There was lots going on in startup-land, as always, and the Equity crew had a blast breaking it all down.
Kirsten Korosec, Mary Ann Azevedo and Devin Coldeway kicked off this Friday’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast with a discussion of WeRide, a Chinese autonomous vehicle startup, seeking an initial public offering in the United States at a $5 billion valuation. The company also recently got the green light to test its driverless vehicles with passengers in California.
The trio then got into the topic of EliseAI raising a $75 million Series D and becoming a unicorn. The 7-year-old company’s chatbots text with, email and respond to calls from renters about things such as apartment tours, maintenance requests, lease renewals and delinquencies. We had mixed feelings about this concept, as well as the company’s plans to expand into healthcare.
We then dug into the topic of Elon Musk’s xAI launching Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini in beta. The new Grok AI model can now generate images on the X social network, though Grok access is currently limited to Premium and Premium+ users on X. Lucky for us (and you), Devin is one of our resident AI experts so he was able to take us through Grok-2’s capabilities and potential risks.
The team then shifted focus to the fact that there were two startup shutdowns this week: Tally and Score. Tally was a nine-year-old fintech that helped consumers manage and pay off their credit card debt. It had raised a staggering $172 million in funding over time from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. Score was a dating app for people with good to excellent credit that was only around for a few months before it got sunsetted.
And last but not least, we did a deeper dive into a California bill known as SB 1047 that is aimed at stopping real-world disasters caused by AI systems before they happen. Devin helped us better understand who would be affected. And the team discussed how effective implementing the proposed safety protocols could be when trying to regulate some of the largest companies in AI.