Why the operating room is ripe for AI, according to Akara

TechCrunch's Equity crew is bringing 2025 to a close and getting ahead on the year to come with our annual predictions episode! Hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan were joined by Build Mode host Isabelle Johansson to dissect the year's biggest tech developments, from mega AI funding rounds that defied expectations to the rise of "physical AI," and make their calls for 2026.  The group tackles everything from why AI agents didn't live up to the hype in 2025 (but probably will in 2026), to how Hollywood will push back against AI-generated content, to why VCs are facing a serious liquidity crisis.   Listen to the full episode to hear:  Why world models are the next big thing in AI and how they're different from large language models  The death of "stealth mode" for AI startups and the rise of alternative funding sources  Predictions on regulatory chaos around AI policy and what Trump's recent executive order means for startups  Hot takes on IPOs: Will OpenAI and Anthropic actually go public in 2026?  Rapid-fire predictions including Johnny Ive and Sam Altman's inevitable public breakup, the return of dumb phones, and why everyone will be calling themselves "AI native"  What's coming in Build Mode season 2: A deep dive into team building, hiring, and finding co-founders  Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.    Chapters:   00:00 - Introduction   01:43 - Rating our 2025 predictions   04:19 - Funding in the bubble era   06:35 - World models and the future of AI   09:05 - The year of AI agents (for real this time)   11:58 - Physical AI everywhere   15:19 - AI meets Hollywood   16:25 - Regulatory chaos and federal preemption   18:34 - The liquidity crisis and LP direct investing   22:19 - IPO predictions for 2026   23:57 - Startup trends for 2026  27:06 - Buzzwords we're sick of hearing   28:15 - Rapid fire predictions   32:50 - What's next for Build Mode  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's plenty of hype around AI and robots in healthcare, but the problem that's actually costing hospitals money right now is operating room coordination. Two to four hours of OR time is lost every single day, not because of the surgeries themselves, but because of everything in between from manual scheduling and coordination chaos to guesswork about room turnover.      Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation that TechCrunch AI Editor Russell Brandom had with Conor McGinn, co-founder and CEO of Akara, the startup that recently landed a spot on Time's Best Inventions of 2025 and is building what’s essentially air traffic control for hospitals using thermal sensors and AI.       Listen to the full episode to hear:  Why Akara pivoted from cleaning robots to ambient sensing, and how thermal sensors document surgeries without privacy concerns  How NHS vetting became McGinn's backdoor into US hospitals  The real bottleneck holding back medical robotics. (Spoiler: it's not the robots, it's the infrastructure)  Why 40% of the nursing workforce could leave in the next five years, and what that means for automation  Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.    Chapters:    00:00 - Introduction   00:54 - Air traffic control for ORs   02:35 - Where hospitals lose hours daily   03:54 - Selling into risk-averse hospitals   06:21 - Thermal sensors and edge AI  09:11 - NHS as proof of concept   13:16 - The AI under the hood   18:12 - Privacy benefits of thermal   21:22 - Infrastructure before robots  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The hardware world had a brutal week, with iRobot, Luminar, and Rad Power Bikes all filing for bankruptcy.  Each company faces its own mix of tariff pressures, supply chain issues, and shifting markets, but together they tell a larger story about the challenges of building physical products in an era of global trade tensions and cheap overseas competition. From the Roomba maker that almost got acquired by Amazon to the e-bike company that couldn't escape its Chinese supply chain, this week's bankruptcies are a warning sign for hardware startups everywhere.  Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Anthony Ha, Rebecca Bellan, and Sean O'Kane discuss what went wrong for three once-promising hardware companies, plus Amazon's massive OpenAI bet and Trump's new approach to AI regulation.  Listen to the full episode to hear more news from the week, including:  How "slop" became Merriam-Webster's word of the year — and why it's become bigger than just AI-generated content  Why Databricks raised $10 billion at a $134 billion valuation (in a Series L!) instead of just going public already  The Coursera-Udemy merger and whether online course platforms can survive the AI era  Chapters:  00:00 - Introduction  00:24 - AI slop is Merriam-Webster's word of the year  06:07 - Amazon's $10 billion OpenAI investment  10:43 - Databricks raises $10 billion in a Series L  14:14 - Coursera acquires Udemy  19:17 - Hardware bankruptcies: iRobot, Luminar, and Rad Power Bikes  26:21 - Trump's AI executive order targets state regulation  Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jiten Behl, partner at Eclipse Ventures and former chief growth officer at Rivian, thinks we're entering an era of major re-industrialization in the US — one where factories run on AI-powered robots, not cheap overseas labor.   Behl, who helped scale Rivian from a conference room idea in 2015 to a publicly traded EV maker, is now investing in the next wave of industrial and mobility startups, including two Rivian spinouts: Also and Mind Robotics. It's part of Eclipse's larger bet that the physical world is finally ready for the kind of disruption software saw a decade ago.  Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec sat down with Behl to talk about why Rivian keeps spinning out companies, what founders in the "physical world" need that software founders don't, and why automation is becoming necessary if the US wants to compete without Chinese supply chains.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  Why Behl looks for founders who are both "hyper-optimistic" and grounded in reality, and why that combination is surprisingly rare, even in Silicon Valley.  How vertical integration worked for Rivian but won't work for most startups today.  Behl's prediction that autonomy will become "real and something we can touch and feel" in the next five years.  Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A baby was born in a Waymo this week, and it wasn't even the first one.  