The TikTok ban clears key hurdle while Perplexity AI continues to shake up search

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2024

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today on Equity, we have som bad news for TikTok fans in the U.S.: A bill that would force a sale of TikTok or ban it in the United States passed the Senate. And the President is expected to sign it. Given that China has made noise that it will not allow a sale of the social media company that is headquartered in Singapore, but is owned by Chinese company Bytedance, it’s not looking good for TikTok in the States. But if that has you bummed out, don’t worry, we have lots of pretty positive news to discuss as well. News like two AI startups in Europe that are making a bit of noise that caught our attention. There’s a lot more AI in Europe than just Mistral, of course. And we had to discuss the latest from Perplexity AI, which just raised money and is shaking up its operating plans by raising even more money. It’s a good time to be an AI startup. Not that that is the only thing going on. The Framework laptops folks just raised more capital, Pony.AI is considering a U.S. IPO, and Volition Capital is expanding.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:18.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, the Tech Runch Podcast, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. This is Alex and today is April 24th, 2024, and this is our Wednesday show where we dig into the critical startup and
0:25.7	venture capital stories from the week thus far.
0:29.2	And this week's show is actually pretty darn awesome.
0:31.7	I'm excited about every single one of these stories. So on the show today we have
0:35.6	news about the Tik-Toc ban and what is going on with the pony dot AI-IPO
0:40.8	Then perplexity AI and why its upcoming round actually makes reasonable sense, then
0:46.7	repairable laptops are big business, who would have thought, two European AI stories
0:51.6	that I'm tying together,
0:53.0	and then good news for Boston startups
0:55.0	from the world of venture capital.
0:56.7	All right, let's go.
1:00.6	First up, big news from the realm of banning Tik-Tok. The Senate has passed a bill included
1:05.8	as part of a larger foreign aid package that will ban Tik-Tok if its owner,
1:10.9	Bite Dance doesn't sell it within a year.
1:13.7	The senators in the Senate passed the bill 79 to 18,
1:17.6	and that was after the House passed it
1:19.1	with an overwhelming majority over the weekend.
1:22.3	Of course, the president has to sign it to
1:24.2	actually make it law but the White House says that he will do that today. Now
1:28.4	Tik-Tuck does plan to challenge this move in courts which is absolutely
1:32.2	unsurprising so get ready for that
1:34.3	legal drama, but let's talk about the context here.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TechCrunch, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of TechCrunch and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.