Apple Blocks Vibe Coding Apps, Anthropic’s Pitch to PE Firms, Coinbase’s Crypto Payments for AI

0:12Stephanie Palazzolo:Welcome everyone to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Wednesday, March 18th. We are kicking off today's show with some exclusive reporting that Apple is cracking down on Vibe Coding apps like Replit and Vibe Code in its App Store. We're bringing on the reporters behind that story. We're also bringing on the CEO of an AI software company focused on selling to VCs to help us make sense of our story last week that Anthropic is eyeing deals with Blackstone and other private equity firms. Next up, we have the CEO of Gecko Robotics coming on the show to talk about its$71 million deal with the U.S.

0:51Stephanie Palazzolo:Navy. And we'll wrap the show with a look at the digital payment space. Our crypto reporter has a story out today about Coinbase's ambition to become the payments layer for AI agents. It's going to be a fun show, so let's get right on into it. Vibe coding apps are having challenges navigating Apple's App Store. That is according to a new exclusive report from The Information this morning. I want to bring on Stephanie Palazzolo, our AI reporter, and Aaron Tilley, our Apple reporter, to share with us what they are hearing. Stephanie and Aaron, welcome to the show. It's great to have you both here.

1:24Stephanie Palazzolo:Thanks. Thanks. Okay, Stephanie, what are we hearing about these challenges that vibe coding apps are happening with Apple? So I'm sure that most people by now have heard of this term vibe coding. But, you know, just as a reminder, essentially vibe coding is this term that's been used to refer to this new capability where people, whether they're engineers or just non-technical users, can, you know, code up apps and games and all sorts of things just by giving instructions in natural language. language. So obviously, a bunch of apps have popped up around this idea that are, you know, helping everyday people like us, for instance, like code up apps really easily.

2:02So essentially, we've been hearing that some of these, you know, some of the most popular ones of these apps, like Replit and Vibecode on the Apple App Store have been basically getting their requests to, you know, put through updates shot down by the App Store, unless they make really significant changes to the way that their vibe coding features work. You know, initially from what we've heard, it seems like the App Store reviewers, you know, almost wanted them to get rid of these vibe coding features entirely. And then over time, it seems like the, you know, changes that they've been asked to do have kind of lessened in severity, although they still are, you know, real changes.

2:42And so, for instance, some of these apps are having to change the way that these AI-generated apps are previewed in their app. or changing, for instance, the types of apps that people are able to create, like not being able to create iOS native apps for Apple devices, for instance.

2:59Stephanie Palazzolo:So basically the way I understand this is that some of these apps that have Vibe coding features in them, whether or not they're in the app or on their platform at all, basically Apple is making it harder for them to roll out their software updates in some cases, and that's posing a bit of a threat right now to those apps' growth on the platform. Yes, yeah, that is fair. And again, this is specifically for apps that have a mobile app in the App Store. So Replit, for instance, it has both a website, but it also has this mobile app. There are some by-coding apps out there, like Cursor, for instance, that doesn't yet have a mobile app in the App Store.

3:40Stephanie Palazzolo:Got it. So Aaron, what do we know about why Apple is doing this? Excuse me. So in Apple is very clear, you know, when they when they get kind of queries about what they're doing around particular apps in the app store, that they're not targeting any specific company or category. So they said, we are not targeting VibeCode apps. They want to be very clear. This is a part of an existing guideline they have in the App Store related to features that can change the fundamental functions of an app post-review. So that's what these VibeCode, VibeCoding features might introduce. You can sort of change parts of an app after the review process.

4:31So I think that's fundamentally their position. They don't want sort of features or capabilities that can sort of mess with their control over apps in the App Store.

4:49Stephanie Palazzolo:But, Stephanie, on a bit of a higher level here, I mean, I want to understand why you think Apple might be putting up these challenges. I mean, conceivably, it's because what? These vibe coding developers are making apps that people wouldn't have to put on the app store? I mean, you know, we've seen clawed code coming up. People can, I'm thinking about organizing your desktop. It's not a one-to-one comparison. That's the co-work example. But I mean, we see these apps coming up. Totally. And I think, you know, what Aaron just said is the kind of reasoning that Apple has been giving. However, I think that some of these app developers are pushing back on that reason because they're saying, hey, you know, what if somebody just wants to make a website with Replit, for instance?

