Pod Insights Equity Podcast Why Cloudflare wants AI companies to pay for content About this episode Cloudflare wants AI companies to pay up. The cloud infrastructure provider is launching a new experiment called Pay per Crawl that would let publishers charge AI firms every time their bots scrape a site, and it could reshape how content is accessed and monetized online.
Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec and Max Zeff dig into Cloudflare’s big swing, why it’s a natural next step after a year of laying groundwork for bot-blocking tools, and whether the plan to sit at the center of a pay-for-content protocol is genius…or just wishful thinking.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
How ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, went viral thanks to backlash from former prosecutor Pam Bondi, and is now one of the most-downloaded free iPhone apps in the U. S.
Why Figma’s S-1 filing could set the stage for a blockbuster IPO, and what its 48% revenue growth says about demand for design tools
What Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman signals about its vision for the "agentic future" of productivity
Tesla co-founder JB Straubel’s new venture and how the old EV battery-powered AI data centers might just challenge Tesla's own storage business
Equity will be back next week, and for those of you in the U. S., enjoy the long holiday weekend!
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.
Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Anthony Ha? This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.
0:17 Kirsten Korosec? So this week, we had a classic example of the Streisand effect, which is when you don't want to bring attention to something, but of course you do by talking about how you don't want attention on it in regards to an app called Ice Block. Not the internal combustion engine, but the agency that handles immigration and has been quite controversial lately. Do you know the story I'm talking about?
0:42 Speaker 02 I do, I do. I think this was when US Attorney General Pam Bondi criticized this app that helps people report sightings of ICE agents. I think there was another member of the Trump administration who said that this was obstructing justice, this app. And then in the next day, it like shot to the top of the App Store. And it was total Streisand effect in action.
1:05 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah, exactly. So called despicable, got tons of attention. Now has driven an incredible rate of downloads. And we'll see if it persists. It's really interesting. We wrote about this and so you can see it in our show notes. Our cybersecurity editor, Zach Whitaker, made sure and checked to see if, what kind of data was being captured. And interestingly, this is not an app that is available on Android. It's only on iOS. The app's creator, Joshua Aaron, said it's because Android would have required them to collect user data. And Zach was able to confirm that this does not collect user data. And as a result, it's become very popular indeed. So we'll see if this persists. My prediction is it will.
1:51 Speaker 02 That tends to be the case with these things. You try to stomp it out and it just flares up.
1:55 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah. So, welcome to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Thursday, July 3rd, bringing you the show a little earlier this week before we head off into the holiday weekend. I'm Kirsten Korosec, Transportation Editor.
2:14 Speaker 02 I'm Max F., Senior AI Reporter.
2:16 Kirsten Korosec? And on the show today, we have Deals of the Week from Figma and its IPO, Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman. And then we're going to get into my visit to Redwood Materials and its next big business act, and CloudFlare launching a new marketplace. Let's start off with Figma. The company finally publicly filed its S1 on Tuesday, and I have to say, there are still some details we want to know, like share price and things like that. But there were some interesting tidbits, and I don't know if you took a look, but the numbers look pretty good for this company on a revenue front, especially.
2:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, it does look strong. It looks like it's shaping up to be potentially one of the biggest IPOs of the year. And I think, you know, before we dive too deep into the financials right now, I want to just kind of take a step back and just like think about, Figma was nearly acquired by Adobe two years ago in 2023 for $20 billion, which, you know, seemed at the time like a massively successful exit that just never came to be. It fell apart because of regulatory scrutiny at the time. But now, it seems like it's going to be worth potentially way more than that in this IPO. And, you know, the future of it seems very bright right now.
3:40 Speaker 02 So, I mean, say what you will about the regulatory environment right now for Silicon Valley startups, but this might be a case where the regulators actually may have got it right and paved the way for a way bigger exit for this company.
3:53 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah, and since we're going back into the record books, talking about Adobe, my understanding, if you recall, Figma actually got money from that.
4:03 Speaker 02 Yes.
4:03 Kirsten Korosec? For, for ending that deal, I believe it was about a billion dollars or so.
4:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, they got a billion dollars, which actually shows up in the financials that they reported in this S1. And I think in 2024 or 2023, it shows up. And yeah, so but even without that kind of billion dollar boost that they got, you could see that this, you know, in this last year, they're generating really strong revenue. I mean, Figma is a design software business of choice for most startups these days. I mean, people have just loved what they've built and it's really built a business that has a lot of affinity towards it here in Silicon Valley. So I'm very curious to see how this IPO goes.
