Equity

Amazon is backing off NDAs for data center deals, showing that communities can still make some noise in the AI infrastructure boom. Equity looks at the shift, plus the race to make personal AI agents useful, and more deals of the week.

After selling companies to P&G and Lululemon, Tristan Walker and Brynn Putnam are building leathercraft schools and a shared gaming console. They joined the latest StrictlyVC event in New York to talk about why AI could make human connection more valuable.

Equity digs into how the White House's new AI safety pledge and "super intelligence" rebrand will (or won’t) change the industry, a cooling IPO market, and deals in maritime tech, supply chains, and space insurance.

Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health raised $700 million to build a business around scanning your body, but it’s not the only company centering its roadmap around a new kind of preventative healthcare. Midjourney is building its own body scanner, while Function Health has also raised significant capital to build out its preventative-health platform. Why are investors betting so big on this category? On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis talks with Farooq Abbasi, founder and general partner of Preface Ventures and an investor in Neko Health, about how Neko compares with other consumer-health startups. They discuss what has to happen for body scanning to become part of the broader healthcare system. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Farooq invested in Neko after trying the company's scan himself What Neko's $500 scan actually includes, and how the company keeps the price down Why Farooq thinks low primary-care utilization is one of the biggest problems in U.S. healthcare Why some consumer-health startups may be overfunded, in Farooq's view How better health data could open the door to a new generation of AI-powered healthcare Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Chapters: 00:00 — Can Tech Reinvent Preventative Healthcare?01:44 — Why Spotify’s Founder Built Neko Health06:22 — Why Healthcare Is So Hard to Fix08:23 — Inside a $500 Neko Health Scan12:35 — Can Preventative Healthcare Scale?14:20 — The Risks of VC-Backed Healthcare17:28 — How AI Is Changing Medicine22:55 — Is AI in Healthcare Worth the Risk? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Equity breaks down a wild model-drop week from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta, complete with Meta's Tamagotchi-style AI device. We also get into Andreessen Horowitz's new founder school, Oura's IPO, and Ema's $77 million raise.