Call it AI, call it Super Intelligence, only 2% of consumers are buying it

0:00This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech. This week, President Trump and some of the biggest names in AI are declaring the era of superintelligence, while the companies building it are still figuring out what that means. We're also taking a look at the IPO market from Anthropik's massive potential debut to Aura pulling its offering. Plus, we're highlighting a couple of deals this week, including a startup that raised$140 million to track what's happening at sea.

0:36Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, October 2nd. I'm Kirsten Korosek, Transportation Editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined, as always, by our weekend editor, Anthony Ha, and senior reporter, special project, Sean O 'Kane. And I'm going to see you guys in like days. It's coming around the corner. Just over a week from now, we're going to be in San Francisco for Disrupt. We have a promo code for equity listeners, Equity25. You're going to get 25 % off and we're going to be live recording an episode at Disrupt. I mean, there's going to be so many other things happening.

1:12I'm going to be hosting the Startup Battlefield. What else is going on? I will be interviewing RJ Scringe, who's the founder and CEO of Rivian. And there's a lot to talk to him about since he was on our stage four years ago. So I'm really looking forward to that. And then, Sean, you have a bunch of stuff going on. Yes, some really good panels. I think I'm also going to be on stage with a robot at some point. So, you know, come see if a robot tries to fight me or God knows what. Or you try to fight a robot. Listen, you know, if we sell out, disrupt, I'll do whatever the audience wants. And that is a promise I absolutely will keep.

1:47Yeah, I was looking at the agenda right before we started recording. And we've got multiple speakers from Anthropic, from Amazon, from OpenAI. Mark Wahlberg is going to be there. The CEO of Flock is going to be there. It's going to be a very, very packed show, I think. My last big pitch is what I'll say. One of the things I really like about Disrupt, and I've gone for eight years now, I've been at TechCrunch for eight years, and the energy and all of the early stage founders, it is like a networker's dream kind of in terms of finding, you know, your next employee or your next investor. And that's actually what I almost like even more than doing the interviews on stage is like just meeting all these founders.

2:30So use that promo code again, and it is equity 25. And also come to our live recording. I will say I will say, yeah, come to our live recording. It's how we kick the whole event off in the morning. And I have fond memories of when our beloved former co-host, Alex Wilhelm, was on the show and he had some super fans in the audience that were actually recording the show. So we need that energy back. So please come and help us kick off Disrupt. Yeah, come bootleg the recording at the Builders stage at 9 a.m. on Tuesday of Disrupt. Well, that's our pitch. Let's talk about what happened this week and a lot happened this week, including super intelligence.

3:15Anthony, what happened? Yeah, so we are officially by order of the president of the United States. It's not artificial intelligence anymore. It's super intelligence. We were talking about this, I think, last week because this is something he's been hinting at or I'm not. He doesn't do hints. He's been saying for a while now, but now is signed into executive order that, you know, everyone, if you're like an official U.S. representative, you are supposed to say super intelligence, not artificial intelligence. And this is also part of this broader announcement around AI safety, which I think is both interesting for what the actual there's this sort of pact that was announced.

3:56but also just the fact that it happened at all seemed to come together fairly quickly. Because again, just in the last two weeks ago, a week ago, President Trump was saying, we don't need any of this. Like, you know, we need to lead an AI. We can't constrain it anyway. We don't need any regulation. Anyone who's saying that there's any danger from AI is essentially like a Chinese or democratic plant. And yet all these AI CEOs got together with him earlier this week and signed this pact. So first of all, I'm wondering if any of you looked at the seating chart of this luncheon, which was pretty amazing.

4:32But leading up to that, we should say not only was there pushback on regulation, and we can talk about whether this executive order even does any of that, which I would say no. There's a little bit of theater there. But the important and interesting thing is that just days ago, Anthropic was really in the doghouse, if you will, in terms of like what was happening behind the scenes with with President Trump. And that all changed when Dario Amadei was invited to a 10 p.m. dinner. He had this sit down. And then just days later, we had this luncheon. And at this luncheon, we have pretty much every tech power broker from every major tech company.