4:42 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah. And on the revenue front, almost 750 million in revenue in 2024. That's a 48% jump from 2023. But here's what really gets me interested and excited about this IPO is that there's profits involved, which, you know, we don't always see and we don't always get to talk about on this show. The company was profitable in 2023. I will note that it did swing to a loss and that was really due to like a one-time related expenses to employee stock compensation, but profitable back again in the fourth quarter of 2024 and also in the first quarter of 2025. So they've resolved that. Now they've moved
5:25 Kirsten Korosec? on and back in profit territory, which makes it all very interesting. I'm very curious to see what they end up raising. Some are predicting about 1.5 billion dollars and it is on pace to be one of the largest IPOs to 2025. One last final thought, you know, there's been some comparisons to CoreWeave, which totally different type of company, but you know, in terms of IPO size, CoreWeave hasn't been able to sustain itself, really. It's struggled a little bit since it's gone public. So I think Figma is in a little bit better position to not just have a really large IPO, but actually sustain it. So we will see when they finally do go public and I'm sure we're going to talk about it so
6:06 Kirsten Korosec? much more. But I do want to shift to Grammarly, which kind of surprised me.
6:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, for folks who didn't see, Grammarly acquired Superhuman, which is this productivity email platform that uses a lot of AI tools. And, you know, Superhuman had raised $114 million. So this was not a very small acquisition for Grammarly. I mean, Grammarly itself, you know, they've raised $1 billion in funding, I think in a round that closed in May. So, I mean, this is a startup that they're acquiring that is not that much smaller than itself. Like, like, this was like a big acquisition for them. And Grammarly has been on kind of a rampage of these acquisitions, where I think last year, they acquired the startup Coda, that was another kind of AI productivity startup that mostly focused on docs instead
6:55 Speaker 02 of email. And I think what we're seeing is a transformation of Grammarly. I mean, most people know it as this startup, or really this tool on their computers that they use to like, correct their spelling mistakes when they're writing emails, or, I don't know, memos or whatnot. But they're trying to kind of create this bundle of productivity tools that they can sell to be like a more compelling, we're going to enhance your productivity altogether, which I think is really fascinating. And it's like, a company that has, you know, I think, a lot of mind share in consumers, and they're really trying to expand their reach into other areas.
7:30 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah, interesting, but also a little bit risky, because there are a lot of tools out there. I mean, there's, whether you're using ChatGPT, which I know a lot of folks are shifted over to that to check their grammar, check, I've even used it periodically to double check my rules. Of course, I'm so concerned about hallucinations, that then I go to the root source anyway. But there is, you know, even embedded in your Gmail, you can turn on the AI kind of assist piece. So there is a lot of competition in this space. There's always also a risk of any startup that starts to do these very large deals, that it kind of dilutes the original mission of the company, and it becomes hard
8:13 Kirsten Korosec? to parse, like, what they're actually doing. There's too many teams being integrated at once. And I'm not saying this is the case here. I've just seen it time and time again. You start doing very fast-paced acquisitions, you're onboarding all these people, it changes the culture, it changes the mission, it changes the trajectory, and a lot can get lost. Have you ever used Superhuman?
8:33 Speaker 02 I have used Superhuman before, just a couple of times just to test it out. And it's a very buzzy kind of email client that I think, you know, there's a lot of these kind of AI native email clients that are popping up these days. Like I think Notion is another popular like productivity email client that people are really interested in. But you're also seeing all of these kind of AI tools make their way into Gmail, you know, into Microsoft's like Outlook products and whatnot. But yeah, I think that the pitch here is that in the AI era, you're, all of your tools are going to become more productive and everything, every app that you use is going to be like enhanced by AI. And I think Grammarly is really leaning into that right now.
9:16 Speaker 02 And I'm not sure if that is the right strategy for someone like them who has already made themselves like a really key part of a lot of people's like daily workflows. I just want to read a line from the press release here that I think encapsulates, you know, what they're trying to do with the acquisition of Superhuman. They say that this acquisition accelerates Grammarly's evolution into an AI productivity platform for apps and agents, positioning email as a critical communication surface in the company's vision of an agentic future. And it's like, that really feels like it has nothing to do with Grammarly at all is what you know it, but.
9:54 Kirsten Korosec? But it is very, you got to go into galaxy brain mode to understand this press release. It's very exciting because it's our agentic future.
10:03 Speaker 02 So, yeah.
10:04 Kirsten Korosec? Congrats on that.
10:05 Speaker 02 It's like very small minded to just think of correcting my grammar, correcting the, the correct use of there in a sentence and instead accelerating my agentic future through email. So I mean, that they're really, you know, thinking outside the box here. Credit to them, but I, but I do think that they are kind of stepping a little bit outside of their expertise here. So we'll see how that goes.
