As always, there's a lot going on in the startup world, and the folks at Equity had a blast analyzing it all.
Kirsten Kolosec, Mary Ann Azevedo, and Devin Caldway kicked off this Friday's TechCrunch Equity Podcast by discussing WeRide, a Chinese self-driving car startup that is seeking a US IPO at a valuation of $5 billion. The company also recently received permission to test self-driving cars with passengers in California.
The three then moved on to talk about EliseAI, which just raised $75 million in Series D funding, making it a unicorn. The seven-year-old company's chatbots text, email, and answer phone calls with tenants about apartment viewings, maintenance requests, lease renewals, overdue payments, and more. We had mixed feelings about the concept, and its plans to expand into healthcare.
We then dug into the topic of Elon Musk's xAI releasing the beta versions of the Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini. The new Grok AI model can now generate images on the X social network, though access to Grok is currently limited to X's Premium and Premium+ users. Luckily (and for you), Devin is one of our resident AI experts, so he was kind enough to walk us through the capabilities of Grok-2 and the potential risks.
The team then shifted focus to the fact that two startups had shut down this week: Tally and Score. Tally was a nine-year-old fintech company that helped consumers manage and pay off credit card debt. The company had raised a staggering $172 million to date from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. Score was a dating app for people with good to excellent credit that only existed for a few months before being shut down.
And finally, we took a closer look at the California bill known as SB 1047, which aims to forestall real-world disasters caused by AI systems. Devin helped us gain a better understanding of who would be affected, and the team discussed how effective the implementation of proposed safety protocols would be in regulating some of the biggest companies in the AI industry.