5:16So Amazon. So Mark Zuckerberg was there. Jeff Bezos was there. Elon Musk was there. Dario, of course, was there. But I guess my bigger question for both of you is, what does this all mean? And does it mean anything? How much time do you have? I mean, first off, I will say, you know, I get sure they had dinner. Trump and Dario. If you read the Time Magazine interview that Trump just did, your guess is as good as mine as to how informed he was that that dinner was even going to be happening, which is a strange reality to live in, but it's just the one we inhabit. And I will also say one other thing that makes me skeptical, surprise, surprise, of how repaired the relationship is between the White House or the administration, I should say, and Anthropic is that for as much as there are clearly people trying to put those two, you know, groups together, the Defense Department is still, you know, very adamant that Anthropic is terrible and woke and a national security risk.

6:17Emile Michael, you know, goes off on Anthropic sort of every other day on X, it seems. And so so I think there's still some distance there, despite, you know, Dario showing up to this thing. As far as the agreement and all of that, you know, let's be real, like they misspelled the United States on the agreement that they all signed. Like it is also just deeply non-binding. I mean, it is completely voluntary. I think my favorite aspect about it was that Trump described it as, quote, morally binding, which is just a level of abstraction and terminology that I've never heard of before. Yeah, I mean, I think just to amplify both of those points in terms of the role of Anthropic and the relationship with the Trump administration, I think there's been a sort of lot of reporting, you know, in the last year, especially during that time of that big blow up with the Defense Department is that it seemed like also different parts of the White House had different relationships with Anthropic and that like the Treasury Secretary seemed to be a big fan.

7:18whereas the Defense Department, definitely not big fans or at least unhappy with some of the conditions that Anthropoc were trying to put on the use of their technology. And so in that sense, it sort of feels like nothing has necessarily changed, right? That there are people in the White House who want to use Anthropoc's technology, want them involved in these decisions, and others who really, really, really, really don't. And in terms of this agreement, I think, yeah, it seems just not super meaningful. And what is meaningful is just the fact that they felt that this was something worth doing, that they've kind of, you know, as indicated by the fact that they misspelled United States, like it seemed like they kind of rushed to put all of this together.

8:01And so the fact that this kind of gesture was needed seems significant, even if I don't think the agreement itself is going to lead to any major changes. I thought I think Mark Zuckerberg said that this is a first step, which I mean, is pretty impressive when even Mark Zuckerberg is being like, yeah, this really isn't doing a lot, but at least we're all here saying we're going to try to do good here. Yeah, let's all hold hands. I do think that there was one important thing that happened. And to me, this is the point of it, which was a rebranding exercise around AI. AI is going to kill us. It's scary.

8:39It is going to take jobs. But superintelligence is not. And to me, that was the message. This isn't my personal belief. To me, that was the message. And you saw that the naming is now superintelligence officially from the White House. So SI instead of AI. You saw a bunch of executives, notably Elon Musk, correcting himself with, you know, Trump saying it's SI. um and so and you see then just within the last day or two um any of these tech executives who have then um posted on x using the term super intelligence the buzzy startup safe super intelligence seems you know well positioned now to take advantage of of um this renaming but to me that was the big purpose of this was let's rebrand.

9:29This isn't scary. We were on top of this and proceed as normal. I think that makes a lot of sense. But I also want to point out, I think there's like multiple levels of delusion happening here. One is that just the rebranding and the renaming is going to is going to change things. What people are asking for is, you know, more transparency, more detail about what this technology is going, how it's going to be implemented, how it's going to affect them. What does it really mean to have a data center in your backyard? Why does it have to be negotiated in secret? Like those are the reasons that people are pushing back on this stuff more than anything else.

10:03And so just changing the name and moving the goalposts that are like a hundred years out anyways, doesn't seem like it's going to move the needle for me. And to me, it's, you know, it's very similar. I just published a story yesterday about Elon Musk and Tesla still a year out struggling to define quote unquote, amazing abundance. And it's just very clear that all of these folks have communication problems. The other levels of delusion are like, you know, David Sachs posting on X that this is like the modern day Bretton Woods, which is like the conference that was called together after the World War II to reset the world order, which is just, oh boy, there's a lot to unpack there.