10:30 Kirsten Korosec? Yeah, I mean, before we move on, because there's one more little deal that I have to talk about, but I do wonder if the folks at Grammarly kind of see this as an existential like necessity. If they stick in their lane and do this one product, they will be out of business sooner rather than later because of the rise of AI and AI tools being embedded in so many other products. Why would someone just go to Grammarly? So I understand what might be happening in discussions in the boardroom about like how they diversify. The question remains if it will work out for them. So, but I talked about this other deal. I do want to sneak it in because it just brings me back to like 2016. And I'm
11:13 Kirsten Korosec? talking about Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former CEO of Uber, who, you know, was forced to resign around some not great circumstances at the time. We don't need to rehash all that history. Most of it's known, but he's back, apparently trying to buy Pony AI, which is, and I should explicitly say, the US arm of Pony AI, which is a Chinese autonomous vehicle company at one time. And I haven't checked, but at one time they did have a testing permit in the state of California. I'm not sure if it's still active. So they've been around. They went public last year with a market cap of around four and a half billion
11:55 Kirsten Korosec? dollars. So I'm just fascinated with the fact that Travis wants to be back. Not surprising, though, because he's been on record saying that he sort of feels like there was a missed opportunity, that he regrets that Uber ATG was sold off. And for those who aren't familiar, Uber ATG was the self-driving arm of Uber, and that was sold off in a pretty complex deal with Aurora. Aurora actually brought in all those people. And now it's part of the self-driving trucks company Aurora. So, oh my gosh, I just, I feel like we are just repeating history and I cannot wait to see where it goes.
12:32 Speaker 02 The fascinating part of this to me was not only that Travis is, I'm sure Travis is interested in doing this. Like, that's not surprising at all. The fact that he, I think Uber's involvement in this to kind of make this transaction happen is really interesting to me. One, that they would want to work with their founder, again, kind of after they've parted ways, but also how could this accelerate Uber's efforts in the self-driving space? I mean, this has been my big question. Like, every time we hop on the show, it's like, you know, what is Uber's angle to get into this stuff? And it seems like this could be one of them.
13:06 Kirsten Korosec? Maybe. I mean, The Times reported, so The New York Times initially reported this, and Kalinic is reportedly working with investors to finance an acquisition, and Uber may even help. So I think it's important to like, you know, there's some hedging there. As far as your question, though, or your speculation about like what Uber is doing with autonomous vehicles, I mean, they've made 18 partnerships with AV companies on the mobility front and on the delivery front. And if you look at who is running Uber, Dara was formerly heading up Expedia, and I think that there is a comparison to be made there. Uber really is turning into like a network effect where it's an Expedia of sorts.
13:50 Kirsten Korosec? You want to get your AV and you use the Uber network to access that. It's obviously not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, but I think that that is sort of the business model. Whether Uber wants to then attach themselves back to Travis, I think that's kind of risky. I don't know about that one, but I totally agree with you that, yes, I think Travis 100% wants to get involved.
14:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, the co-founders of vehicle startups can go on to do some pretty wild things. And after the break, we're going to talk about Tesla co-founder JB Straboll, who has launched a new business, Redwood Energy.
14:30 Anthony Ha? Every company today is looking for an edge. 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.
14:57 Kirsten Korosec? Well, you mentioned before the break JB Strabell. And for those who are unfamiliar, he is actually still on the Tesla board. He came back, but he was considered one of the co-founders of Tesla. He's really considered, I hate to just say, oh, he's the battery nerd, but he's really the brains behind how the battery pack works, assembled. You know, he really pushed Tesla, and I think Tesla credits its existence in large part because of the work that he did. He left Tesla several years ago to pursue what I would say is like actually the root of what gets this guy going every day, which is back to batteries and less about the car, but really creating a closed-loop system.
15:42 Kirsten Korosec? So several years ago, he launched Redwood Materials. Started out as really more of a battery materials company. And their first deals were with Panasonic. So taking the scrap from production of making battery cells, stripping out all the important elements of that, processing it, and then giving it back to Panasonic. The reason why this matters is it creates a closed-loop system. So you don't have to theoretically mine as many materials, you're just continuing to recapture. But in the early days, the whole idea was that they were going to also take old EV batteries. But there wasn't a lot of stock yet because if you think about it, the Model S came out in 2012. And
16:26 Kirsten Korosec? These vehicles were still on the road. So fast forward. And basically what they've come to find in the last year is that now they're getting this huge influx of EV batteries and they're not ready to be processed. So what do you do with them? Instead, they're turning it into an energy storage business. So I was out there in Nevada at their Tahoe facility. It's actually in Sparks, Nevada. This is where famously the Tesla Gigafactory is also. You're in the middle of the desert and outside of Reno and they launched their new business.
17:00 Speaker 02 I'm fascinated by this idea of just rounding up old EV batteries and using them to power data centers, potentially AI data centers. And it sounds like from the jump, they're planning to work with a pretty notable startup, Crusoe, which for people who don't know, they're one of the bigger players in the AI data center space. They're actually a big partner with OpenAI for its Stargate projects to build out lots of AI data centers. Can you talk to me about Strabos' relationship with Crusoe and how this microgrid is going to work with AI data centers? I mean, what's the relationship there?
17:40 Kirsten Korosec? So the co-founders of Crusoe actually kind of shared this story at this event, which had very Tesla vibes. I could tell that there were Tesla people who had worked on this event because it was classically at night with hors d'oeuvres being passed and they had like a light show and they powered the whole event using the microgrid that they created from these old EV batteries. So it was very, as someone who's been to a lot of Tesla events, I was like, oh yeah, I recognize this. But, but one of the stories they shared was that JB actually reached out to one of the co-founders of Crusoe via LinkedIn and he didn't believe it at first. They were in the middle of raising their Series B at the time
18:21 Kirsten Korosec? and thought it was maybe a joke or fake. And turns out it was him and JB actually ended up being one of the investors, a personal investor in the Series B. So they've had a relationship for a long time. And Crusoe is interesting and you probably know a lot more about them than I do. But they've always sought out very interesting energy plays to power their operations. They tapped into natural gas flaring back when they were doing Bitcoin mining. And instead of it flaring, which is a waste, you know, you're burning off the natural gas. They actually tapped into it and used that power. And so this is very much in line with like their sort of, I think, underlying ethos.
19:03 Kirsten Korosec? Basically, what Redwood Energy, this new business is going to be doing is absolutely going after AI data centers. And they, they had it not just as a demonstration project, but actually working. Crusoe had their small kind of modular AI data center, not the stuff that's being used for like training models, but more of what they called like what you might need in a neighborhood to handle like inference and things like this. And then next to it, this line of EV batteries, like a Tesla battery, next to a Kia battery, next to a like, they didn't pull anything out of the packs. These are all still in the packs and then connected to a solar array that was just flat on the ground,
19:46 Kirsten Korosec? creating actually the largest microgrid in North America and powering this AI data center. But the future for, at least in Redwood's perspective, is that, hey, this doesn't have to be tied to renewables. It can actually be tied to the grid. We can set up shop next to various data centers. And they see a real opportunity to the point, and I think this is notable, that JB said that it could actually end up being more valuable than its core business.
20:14 Speaker 02 So can you talk to me about how this matches up against Tesla's energy storage business? Is there any tension there? You know, co-founder of Tesla, like that's not an insignificant part of Tesla's business these days. I mean, it's kind of a bright spot in all of the turmoil they've been going through.
20:31 Kirsten Korosec? It is a bright spot, although it's funny, their delivery numbers were reported this week. And they also have been including a line on energy storage deployment. We're seeing a little dip in that business, but you're right. Yeah. But but this has nothing to do with that. I think that there is very, there are a lot of other things going on. But you know, we asked JB about it. There were, there was other media there. And he hedged and he kind of described it as two different businesses. But I would say this is, I think, absolutely going to be competition. Because not for the consumer product. The consumer product is the power wall. This is what you can buy and have energy storage attached to your home.
21:16 Kirsten Korosec? But on a commercial or even industrial side, yes, I do think so. When Tesla Energy first launched, and I was at that event, there wasn't a stockpile of old EV batteries. There wasn't, they had to create their own assets from scratch. Fast forward, you know, almost a decade. Now there's all of this inventory of EV batteries that just simply aren't quite ready to be recycled. And if you recycle them too early, there you're really like stripping out the value of them. So there is room in the marketplace for these things. And especially if they just target like AI data centers, I could even see them maybe even partnering
21:57 Kirsten Korosec? with X or something like that. They have a data center that has been getting a lot of attention. So I could see that, but I do see it as potentially competing.
22:07 Speaker 02 No, it's fascinating. And I love to see kind of these ideas where you're like really rethinking an industry. We do have another theme that we wanted to talk about, which is another industry that is kind of being rethought here by CloudFlare. CloudFlare launched a marketplace called PaperCrawl that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping. And I mean, what's going on here is that CloudFlare's CEO, Matthew Prince, is really making a very bold play. And he's saying that, okay, AI crawlers, you know, these companies that send crawlers out on the internet to scrape up all the information from news articles, you know, recipes, whatever. These crawlers are going on for free and basically just taking up all that content.
22:50 Speaker 02 And publishers, everyone from the New York Times to TechCrunch to the mom and pop kind of like, I don't know, pool cleaning service that offers tips on, you know, how to clean your pool. Like, they have no way to stop these bots from just taking all their content. And for many businesses on the business that rely on ad traffic, that has really deteriorated their business. So CloudFlare is coming in and saying, hey, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna give you tools, all websites, these tools to block all of these crawlers. So that, you know, these AI chatbots can't access your website and can't just display your content, can't be trained on your content for free. And instead, we're gonna implement a system where you can charge these AI companies
23:35 Speaker 02 a micro payment for every time that one of their crawlers scrapes your site. This is a really big idea, in my opinion. And I think there's a lot of directions that this could go. And it requires a lot of people to get on board for it to work at all. But yeah, there's a lot to unpack here.
23:52 Kirsten Korosec? Okay, so I want to go back in time, though, first, just because my understanding is that CloudFlare already has some tools for publishers to kind of, let's say, like, protect against AI crawlers. Like, they have the ability to block all AI bots or even like see a dashboard view. So in your view, is this like a big pivot from, hey, we're gonna keep these AI bots away to actually, come on in, we at least can make some money off of it? Is it that, or is it just like another layer of things that they've already been doing?
24:28 Speaker 02 I think that the past things that CloudFlare has been doing has been setting the foundation for this marketplace. I think this marketplace is the big idea that they've been building to for the last year. I interviewed Matthew Prince about a year ago, and he kind of told me about this idea for the marketplace where, you know, he was like, but first, in order for that to work, we need to be able to block these crawlers and be able to give people tools to identify them, how often they're coming. And I honestly do think it's a really smart idea. I think CloudFlare is very strategically trying to place themselves at the center of this potentially massive business. You know, if publishers, instead of relying on viewers to come to their website,
25:12 Speaker 02 are relying on AI chatbots to scrape their website, and they get a payment for every time an AI chatbot like references them or scrapes their website. I mean, that Is potentially a big revenue stream for publishers, potentially a huge cost to these companies that are scraping these websites for free today. And CloudFlare is saying, we're gonna do it all. We're gonna be in the middle of it all. Everyone's gonna pay us. We're gonna facilitate all the payments. This is like a really crazy idea that I think people who are really into protocols like get really excited when they hear about and they kind of like you get butterflies in their stomach when they hear something like this, but I think it's just, there's so many people in the internet ecosystem who have to get on board with this.
25:53 Speaker 02 And people who are gonna lose millions of dollars if something like this came into play. So I'm a little skeptical that CloudFlare is gonna be able to pull it off.
26:02 Kirsten Korosec? Well, that was my big question for you. What's your sense of, I mean, clearly CloudFlare is bullish about this, but if you pull back, do they have any actual traction or chance of this? Are people actually going to buy this product? Do they find it intriguing enough or is it just a little bit too much, too soon, too scary to even go down that road?
26:28 Speaker 02 I mean, here's what I'll say. Well, first of all, we're trying to get Matthew Prince on the podcast, either to talk about this launch or when it rolls out more broadly. But we want to talk to him about this because it is a big idea. But what I'll say is that CloudFlare has said that they have gotten a lot of promising interest from AI companies that recognize that they need to pay for content in some way and that they can't just take it for free. But I think the big concern from them is that they want this to be a fair system. And what does fair mean? It means that, you know, they're getting a good deal out of this for publishers. I think that there's gonna be a lot of publishers who are hesitant to do this, frankly. I don't think that a lot of publishers are going to like the idea
27:08 Speaker 02 of we don't have viewers anymore. We have AI crawlers who visit our site and then, you know, resurface our content in summarized chat GPT summaries. I think that there is going to be a lot of people who will not be easy to get on board with this idea. That said, CloudFlare serves 20% of the internet. They have gotten a lot of companies to sign up for their kind of initial block of all AI crawlers. They got Time, The Atlantic, Fortune, Conde Nast and Adweek and all of these big publishers to basically block all AI crawlers by default. So they're trying to set a standard that, you know, you can't just get content for free anymore. But there's a lot of people to get on board with this big idea.
27:50 Kirsten Korosec? Well, when, I'm not going to say if, when you have Matthew Prince on, please ask him what his strategy is to convert those publishers from Blocker to this new product, because I would love to hear that strategy. And I'm sure that they would too. But we are out of time. We will be back next week. Until then, you can find Equity under the handle at EquityPod on X and threads.
28:18 Rebecca Bellan? Equity is produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
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