Fintech
Acquisitions are heating up and Mercury is targeting the fintech crown
Finally some good news! This week we were pleasantly surprised to see it Victims of FTX fraud reportedly received money back – although it’s not as much as they might have hoped for.
But that is not all: Mary Ann Azevedo, Kirsten Korosec AND Alex Guglielmo I had a lot more to talk about this week Equity.
We discussed why investors are attracted Amae Salute, which is building an in-person approach to mental health in an increasingly digital space. We were also intrigued by Lucid Bots, a North Carolina startup that started building drones to clean the windows of tall buildings and has now become a robotics company.
Kirsten helped us understand what was behind Motional’s decision to do this delay its robotaxi business plans amid its restructuringand the broader context around that.
We then delved into the launch of digital banking Mercury’s plans to expand into softwareand how it now fits into the increasingly crowded landscape of spend management. There were also three M&A deals to close this week (Here, Here AND Here), and we celebrated that this was refreshing considering M&A activity was lighter than expected. (Spoiler: AI was involved in at least two of them.)
Last but certainly not least, we close the show with an announcement: after seven extraordinary years, Alex’s time with the podcast and TechCrunch is coming to an end. We’re excited to see what he does next, but we will certainly miss him dearly. Thanks for everything, Alex!
This, however, is not the end of fairness. We’ll be back bright and early Monday morning with your tech and startup news, along with another round of Pitch Deck teardowns. We will talk soon!
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo and published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Sign up with us on Apple Podcasts, Covered, Spotify and all the cast.
You can also follow Equity on X AND Discussions on @EquityPod. For the full transcript of the episode, for those who prefer to read rather than listen, check out our full episode archive as well as Simplecast.