10:43You know, and it's just, I don't know. That's, that's all I got to say about that. I'm sure that there was a lot of deal making happening with that many people together. I mean, so so I think there is a lot that happens in the background that is critically important and will probably shape history in many ways, but not in the way that it's been framed. Yes, but it's not like these people were not already. It's not like these people were not already really close to each other and involved in each other's business. Right. Like this was not like some. Oh, they're finally all in a room together like they all have pieces of each other's business in different ways.

11:15Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't raise it to that level of importance. You know, I think that while this is happening and it feels a little bit theatrical, it feels like a branding exercise, it feels like a lot of these other things. At the same time, there are consumer AI product announcements happening. And it has a very different feel, a very, let's say, warm and fuzzy feel to it. And I'm kind of talking about, of course, Muse and its Jolly avatar, but also OpenAI just launched this past week Dots, which is this little bubbly floating cartoon that you can shape in different ways dot. And then, of course, there's been endless, you know, memes and rivalry from the folks at Meta using Jolly to, you know, throw shade on Dots.

12:04But there's this general effort while this White House meeting and luncheon was happening, while all this was happening at a very high, you know, federal policy level, then actual products coming out. And it feels like we're living in a little bit two separate worlds there. Yeah. Although, again, they do feel linked because you did say before, right, the main thing to come out of this White House meeting was essentially a rebranding effort. and on some level what we're talking about with both meta and now open ai are new products but we're also talking about an attempt on some level to rebrand ai and make it kind of more cutesy more friendly um in the case of dots in particular i found it i mean actually i think in both cases i found it a little bit strange and baffling in not in the sense that i mean why wouldn't if you're making a consumer product you'd want to make it seem kind of cuddly and cute but in in both cases it seemed like a slightly awkward fit in the case of like the meta, you know, avatar that basically they're like, this is for adults, this is for adults.

13:03Like, why does it look like it's for children then? This is so strange. And then in the case of the open AI avatar, you know, it seemed like, or the agent, you know, the use cases that were being described in, at least in the TechCrunch story about it, were all these not super consumer use cases. It was about programming, It was about scientists. And so it was strange to think, well, why would somebody like that need this kind of, you know, very friendly packaging when you're talking about like scientific or enterprise use cases? It seemed like, again, as much a branding exercise as it was sort of a product exercise.

13:41And we talked about this last week with like meta, that seems to make sense. With OpenAI, to your point, it was a little bit of a mismatch because, sure, push into consumer AI, but then have the tool, this dot, do the thing that a consumer would be using it for. And so I'm going to make a prediction right now. I know we usually do this at the end of the year, but I don't think dots is going to go far. that's just no shade on open ai i just i do think or it's going to go through like a pretty extreme pivot to get to where it needs to be well i mean because once again we're dealing with sort of a communication issue but also i think in this case maybe more of a more of a fundamental philosophical issue which is that what these things are being pitched as useful for is you know often out of touch with how most consumers use technology or like what they even need solutions for.

14:43Right. So often we see these agents being used to, you know, I think the one that everybody has settled on this week to sort of pick apart as a bad example is like making restaurant reservations or like making multiple restaurant reservations or getting reservations at the hard to get reservation spot, you know, like all this kind of stuff that like, man, most people are like running out of money because groceries keep getting more expensive and gas is outrageous and it's just like not a thing that people understand is like oh that's gonna it's just not gonna change their lives materially and i still think that there's a lot of work to be done by these companies if they think that it's gonna happen to find use cases that make sense for a majority of people and it's just not it's just not there what moves our world forward energy History has been shaped by it, revolutions won with it, and progress dependent on it.