What started as a novelty story quickly became a reminder of how autonomous vehicles have quietly become part of everyday life, complete with all the messiness that entails. The real coming-of-age story this week, however, wasn't happening in San Francisco's robotaxis. It was playing out in Hollywood, where Netflix made an $82 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery's streaming and studio business.    Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec and Anthony Ha discuss what happens when the startup that used to mail you DVDs grows up and tries to buy a legacy entertainment empire as well as the other headlines that caught their eye.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  How Boom Supersonic is selling jet engines to data centers to fund its supersonic flight dreams  Why Hinge's CEO is leaving to start an AI dating app, and whether AI can actually fix dating  The rise of AI circular deals and what CoreWeave's CEO says about companies investing in their own customers  A fertility startup using AI-designed antibodies to expand beyond ovulation tracking  Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ElevenLabs has made a name for itself building realistic AI voices.     What started as two Polish engineers annoyed by terrible movie dubbing has grown into a profitable company now valued at $6.6 billion, doubling its valuation from just nine months ago. The company recently announced a $100 million tender offer led by Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from a16z and others, as its tech powers everything from Fortnite characters to customer service bots and goes toe-to-toe with OpenAI to become the default voice of AI.    Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we’re bringing you a conversation with CEO Mati Staniszewski from this year's Disrupt, where he made a surprising admission: he thinks voice models will be commoditized in just a couple of years. So what's ElevenLabs' plan when everyone else catches up?    Listen to the full episode to hear about:   Why ElevenLabs is pivoting from just voice models to building a conversational AI agent platform  How the company is tackling deepfakes with watermarking, AI detection, and device authentication  Why Staniszewski believes there will soon be more AI-generated content than human content  ElevenLabs' push into music generation and partnerships to fuse audio with video models  Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AWS announced a wave of new AI agent tools at re:Invent 2025, but can Amazon actually catch up to the AI leaders? While the cloud giant is betting big on enterprise AI with its third-gen chip and database discounts that got developers cheering, it's still fighting to prove it can compete beyond infrastructure.  This week on Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the ROI on AI agents, plus the collision course between Hollywood and generative AI, and why everyone wants their own version of Spotify Wrapped.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  Why Hollywood filmmakers are drawing hard lines between performance capture and AI, and another spiked attempt at AI regulation  Nothing's $5 million community funding round and whether letting consumers invest is genuine community-building or just IPO hype  Autolane's $7.4 million raise to build "air traffic control for robotaxis"  Wrapped battles from Spotify, YouTube, and others chasing their viral moment  Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tech is racing ahead while society struggles to keep up. Masha Bucher, founder and GP of Day One Ventures, built her firm around closing that gap by combining venture capital with hands-on PR to help portfolio companies not just raise money, but actually break through the noise.   Day One's been an early backer of companies like World, Superhuman, and Remote.com, with 12 of its portfolio companies hitting multibillion-dollar valuations.  Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sat down with Bucher to talk about why traditional PR is broken, how she picks founders, and why every startup founder now needs to be chronically online.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  Why Bucher thinks being a VC first makes her better at PR, and why the traditional PR model is "misaligned" for startups.  How she vets building teams and finds the “most exceptional founders.”   Why founders can't just pick one platform anymore, along with Bucher’s simple – and potentially contentious -- advice for getting started on social media.  Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vibe coding has taken the tech industry by storm, and it's not just the Lovables and Replits of the world that are winning. The startups building the infrastructure behind them are cashing in too.  Supabase, the open-source database platform that's become the backend of choice for the vibe-coding world, raised $100 million at a $5 billion valuation just months after closing $200 million at $2 billion. But co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone has a surprising strategy: he keeps turning down million-dollar enterprise contracts, betting instead that vibe coding will birth the next generation of companies.  Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Julie Bort sat down with Copplestone to explore Supabase's rise and what it means for the database race.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:  Why Copplestone believes "the death of Oracle won't take a generation"  The technical moonshots Supabase is funding to make Postgres even more scalable  How he decides which enterprise deals to turn down, and why it still "feels very painful"  Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ten years ago, raising €1 million in Copenhagen was enough to make waves in the region’s tech scene. Today, the Nordics are turning out billion-dollar companies like Lovable — which hit $200M in revenue just 12 months after launching.    Dennis Green-Lieber, founder of AI-powered customer intelligence platform Propane, has had a front-row seat to that shift over the last 15 years. His take? The region's social safety net gives founders room to take real swings without putting their personal lives on the line, and they're accelerating faster than Silicon Valley as a result.    Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis caught up with Green-Lieber to talk about the Nordic startup ecosystem, from its collaborative culture to its deep tech future.  Listen to the full episode to hear about:   How Danish founders can access free quantum computing power and what that means for the region's deep tech ambitions  Why the cultural shift from "don't stick your neck out" is creating a new generation of globally ambitious founders  The hidden problem AI tools are creating for startups that can now ship products in days instead of months  Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices