Fintech
Musk’s xAI raises new capital as Synapse failure could impact millions
We start the short week with news about Elon Musk and no, it’s not about X or Tesla. Let’s talk about Musk’s other company, xAI. In a blog post this weekend, xAI announced a relaunch $6 billion in Series B fundingconfirming previous reports which the AI startup was looking to raise at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion. With Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Valor among his backers, it appears Musk is taking steps to catch up and compete with the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft and Alphabet.
The ongoing AI race was just the beginning of what we talked about in today’s episode Equity. This morning, Becca Szkutak he dove deep into the synapse collapsea banking-as-a-service company whose failure could impact an estimated 10 million end customers and 100 fintechs, including those focused on teen banking Copper. While this isn’t the only worrying headline in the fintech sector, as our co-host Mary Ann Azevedo said, “it demonstrates how treacherous things are for the often interdependent fintech world when a key player gets into trouble.” .
To wrap up this morning’s news segment, we also discussed a relationship from the Washington Post that election officials and researchers are considering a new approach to combating misinformation called “pre-bunking.” Companies like Google We are testing it ahead of the European Union elections, but remain skeptical about how successful this technique could be.
Haje closed the show with another Pitch Deck Teardown, this time looking at those based in Berlin The Terra Uno deck. The startup just raised a cool $7.5 million to make sure Germany’s clean energy isn’t wasted. Listen to the end to hear how they accomplished it all!
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo and published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Sign up with us on Apple Podcasts, Covered, Spotify and all the cast.
You can also follow Equity on X AND Discussions, on @EquityPod. For the full transcript of the episode, for those who prefer to read rather than listen, check out our full episode archive as well as Simplecast.