AI talent managers, technocapitalist college towns, and a rise in defense tech acquisitions

In this Friday’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast Mary Ann Azevedo, Devin Coldewey, and Equity's newest voice Margaux MacColl are here to discuss three major deals of the week. First up is the $80 million round for Story, which is trying to apply that ol' web3 magic to AI and talent management. Next, Mary Ann attempts to untangle the knotty, weird term sheet for Bolt: $450 million. But is that real money or "marketing credits"? And the Margaux explained Balaji Srinivasan's private island "technocapitalist college town" where "those with a fondness for the current world order need not apply."

Then the crew got into our two main themes. Devin talked about two AI companies that aren't just doing enterprise AI. Reliant AI is focused on researchers (especially in pharma) who need to analyze thousands of papers at once.  And BeyondMath is working with Formula 1 companies to create a "digital wind tunnel" that does high-accuracy physics-based computational fluid dynamics simulations in near real time. When was the last time ChatGPT made a race car faster? Then Margaux wrapped us up with the increasing activity level in defense tech acquisitions.

Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.