Inside TC’s Techstars investigation and how AI is accelerating disability tech

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Equity crew had a lot to parse this week. We had notes on wallet-as-a-service’ startup Ansa's latest fundraise, and how Alex initially misunderstood its business model. Then Kirsten talked us through a simply massive deal in the self-driving space, while Alex wanted to riff on Beehiiv and its own funding round. $33 million is no small Series B in 2024! From there, we had a few minutes to discuss Anna Heim's recent reporting on disability tech and how AI is taking and industry and accelerating it. Even better, there appear to be a mix of business models approached by the startups we discussed. That means that there could be many avenues to making tech that works better for more folks into real, and large businesses. To close out, Dominic-Madori Davis joined us to chat about her reporting on Techstars. The company has been shaking up its operations for some time now, leading to certain departures from its ranks. TechCrunch's deep-dive into how it all went down is well worth your time.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we
0:15.4	unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Today is Friday, May 3rd.
0:19.9	I'm Marianne Asavito and joining me is Senior T.C. reporter, Alex Wilhelm.
0:25.3	Alex, how are you?
0:26.9	Well, I'm doing good. I have 10% left of a Red Bull.
0:30.0	Turns out I'm out of coffee, but we've already hit hit record so no drinks for me.
0:33.6	Oh this is going to be fun. We're also joined by Tech Crunch Senior
0:38.1	reporter and editor Kirsten Korsack. Kirsten how are you? I'm great. I'm trying to keep up with the chaos that is Tesla right now.
0:48.0	But thanks for asking.
0:50.0	Yes, there's been so much Tesla News. I don't know how you do it. Well for the show today we are going to get into a few very interesting deals of the week including Anza, Motional, and Beehive.
1:03.4	And then we're going to dig into a very interesting theme
1:06.8	around disability tech leveraging AI.
1:09.9	And lastly, we're going to have a special guest, senior TC reporter and found co-host
1:15.7	Dominique Madori Davis, who did a very thorough investigative piece around tech stars.
1:21.5	Hell yeah.
1:22.3	So first up is my story on Ansa which is a
1:25.9	wallet as a service startup which you may be asking what is wallet as a service
1:31.6	so let me help explain that for you real quick.
1:34.5	If you've ever gone through the Starbucks drive-thru and you have the Starbucks app and you use it to pay for
1:39.8	your coffee, that is essentially wallet as a service. So that way you don't have to pull out your credit card, you don't have to pay in cash, you just reload funds into your Starbucks app and use it to pay. So a lot of mom and pop coffee shops would love that ability and that's what ounces trying to do. It's trying to give these mom and pop type retailers a way to accept payments through virtual
2:05.9	wallets. Okay first of all drive-through Starbucks. How many of those are there? You
2:10.8	said that like it was like the norm I've always walked into
	...

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