korosec?

  But the thing about, you know, construction and also like large industrial sectors, there's so many slices. So you can do mining within this. You can, you know, be operating in the Permian Basin, you know, self-driving trucks that are off-road in closed environments. And so there's, I think, a lot of opportunity for startups. They don't have to, you know, boil the ocean here. They can really focus on this very, like very specific slices and of this very massive sort of industrial sector. It's a big opportunity, I think, for startups that are trying to, you know, make their way into physical AI.

• 30:00Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, and I think one of the other interesting points that came up in the story as well was the fact that when we talk about automation, you know, there are areas where there's very real fears about sort of what does this mean for human jobs? But construction is an area where, at least as I understand it in the United States, that actually sort of just interests, the amount of people going into these fields is going down. And so again, in theory, I mean, there's a lot of questions here, but you could imagine that this is an area where that transition can maybe be a little bit more graceful and not involve mass unemployment. But we have one more deal to talk about, and this is an even bigger investment, more than $2 billion in a startup called Rebuild, a company that I had not heard much about before reading this story. Sean, what's Rebuild?

• 30:46Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, this is a company that is based in Massachusetts and kind of keeps it low profile. They are, you could call them like sort of a domestic manufacturing accelerator, incubator, a little bit of both. It was started by Jeff Wilkie, who was the former commercial CEO at Amazon and his sort of college buddy, Miles Arnon. And they are, they've been in operation since 2020. The pitch was basically they saw in 2020 how supply chains were getting disrupted and how we were kind of left in the lurch, not being able to access stuff from China. And so they were early on this idea of reindustrialization. And their approach is basically like, you know, like incubate some startups and spin them out when necessary,

• 31:26Sean O'Kane?

  attract technologies and let them foster here or foster them here in the US. And, you know, I think the biggest, most visible thing that they've done to date was that this is where Slate Auto, which is the Bezos-backed EV startup that we've written so much about and first revealed, you know, a little over a year and a half ago, was, you know, started. It got started here by Jeff and Miles and then they brought in their first CEO. And then they spun that out in order to bring more capital into that effort. But a lot of the other things they're doing are really kind of like wonky, deep in the weeds, industrial automation and drone assembly and things like that. And so, you know, this is a lot of money for a company not a lot of people know, $2.1 billion.

• 32:09Sean O'Kane?

  It was led by General Catalyst, which is also an investor in Slate and the Strategic Investment Group from JP Morgan Chase. And so, you know, this is one of a number of companies right now that I think are doing really interesting things. I think when you think about like bring back US manufacturing, we think about big boxes in different places and filling them with robots and workers. But it's also about like fostering these technologies that contribute to that, to making that easier. And also, you know, the other problem that we have, which is there are a lot of manufacturers in this country who are capable of doing really incredible things. And so it's about finding those manufacturers, matching them up with customers, enabling them with new technologies. And I think all of that stuff is why they were able to raise so much money here.

• 32:53Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, I do have one quick question before we wrap up the show, this episode.

• 32:59Kirsten Korosec?

  Obviously, there's a lot of Amazon connections here. So, you know, there's the Jeff Bezos-backed spinout Slate Auto, which you mentioned, and then of course Jeff Wilkie. What is your sense, or is there any evidence that shows that this company specifically, working on this sort of very broad area of industrial manufacturing, does it feel like a testbed for like the next, you know, spinouts or potential companies or tech that Amazon would be interested in? Or do these, should we be viewing this as a completely, completely separate animal and just doing something that has a thread of Amazon connected to it?

• 33:39Sean O'Kane?

  I think it's probably more the latter. I think, you know, you and I both know in the amount of effort we put in to try to nail down Bezos's investment in Slate Auto, we really came away from, it was an investment that he made and it was not something he was controlling day to day. And we've spoken to their leadership a bunch of times since then about how he isn't involved in that day to day. And, you know, I think we've heard similar things in trying to report out that story about the connections to Rebuild. I think it would be silly to deny the obvious connections. Like there's just so many executives at Rebuild that have spent a lot of time at Amazon. And I think there is, you know, a network there that is supporting it that is very Amazon-heavy.

• 34:22Sean O'Kane?

  And so I think that there's, there's DNA there for sure. But I don't think this is something where Amazon is going to make this an arm of itself or anything anytime soon. This feels very focused and something that Jeff Wilkie and his partner, Miles Arnon, are running with conviction and are going to try and do something on their own.

• 34:44Anthony Ha?

  All right, well, that is all the time we have, but Equity will be back next week. And in the meantime, you can follow us at EquityPod on X and Threads. Thanks so much for listening.

• 34:56Rebecca 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.