Equity

Tristan Walker and Brynn Putnam both built and sold major consumer companies. Now, they’re building products designed to bring people together.

Today on Equity, we’re bringing you a conversation TechCrunch AI editor Russell Brandom had on stage at the latest StrictlyVC event in New York. Russell sat down with Walker, who sold Bevel maker Walker & Company to Procter & Gamble and is now building leathercraft trade school Heirloom, and Putnam, who sold fitness startup Mirror to Lululemon and is now CEO of Board, a touchscreen console that combines board games and video games.

The two repeat founders talk about what they learned from their first companies, why they’re focused on physical skills and shared experiences now, and how AI could make hands-on, human connection more valuable rather than less. Walker explains why he sees growing demand for mastery and trade skills, while Putnam talks about using technology to bring people together instead of pulling them into individual screens.

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This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.” Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as “super intelligence,” and meanwhile, Meta and OpenAI are putting friendlier faces on their AI products, even as the biggest money in AI still appears to be coming from the enterprise.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into this week’s AI moves, the ugly economics of consumer AI, plus the shifting IPO market and a handful of startup deals.



Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

What Oura pulling its IPO, plus Anthropic’s leaked S-1 and OpenAI going back to private funding, says about how picky public markets have gotten

Quartermaster’s $140M raise to bring real-time sensors to an industry that AI basically hasn’t touched yet: maritime shipping

Why Atomic, a supply-chain startup from ex-Tesla vets, is already running 90% of DoorDash’s purchasing

How Startup Battlefield finalist Charter Space raised $5M to bring insurance to satellites

Speaking of Startup Battlefield, join us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where Equity will kick things off with a live show on the Builders Stage at 9 a.m. Get 25% off your tickets with code Equity25.



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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?
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When AI leaders at OpenAI and Anthropic started talking about “pacing the frontier,” maybe someone should have asked: what pace? It’s turned into model drop week for both companies as Anthropic rolled out Opus 5.5, followed by OpenAI’s GPT-6 model updates just 90 minutes later. But the company that stole the spotlight this week was Meta, whose personal AI agent Muse is reportedly outpacing ChatGPT’s early numbers and is headed for smart glasses and a tiny Tamagotchi-style device next.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into Meta’s consumer AI strategy and what it means for the startups trying to build on top of this technology, from where the money is flowing to which AI products might actually become part of people's daily lives. They also get into a16z's new school for aspiring founders and two very different AI and hardware deals.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

How a16z's Horowitz Andreessen Academy plans to pave a new path for aspiring founders, and why the Equity crew sees echoes of the Thiel Fellowship and Silicon Valley's long-running anti-college streak

Why Oura's $2.2 billion IPO looks more like a payday for existing shareholders than a major fundraising event for the company

Ema’s $77 million raise to sell teams of AI agents that automate HR, IT, and finance workflows, with Google and Microsoft among its early enterprise customers

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As concern over AI safety and rogue agents continue to make headlines, it’s no surprise that cybersecurity stocks are rising, or that investors are pouring massive amounts of capital into startups trying to build the next generation of security for an AI-native world. We’re even seeing companies like Instinct and Simile bring in nine-figure checks and valuations that wouldn't have made sense a few years ago.



With a front row seat to it all is Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures who’s spent nearly two decades investing in cybersecurity and enterprise software — including six consecutive rounds in cloud security startup Wiz, which Google acquired for $32 billion earlier this year in one of its largest acquisitions ever.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Shah joins Rebecca Bellan to break down why he thinks periodic, human-in-the-loop security can’t keep up anymore, and why Index continues investing in AI-native security companies at stages that once required much more proof.



Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

Why Shah thinks cyber insurance should be most companies’ first move in managing AI-era risk

What happens when a single attacker can deploy a 10,000-agent ransomware swarm, and why that could force cybersecurity to become more machine-to-machine

How Wiz’s founders paved the way for a new generation of startups, including Frame and Enigma

Shah’s take on “pacing the frontier,” and why he thinks even a slowdown in model capability wouldn’t cool off cybersecurity investment

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

02:02 Why AI is creating a new cybersecurity category

05:16 The cyber insurance layer most companies overlook

09:15 Why Index is betting on AI-native security platforms

12:40 Will Wiz become a talent factory for new startups?

14:46 What actually makes a founder worth betting on

16:11 The hard part of knowing when to double down

18:53 Why Shardul says he’s not a visionary investor

21:16 How AI could reshape the entire security stack

24:18 What makes an AI security startup defensible

25:14 Why he doesn’t want to find “the next Wiz”

26:48 Why investors are writing huge checks so early

29:39 What happens to AI valuations if the frontier gets paced

31:01 Outro
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