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Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Balan, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

This is a bit of a different episode for us.

We don't usually have musicians on Equity, but as AI starts to reshape creative industries,

and as more creators start acting like investors, those lines are getting blurry.

So today we're joined by Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Allo Black. This isn't just a conversation about music, though. For those who aren't aware, Al-O is a biotech founder. So we're going to talk about how he found his way into cancer research, the funding behind it, FTA pipelines, and then how AI is reshaping the economics of the music industry. Allo, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you for having me.

So for those who don't know, you are the voice, the singer-songwriter behind I Need a Dollar,

which has been stuck in my head all day. The man, wake me up. There's that amazing Avici song

that you wrote. So thrilling to meet you. Yeah, thank you. Yes, I love writing songs and

creating music. It's been a

passion of mine and luckily has become my career after a short stint in business consulting.

You're known as a musician, but now you're also building a biotech company and thinking about

AI. How do you define what you do today? Well, I just enjoy trying to make as much impact as possible. The music is one way that I do it.

But with biotech, my goal was to use my influence and my income to make a market difference

in how we approach creating new therapies for disease,

immune dysregulation, and for oncology.

I was lucky enough to find a scientist who is at the University of Houston,

a biological chemist named Dr. Gomika Urugamasoria,

who is brilliant.

And he has a platform where he can produce and discover molecules that have

tremendous efficacy in binding to biomarkers, any kind of biomarker. A lot of the research

...