5:31It's not changing the Replit app at all. It's not changing any other app on the App Store. So I think there's some confusion around, like, why some of these cases are being counted under this guideline. I think to your question on, like, why Apple might be doing this, obviously, you know, this is kind of more, you know, our speculation or, you know, thoughts of people that we're talking to. Not necessarily, you know, we don't know for sure what's going on inside Apple's mind. But there's a couple of reasons why it might make sense for them to kind of block some of these apps or make it more difficult for them to make updates.

6:03One reason is that Vibe coding has led to an enormous increase in the number of new apps every day that are being submitted to the App Store. That has obviously made it very difficult for the App Store reviewers to be able to get through such a huge load of new apps that are coming in every day. So putting restrictions on the Vibe Coding apps might kind of slow down this influx of new apps and make it a little bit more bearable for those people that are, you know, reviewing and approving those apps. I think another reason is that Vibe Coding could theoretically make it easier for people to make apps that are not going on the app store.

6:37So kind of the example I mentioned earlier with apps like Replit or Vibecode, you can make these kind of web-based apps, basically websites that are obviously not popping up on the App Store, but people might go to to complete different sorts of tasks. And that's not great for Apple because they want apps to be on the App Store because they get to take a nice 30 % cut of any revenue that's generated from those apps. And that's obviously something that is very positive for them. And I think maybe just the last reason, again, like this is kind of more speculation, is that Apple could, you know, not really want capabilities out there that are, you know, sometimes free, that are, you know, competing against capabilities that they offer in their own tools for developers, which is called Xcode.

7:25So, you know, just a variety of reasons why this might be happening.

7:29Stephanie Palazzolo:So Aaron, put this story into context of the other stories that we've heard about Apple cracking down on apps. This is the subject of many different lawsuits. We've seen some of these play out. What do the results of those previous conflicts tell us about how you think this story might play out? Yeah, I mean, Apple will not stand down, you know, if they feel like there is any sort of threat to the platform, any sort of potential overtaking of their platform or an app to become more powerful or more kind of important or replacing the App Store as the fundamental sort of funnel for apps. on the App Store, they are going to halt it.

8:23They will find compromises to let sort of companies continue to exist, but they will always be held back to some degree of what Apple allows in the end. Like you said, there have been many battles over the years, and Apple will always find some sort of resolution, but it's never to a degree that allows any of these companies to have their maximum impact.

8:52Stephanie Palazzolo:And Stephanie, last question for you. How much could this restrict the growth of these VibeCoding apps? I mean, when I think of apps, I think about what's on my iPhone. When I think about VibeCoding developers, I still think of people on their MacBooks. And I know that the MacBook has its own desktop app store, but I think of desktop software, I guess, and making sort of higher fidelity programs. How much of a setback could this be for Replit's growth, for example? Yeah, so as you kind of pointed out, you know, a lot of people and developers are accessing Vibe coding apps through their computers.

9:33So, you know, they're not necessarily coding up apps from their phone, but they're doing it on their laptops because, you know, that kind of allows you to get like much more in the weeds. And so pretty much all of these businesses, you know, have a website that people can access these capabilities through. So it's not like if, you know, the App Store doesn't let you put your app on the App Store. It's not like the business is, you know, completely going down. But it still is like a pretty significant source of traffic and revenue for some of these businesses. Like in the case of Replit, which obviously also has like a website that you can download the software from too.

10:07You know, in the past couple months since it's been able to make any updates to the App Store, we've seen it drop several spots on the chart for the top developer tools in the App Store. So the effect is somewhat limited, but it's still not great, I think, for any sort of app to not be able to reach the users and give them the sort of service that they want. Right.

10:32Stephanie Palazzolo:Well, Stephanie and Aaron, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Stephanie Palazzolo, our AI reporter, and Aaron Tilley, our Apple reporter, here at The Information. As venture capital firms plow investment into AI startups, there are also startups trying to sell AI back to those same venture capital firms to help modernize their own operations. Hanover Park is one of those companies. The company helps VCs manage and track their portfolios. It also helps them model out financials. I want to bring on Chris Haladzik, co-founder and CEO of Hanover Park, to help us share his thoughts on AI and professional services more broadly.