15:39For 190 years, Schneider Electric has been a leading force in this story, creating the technologies that harness energy and transform the competitive landscape. And today, in the dawning era of energy and industrial intelligence, Schneider is helping customers build more efficient, resilient, and sustainable operations across every sector. From data centers to homes, from buildings to industry. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner. Discover more at se.com. Our colleague Russell did a really good piece about sort of the kind of landscape around consumer AI right now, what the obstacles are.

16:15And, you know, I think he makes, tries to lay out sort of what the optimistic case might be, but then I think drills in on why not to be optimistic. And he talked about this, you know, Andresen Horowitz presentation, which they tried to been as a positive thing, but I found pretty surprising is just that right now, I think, and I think this is probably in the United States, but basically like 2 % of people are currently paying for AI, some sort of AI product. And you're not seeing, you know, sometimes of course, you look at a startup's growth curve, right? And the numbers are very low, but every month you see this huge exponential increase.

16:51And so if you kind of just keep trying that line out, you know, for another year, it gets to very high, but actually in terms of like paid growth for consumer, that's not the case. It just seems to be a slight tick up every month. And obviously, with a lot of this negative sentiment around AI, it's not clear that there's going to be a dramatic change in that growth trajectory. So it's, again, very clear then why a lot of these companies as they're preparing to go public are focusing on the enterprise side instead, because enterprise has money to spend. And so it's this interesting dilemma of, I think, that it seems like consumers not where the money is going to be, at least in the near term, but also to sort of justify these kinds of valuations, these kind of promises of how much AI is going to change the world.

17:39I think they also need to have some degree of a consumer presence as well. Or I think on some level, they're just not going to sort of live up to the hopes that people have for them. Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up the sort of justifying the valuations. And that 2 % number is, it is pretty wild because if you were to focus on certain circles in social media or, you know, certain like X accounts, you would think that 90 % of the population is using these AI tools and there's just not. But I will say that in spite of that, we do see IPO activity happening, which I do want to get into. It's an interesting thing that's happening right now, which is you've had a couple of really positive IPOs.

18:32And Sean, you're probably going to disagree with me, but I'll put SpaceX in the camp of a positive IPO. I mean, I know that it hasn't maintained some of the heights it had in the beginning, but it is a company that has been able to maintain. then you have Anthropic which appears to be going forward with its IPO its S1 was leaked but then you have companies that have pulled back like Aura which just pulled back its IPO so it seems like there's this mixed bag and you have maybe two companies I think that are holding on to like most of the valuation of recent IPOs and one is SpaceX and one is SK Hynix.

19:16And other than that, like that's like the bulk of all of the value that's come out since whatever this summer. So what does this mean, I guess, for both of you moving forward? I mean, Sean, I'm sure you have an opinion on this of like, is the IPO window closing? I mean, and certainly that's the question of the back end of this year, right? Like or a pulling its IPO would indicate you know that that's that there is a slowing down or or more caution in the world uh and in the market and i think the other thing to point out is that you know sam altman finally sort of came out and said in a more explicit way you know previously this had just been sort of reported from some other news outlets but you know came out and said basically we're probably holding our IPO even though they've confidentially filed until you know they feel that sort of quote-unquote the their technology is safe which boy how do you define that the more that we learn how unsafe it can be but I think that the point there you know they're not only holding back but there are now a bunch of reports that they are turning back to private markets for another massive funding round, which I think that to me is maybe the most important thing.

20:38I mean, certainly not every company is open AI and isn't going to be able to raise like open AI, but you know, we've talked about it a little bit earlier in this episode, and certainly in weeks past, there is so much, especially from exits like the SpaceX IPO, there's so much money in the venture world right now, and there are these massive funds. So like the idea that that has been tapped out and these companies had to go to public markets is not necessarily true. And so I think, you know, open AI turning back to the private markets in the next six months or so. It makes me think that more people will more companies will probably hesitate a little bit at going public than they had six months prior to this.

