Musk’s xAI raises fresh capital while Synapse’s bankruptcy could impact millions

Equity

TechCrunch

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

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’re kicking off the short week with news about Elon Musk, and no, it’s not about X or Tesla. Instead, we’re talking about Musk’s other other company, xAI. In a blog post this weekend, xAI announced it raised $6 billion in Series B funding, confirming earlier reports that the AI startup was looking to raise at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion. The ongoing AI race was only the beginning of what we covered on today’s episode of Equity. This morning, Becca Szkutak dove deep into the collapse of Synapse, a banking-as-a-service company whose bankruptcy could impact an estimated 10 million end customers and 100 fintechs, including teen banking-focused Copper. To wrap up this morning’s news segment, we also discussed a report from The Washington Post that election officials and researchers are considering a new approach to combating misinformation called “pre-bunking.” Companies like Google are testing it out in the lead up to the European Union election, but we remain skeptical about how successful the technique could be. Haje closed out the show with another Pitch Deck Teardown, this time examining Berlin-based Terra One’s deck. The startup just raised a cool $7.5 million to make sure Germany’s clean energy isn’t going to waste. Listen through to the end to hear how they made it happen!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Grinch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.
0:15.2	Today is May 28th, 2024 and I am Becca Scutak a senior reporter here at Tech Runch.
0:20.8	We're kicking off the week a day late due to the holiday weekend here in the US, so let's get caught up.
0:25.5	On today's show we have X-A-I's $6 billion funding round,
0:29.2	synapses bankruptcy and what that means for other FinTech startups,
0:33.2	pre-Bunking with Google, and a pitch tech tear down
0:35.3	for Berlin-based startup Terra1.
0:37.3	Let's get started.
0:41.3	To kick things off, those of you dear listeners who track tech earnings this week,
0:44.8	there are definitely a couple worth keeping your eye on.
0:47.6	To start, we've got Salesforce, U.I. Path and HP all reporting tomorrow.
0:52.3	And then we have a Sonuna and mongo d.
0:53.7	reporting on Thursday and now on to the big news that matters.
0:58.7	For the first story of the day we have news about Elon Musk and no it is not about Twitter.
1:03.4	No, it is not about Tesla.
1:04.9	It is about that fifth, sixth or seventh company
1:07.5	that Elon Musk also runs called X-AI.
1:10.4	The company announced that it raised $6 billion in new funding funding at a 18 billion pre-money valuation.
1:15.2	This confirms reporting that Tech Ranch had earlier in April.
1:18.6	The backers for this deal include Andresen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Valor, among others.
1:23.7	You may notice their listeners, those are a lot of the same investors
1:26.8	who helped Musk by Twitter a couple years ago.
	...

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