11:09Stephanie Palazzolo:Chris, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. Let's do this. Excited to be on. Let's do this. Okay. That was the most energetic someone starting the interview. I'm excited for it already. I'm just getting started, Kosh. Let's go. Okay. Okay. So, look, I'm going to get to Hanover Park in a second. But the first topic I want to ask you about is we reported last week that Anthropic is in talks with Blackstone and other private equity firms to help them basically sell AI into their portfolios. And it's kind of a similar parallel in a way to what you do, although I know the functionality of Hanover Park is slightly different.

11:46Stephanie Palazzolo:But what did you make of that story? Did that surprise you? Yeah, I think that we're going to transition from a world of selling tools to outcomes. And I think like I've been saying this for a year and a half on podcasts since since the dawn of time that B2B SaaS is dead as we know it. A lot of the next great generation of companies will be these like AI native services companies that are selling outcomes, not tools. And so I every time Anthropic release a new model, our entire team in the office here in New York City celebrates. This is not one of those things where we see it as competitive. At the end of the day, fund administration, which is what we do, is the ability to generate financial reporting for these investment firms.

12:25These investment firms have outsourced this to a third party. And all we're trying to do is build a world that agents checked by well-trained CPAs are executing on that work and not competitive. And so we welcome the improvement on the model front and excited to see where this goes. Right.

12:42Stephanie Palazzolo:I guess where I'm trying to get at is this strategy of selling to portfolio companies by going through the investors or the owners type of thing. With your business, is that an approach that you are pursuing too and saying, hey, venture capital firm XYZ, we want to sell this tool to you so that you can sell parts of our suite into portfolio companies? Is that a distribution route? Yeah, not quite. It's almost like, hey, venture capital fund X, all your data is stale and you have no idea what's going on, but you're making all these investment decisions. You know, why don't we sell the ability for you to access that data in real time?

13:21And so it's really helping the CFOs make better decisions versus selling to the underlying portfolio companies. And so that's why when I'm like Anthropic working with private equity firms to unlock more AI, I was like, great, we can launch an MCP server for people to access the Hanover Park data via Claude. And so a lot of that is, I think, complementary, not competitive.

13:42Stephanie Palazzolo:Right. So talk to me a little bit then about adoption of AI at these VC firms. They're investing all these dollars into AI startups. How good are they at adopting AI themselves? And do they have the same challenges that we hear enterprises have about change management, having systems already in place that are really hard to switch out of? I've been telling that it's so funny. I'm talking to GPs all the time at these venture funds, and I'm like, you're investing in this AI future. What you need to have is your stack to be also AI native, because a lot of these firms are still running on tools from 1995, you know, they're checked by an army of fund accountants to deliver financial reporting to limited partners every quarter.

14:25And so for us, it's been, hey, you're investing in AI. How can we make your firm AI native? And it's been surprising that, you know, up until now, this has not been a focus. But now with like AI context is so important and this data becomes so much more important. So venture funds and private equity funds are saying now is the time by which that change management is worthwhile because of the goldmine of data that's sitting there that they can access. And so I've been pleasantly surprised by how fast adoption has been moving in the past six to 12 months and excited to see where it can go. What's the biggest challenge to adoption right now?

14:59migration that it's actually fun migration has become the favorite word in the english language for our team today where it's like taking the financial data from decades old stale financials and saying i need to then migrate all that data to a new system with plenty of the hair and craziness of decisions that were made 20 years ago from a financial perspective and so taking all that data cleaning that data and making sure it's accessible to these ai agents is the key challenge. And so we're really excited about the opportunity with like long horizon and long running agents that other companies like Cursor have thought about for code.

15:34We're thinking a lot about that for reasoning over complex financial data.

15:39Stephanie Palazzolo:You guys are using your own models? You're using Anthropic, OpenAI model? Whose models are you using in the background? Combination of models, right? For certain tasks, we're using Claude, for certain tasks, we're using Gemini, open source as well as GPT. So what is the biggest issue you have in terms of margins and reaching profitability? Is the company profitable? I mean, how do you think about that? Yeah, we kind of thought, we've been thinking about a lot of like, how do we set ourselves up to building a long horizon durable business? Because at the end of the day, you know, this is a decade long decision when you think about, you know, switching your financial infrastructure to a place like Hanover Park.

16:17And so that's why we raised the$27 million Series A led by Emergence to really build that future to say, okay, we're going to be here for a long time. You can trust us to think about this over a decade long time horizon. And so that's kind of part of why we raised the Series A.