21:19last thing I'll say about that is that it makes me wonder, you know, there are a couple other companies outside the AI specific world that we know are kind of heading towards an IPO. Like the one that really comes to mind for me is Waymo. Waymo just wrapped up, I think it was what, $16 billion funding round earlier this year, I think in February. And so many people thought that their next step would be an IPO and some sort of either spin out or separation a little bit from Alphabet. If they turn back to the private markets for another round, I think then, And yeah, we're really in the conversation of the IPO market really cooling off for tech at least.

21:54Yeah, I have to imagine a lot of that is also going to depend on how the Anthropic IPO goes and that if it is really as spectacularly successful as I think everyone is hoping, then that doesn't, you know, I think there's, you know, not a lot of other companies that are quite in that category, but at least then there's like a sign that there's some positive reception here, some hope, versus if it is, you know, kind of a mixed bag, then I think you're definitely going to see the window closed because it'll be like, if Anthropi can't, you know, do well on the public markets, who can? I also wanted to zoom in a little on the open AI side for a second, because like you said, Sam Altman has now been giving a couple of interviews and statements about this idea that, oh, we have to focus on safety rather than going public.

22:40And I think that, you know, it's not that I necessarily think that that's an entirely deceptive statement, but certainly a lot, there's a lot of reporting that suggests that's not the only reason that they're delaying it. And that, for example, I think there was a feeling or again, a reported feeling that they looked at the SpaceX IPO and they were like, that's not quite how we would want ours to go, that it started really high, but then it did, wasn't able to hold on to all of that value. And if our financials are kind of evaluated in the same way, we could have a similar experience and that's not what they want.

23:17So it'll be certainly very interesting to see what happens there. Sure. Capital markets, public markets provide a lot of capital and a lot of companies make that choice. But there is also a lot more eyes on your balance sheet and you have to justify those valuations. you have you know shareholders are putting a different level of risk than a VC that you know knows the founder and is willing to take a bet and and so I think that a company that is still figuring out its business model you know I might hesitate to go into the public markets as well not saying that any of these companies have ever followed that path by the way because we So you have plenty of examples of that.

24:04But I do think that that's an important thing to remember is that the sort of the siren call of of the public markets, you know, can be hard to deny. But once you get there, the people evaluating you, the investors and shareholders, you know, they don't mess around and they don't you know, they have very specific expectations. And so if you're a company like OpenAI that, you know, has has users and is growing, but is burning through a lot of capital, maybe you pause. I don't know. Yeah, we should say like the Reuters did some really good reporting. They clearly got a hold of part or or all of Anthropics s1 and we're talking 42 billion dollars lost last year alone Spending more than seven billion dollars on compute last year the revenue as many people have reported over the last few months has been going up Clearly anthropic wanted to sort of seed that or somebody at anthropic or on the cap table wanted to see that ahead of the actual S1 filing coming out.

25:02But we also got, you know, some details from what we've been waiting to see, which was what they're warning about in this. The risk factors section alone is 80 pages, which is even I don't think I've ever seen one that long before. Usually risk factor sections are, I don't know, 20 to 40, 40 being on the high end. And in particular warning that the AI could pose, quote, catastrophic or existential risks to humanity because of behaviors that it's exhibited exhibited in the past, like, you know, quote, resisting shutdown or concealing or manipulating information or other behavior, quote, resembling blackmail.

25:43So we've got some, you know, we've got some reading ahead of us in the coming weeks. Small, small risk, small risk factors there. Yeah. I did want to mention one other financial thing that I think came out in the reporting, which again, it's not public yet. I certainly haven't gotten a chance to read it. I'm excited to take a look when it does. I think there has been reporting that they said that they are, they did recently have had profitable months in the last few months. And that is, I guess this has come out a little bit before, but it also depends on sort of how you're adjusting certain things and what you're accounting for in their costs.

26:18But that, hey, like Anthropic maybe is a profitable company or will be a profitable company when it goes public? I'm a skeptic on that one, I would say. We do have, as much as I love talking about IPOs, we do have two deals that I want to at least dive into a little bit. And one was a story, actually, I think a couple of them. Sean, you've got the whole perfecta here. But one of them was maritime intelligence startup quartermaster. And this one got my attention not just because of the amount, which is$140 million, but what they're doing. and it is kind of interesting. Yeah, not just that, but the fact that they are already raising a Series B after closing their A, which was also a pretty sizable 43 million back in May.

27:04So they are, this was a very quick turnaround. And in fact, their round got preempted by an investor. So they had planned on going back to the markets and raising some more money relatively soon, but it happened even quicker. And I talked to the founder, um you know neil who is a really interesting guy and i think is just the example like a perfect example of kind of right place right time with an idea basically speaking they have this this thing that they call smart mast you know imagine the mast or any kind of high up spot on a ship and it could really be anything cargo ship you know all the way down to smaller vessels where and they're just adding sort of weather hardened sensors some stuff that's just like off the shelf too.

27:47This isn't really anything like crazy advanced. They're not throwing like 40 lidars up on a mast or anything like that. They really are just sort of like looking at this maritime space as one that has been sort of left behind by a lot of this technology and the ability to apply AI and, you know, interpret what's going on. And the idea being you now just have, you know, if you use their technology, you have way more awareness of what is happening on the ocean. And not only from an operator perspective of in and like liability just general sort of like you know what happened and can we can we make sure we know for sure what happened but also from an insurance perspective and also for the people on the shores like the the sort of local governments that have these vessels come in and out of port uh and so yeah they raised 140 million dollars series b and uh it's just i think the other piece that i wrote about in the story that i think is also clear uh speaking of right place right time with everything that's been happening in and around the middle east uh the straighter hormuz is just uh at least the way that neil was talking to me about it is now even more abundantly clear to potential investors how much of an opportunity they have ahead of them uh in this space reading the story i just thought this is like sounds like very very cool um and and like there's a pretty big opportunity here um i also just yeah i like the name.

29:09I like the name of the products, which is, I feel like increasingly rare with tech companies nowadays. I was curious, like you touched on a little bit in the story, also just sort of the competitive landscape. I mean, it seems like this was not an area where there's too many other companies trying to do something similar. Not really. And not at this scale. I think this is, you know, one of those instances where they really did find something that was pretty novel and hadn't really been explored and, you know, not just right place, right time for funding right now, but right place, right time as a company to be doing this at a time when you can really maximize what you're able to get out of putting these sensors on there versus if you do this 10 or 15 years ago, you're talking about capturing footage locally, offloading it at the end of a trip, maybe spending days or weeks analyzing it.

29:57This is far more real time. They have something like, I think it's like tens of gigabytes of data they're generating with these things per day per vessel and they have 650 equipped vessels now with uh deliveries out for 800 of them around the world and they're they're all over too up in the arctic and the and the subarctic and so they're also proving out that the technology can withstand what can be pretty brutal brutal environments on the sea yeah to me what was most interesting i guess or surprising is that no one's done this before um because it just it's like one of those ideas where you're like, oh, I just assumed that something like this existed and it clearly doesn't.

30:36And the large amounts of data, I'm very curious to see how the company evolves with what it does with all of that data and information. There's another company that you wrote about that is also kind of tackling, again, like one of these areas of industry that you're like, oh, why? Surely someone's doing that already. And that's, you know, really dealing about supply chains. So this is a company, it's called Atomic, I believe. And it was what, founded by some ex-Tesla folks. And what is it that they're doing that's so special? There's three of these guys. One of them is now joining the company.

31:12There was only two of them originally last year. But these were three of the guys that were basically doing the supply chain work on things like the Model 3 and the Model Y. Model 3 in particular, famously, quote unquote, production hell. You know, they were solving problems about how to how to get and move and all parts in the most sort of extreme environment you could imagine in the automotive world moving faster than anybody had. And so their idea was, you know, let's take that learned experience and build a whole company around that with more modern AI assisted technology. technology. And so that's basically what they're doing.

31:48And they have gone from last year to now working with major technology companies like DoorDash and HelloFresh. Now, the basic idea here being like you want to minimize, you want to strike a balance as a company that's working with any kind of inventory of minimizing the amount of inventory you have at any given moment, but also being constantly ready to provide your customers, whether that's other companies or, or regular consumers with what they want when they wanted. And that can get really tricky, especially, again, nowadays when modern supply chains are getting sort of barreled left and right by unforeseen things.