16:32Stephanie Palazzolo:Great. Well, Chris, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Chris Hladzik from Hanover Park here on TITV. Gecko Robotics, a fast growing robotics unicorn backed by Founders Fund has signed a contract with a U.S. Navy supplier to bring its wall-climbing robots to the U.S. Navy ships to help bolster their fleet maintenance operations. I want to bring on Gecko Robotics co-founder and CEO Jake Lusorarian to tell us more about the deal. Jake, welcome to the show. It's great to have you back. Thank you so much. Great to be on. So last time we had you on, you were telling us all about your wall-climbing robots and about the software that goes with it.

17:09Stephanie Palazzolo:What exactly are these robots now going to do for the U.S. Navy? What the robots are going to be doing is going to be surging and supercharging what we're already doing with the Navy, but just at a much larger scale in pursuit of a large goal. That large goal for the Navy is 80 % readiness the C &O had put out as a really large objective. And you can only do so if you can have superior information and intelligence to be able to understand what's broken, how to fix it, not just immediately when it's in dry docks and being worked on, but into the future. This idea of things don't count unless they're working, this idea that if it's not ready, it doesn't count.

17:48This is a core and essential part of Gecko and what we bring to the Navy in terms of technology that no one else in the world has.

17:56Stephanie Palazzolo:So tactically, the robots are going to fix things? What kind of repairs are they going to be doing on these ships? I'm not a ship. I don't – I've never done a ship maintenance. Can't talk about it? No, just kidding. Well, what we're going to be doing and the things I can talk about are going to be all around the health. So we started this company 13 years ago with this idea and this vision of being able to diagnose the health of the built world. Crazy big, bold, ambitious vision. We've been doing that for 13 years, building wall climbing robots, robots that can fly and gather information or swim and be submersibles to gather information, whether it's on a sub or before a ship comes into dry dock to ensure that we've got everything that we need to fix the vessel, get it off and back deploying in a current conflict around the world.

18:42So the information that we're gathering is things like erosion, corrosion, cracking information, gathering information about the health of what's broken, what needs to be fixed, and also creating a digital thread of what goes into and the structures that make up the vessel itself and how those structures are eroding, corroding, and failing over time. Our objective is to ensure that we can have a living, breathing idea of the health and performance of the most critical parts of the vessel, whether, again, it's on a surface fleet, an amphib or a destroyer, or it's on the sub side. And we can do that.

19:15That intelligence allows for us to be able to modernize, be able to help the assets last way longer, but most importantly right now, not be unavailable. And that's the key, especially with conflicts around the world. Your fleet and the army that you go to war with, the Navy you go to war with, that's the only thing that matters right now, not in five years or 10 years. But the technology that we've built is being deployed today and has been deployed the last couple of years. And now it's being rolled out to a much larger fleet.

19:42Stephanie Palazzolo:Right. How much of your revenue today comes from the public sector versus the private sector? We have, it kind of like, you know, varies. obviously is like taking up larger and larger. One of our fastest growing sectors is the government sector. And so it probably makes up about 20, maybe 25 % of the company's revenues. You know, what you can imagine, you can see is that contracts like this are not easily won and they show off how robust and how proven and reliable the technology is for the government. They don't adopt, especially in the Navy, things that are promises of things to come into the future.

20:18They adopt things that can help them today and are robust and pragmatic. That's the key. And so this technology is a clear indicator that the U.S. Navy wants to be the leader in the world as it relates to this, and they should get all the credit in the world for adopting so. But also, this whole idea of things should work and they don't count unless it's ready is this idea that is very, you know, very believed in and adopted and at historic rates in the big energy sectors. I mean, companies like AdMoc are leading the way in this. And the vision by Dr. Zoltan is one where native on robotics and AI is critical and important for the future.

20:52This is the same in the power sector and the mining and manufacturing sectors with our key customers that you'll see. And so this whole idea of what the future looks like, this ability to predict the built world before catastrophic events happen or things fail because they're old. This is a whole new world that we're creating. Right.

21:08Stephanie Palazzolo:The public sector is an interesting customer category for for us here on the show, because we've been studying it more and more, talking to people about it. And the reason I ask what proportion of your total revenue makes up is because sometimes, you know, these contracts, I mean, they might not be as large as a private sector contract. again, case dependent. But we've been talking a little bit on the show about the extent to which public sector contracts actually help you then score more lucrative deals in the private sector. Has that been your experience? Are you going to focus more on the public sector for that reason?