32:24And so they've had a lot of success with this. They were, interestingly enough, they're one of these companies that was sort of incubated at DVX, which is John McNeil, the former Tesla president, his VC firm, but done in a way that is a little different from what they normally do. Normally they will come up with an idea and match a CEO to it. This one was a little bit more organic where Michael Rossiter and his co-founders had the idea and wanted to pursue this. And they started within DVX and then spun out. One of the really striking things in your stories was also, you mentioned DoorDash is one of the customers.

32:55And already that's like, I think, pretty impressive for an early stage startup, you know, especially for a company like DoorDash where logistics is so crucial. But apparently, like, it sounds like like 90 percent of the purchasing is being run through the atomic system. And I was then struggling to reconcile that a little bit with the fact that I mean, these are relatively small rounds so far. I think it's a twelve point five million dollar round, maybe 15 million raised so far. I feel like, I don't know, a few months ago, an AI company that was like working with these kinds of big customers, we were raising like 10x this.

33:28Am I am I crazy? I don't think you're crazy. I think that's a good thing to think about. I think the explanation there is sort of like twofold one. This is just their Series A. And I think speaking to, I spoke to John McNeil for this story, he seems to think that things are about to pick up with what they're doing. And especially now that they have a bunch of revenue growth that they can show by onboarding some of these customers, and they've really proven out the model, he thinks that it could probably move pretty quickly from here. I think the other thing to consider too is like this is a pretty small team.

34:05I don't remember the exact number of folks, but this is one of the more sort of software heavy companies in a space like this. They're not dealing with big assets or anything like that. And so without a big team and without that piece of it, there's just a naturally lower number that they're going to be working with. Whereas like Quartermaster, they're manufacturing those smart masks, all themselves on top of, you know, doing all the sales and AI and everything else. So I think those are things that are really feeding into why it feels like a smaller round. I want to squeeze in one more deal very briefly because it's very timely.

34:42So another story that you wrote again, Sean, Charter Space raises five million to bring insurance to the stars. And we're not talking about Hollywood stars. We're talking about space. and the reason why I wanted to bring it up is that they were a startup battlefield finalists last year and that is one of the more exciting pieces of disrupt and it's coming up so how timely they've found some success it sounds like from you know gaining some interest going through the competition obviously having a sound enough business plan to raise some money yeah I I think it would surprise most people that despite the increased activity in space and the amount of satellites being launched and everything, that many of those are not insured.

35:30And so this whole, you know, Charter's whole thing is, you know, finding a way to make a marketplace for insurance for, you know, space-based objects, satellites or otherwise. and it really started from a place where they were developing this kind of engineering software because the founder yukchi chan was sort of disillusioned with the state of space engineering software and how disparate it was and so he wanted to build a centralized thing and then realized that there was value in plugging that into like an insurance underwriting marketplace basically because one of the reasons that satellites aren't often insured is because it just costs a lot of money to insure them because typical insurance underwriters don't have an understanding of what goes into these or they'll see a piece on a satellite that's like a you know a fuel tank and think that's that's increasing the risk by x amount because it could explode right so their whole thing was trying to like start this kind of you know essentially from first principles and rework a new insurance marketplace for space and and it's uh you know it was cool they were one of the more energetic startups last year just like so like fully believe in themselves on stage and backstage.

36:41And, you know, it was cool to see them like really translate that to some success in less than a year. Yeah, that was a great way to put it, Sean. I definitely remember their presentation and I remember meeting them that they were I mean, they were great. And they were, as you said, they they were very confident. They absolutely believed in themselves. I'm glad to hear that that confidence is paying off. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but Equity will be back next week. And until then, you can follow us at EquityPod on X and threads. Equity is hosted by TechCrunch Senior Reporters and produced by Teresa Locansolo with editing by Kel.

37:14Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com slash events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.