Techin' Geek

Elon Musk has merged SpaceX and xAI, creating what might be the blueprint for a new Silicon Valley power structure. With his $800 billion net worth already rivaling historic conglomerate GE’s peak market cap, and Musk being vocal about his view that “tech victory is decided by velocity of innovation,” the question isn’t whether a personal conglomerate can be built, but rather how far Musk himself is going to take it. 

Watch as Equity dives into this new era of the “everything” business, whether we’ll see others like Sam Altman follow suit, and more of the week’s headlines. 

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People without coding backgrounds are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn plain-language descriptions into working code.

While these prompt-to-code tools can help create nice prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be tricky without figuring out how to connect the application with external tech services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process Stripe payments.

Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these back-end infrastructure headaches for nontechnical creators.

Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a San Francisco startup developing the financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute — essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs.

Every time an AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and a micro-payment. Sapiom’s goal is to make this whole process seamless, letting the AI agent decide what to buy and when without human intervention.

“In the future, apps are going to consume services which require payments. Right now, there’s no easy way for agents to actually access all of that,” said Amit Kumar, a partner at Accel.

Kumar has met with dozens of startups in the AI payments space, but he believes Zerbib’s focus on the financial layer for enterprises, rather than consumers, is what’s truly needed to make AI agents work. That’s why Accel is leading Sapiom’s $15 million seed round, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures.

“If you really think about it, every API call is a payment. Every time you send a text message, it’s a payment. Every time you spin up a server for AWS, it’s a payment,” Kumar told TechCrunch.

While it’s still early days for Sapiom, the startup hopes that its infrastructure solution will be adopted by vibe-coding companies and other companies creating AI agents that will eventually be tasked with doing many things on their own.

For example, anyone who has vibe-coded an app with SMS capabilities won’t have to manually sign up for Twilio, add a credit card, and copy an API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles all of that in the background, and the person building the micro-app will be charged for Twilio’s services as a pass-through fee by Lovable, Bolt, or another vibe-coding platform.

While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually empower personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. The expectation is that individuals will one day trust agents to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While that future is exciting, Zerbib believes that AI won’t magically make people buy more things, which is why he’s focusing on creating financial layers for businesses instead.

Last year, Roblox launched an open-source AI model that could generate 3D objects on the platform, helping users quickly design digital items such as furniture, vehicles, and accessories. The company claims the tool, called Cube 3D, has so far helped users generate over 1.8 million 3D objects since it was rolled out last March.

On Tuesday, the company launched the open beta for its anticipated 4D creation feature that lets creators make not just static 3D models, but fully functional and interactive objects. The feature has been in early access since November. 

Roblox says 4D creation adds an important new layer: interactivity. With this technology, users can design items that can move and react to players in the game.

​At launch, there are two types of object templates (called schemas) that creators can try out. 

The first is the “Car-5” schema, which is used to create a car made of five separate parts: the main body and four wheels. Previously, cars were a single, solid 3D object that couldn’t move. The new system breaks down objects into parts and assigns behaviors to each so that they function individually within the virtual world. The AI therefore can generate cars with spinning wheels, making them more realistic and interactive. ​

The second is called “Body-1,” which can generate any object made from a single piece, like a simple box or sculpture.

The first experience with 4D generation is a game called Wish Master, where players can generate cars they can drive, planes they can fly, and even dragons.

​In the future, Roblox plans to let creators make their own schemas so they’ll have more freedom to define how objects behave. The company says it is also developing new technology that could use a reference image to create a detailed 3D model that matches the image’s style (example below.)

The company says it is developing more ways to help people create games and experiences using AI, including a project it has dubbed “real-time dreaming.” Roblox CEO David Baszucki last month explained that this project would let creators build new worlds using “keyboard navigation and sharing real-time text prompts.”

The open beta comes on the heels of Roblox’s recent implementation of mandatory facial verification for users to access chat features in the game, following lawsuits and investigations related to child safety.

The founder of David Protein, maker of popular high-protein nutrition bars, announced on X on Monday that longevity guru Dr. Peter Attia “has stepped down from his role as Chief Science Officer at David.”

The announcement comes after Attia’s name appeared in more than 1,700 documents, including email correspondence, released on Friday as part of a massive file dump related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to The New York Times. Attia served on the executive team of the food startup and was also an early investor.

For those unfamiliar, Attia is a Canadian American physician who has become one of the most prominent voices in longevity and preventive health. He’s best known for his bestselling book “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity” and his now seven-year-old podcast, wherein he explores optimization strategies. He was also hired just last month as a contributor to CBS.

Three-year-old, New York-based David Protein raised a $75 million Series A funding round in May of last year led by Greenoaks, with participation from Valor Equity Partners. The company has experienced significant growth since launching its flagship protein bar in September 2024, a product it describes as having 28 grams of protein, zero sugar, and 150 calories.

In a lengthy post on X, Attia wrote that he was “ashamed” of some of the crude content in his emails with Epstein, but he also said he was not involved in criminal activity and never visited Epstein’s island or traveled on his plane. Attia also discussed at length how he came to know Epstein and why he stayed involved with him even after Epstein’s 2008 conviction.

The fallout appears to extend beyond David Protein. It also appears that Biograph, the healthcare testing and longevity startup that Attia co-founded with entrepreneur John Hering, may be distancing itself from the physician. The company declined to comment on Attia’s ongoing participation with the startup or about the pages on its website that used to mention him but now omit his name or return a “file not found” error.

Biograph came out of stealth a year ago, TechCrunch previously reported, with backing from investors that include Vy Capital, Human Capital, Alpha Wave, and WndrCo, along with angel investors, including Balaji Srinivasan. Like a growing number of concierge medical service companies, Biograph offers premium preventive health services to subscribers who pay between $7,500 and $15,000 per year. Attia was previously named on the company’s press release and site as a co-founder.

Nuclear fusion conjures images of massive reactors or banks of dozens of large lasers. Avalanche co-founder and CEO Robin Langtry thinks smaller is better. 

For the last several years, Langtry and his colleagues at Avalanche have been working on what’s essentially a desktop version of nuclear fusion. “We’re using the small size to learn quickly and iterate quickly,” Langtry told TechCrunch.

Fusion power promises to supply the world with large amounts of clean heat and electricity, if researchers and engineers can solve some vexing challenges. At its core, fusion power seeks to harness the power of the Sun. To do that, fusion startups must figure out how to heat and compress plasma for long enough that atoms inside the mix fuse, releasing energy in the process. 

Fusion is a famously unforgiving industry. The physics is challenging, the materials science is cutting edge, and the power requirements can be gargantuan. Parts need to be machined with precision, and the scale is usually so large as to obviate rapid fire experimentation. 

Some companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) are using large magnets to contain the plasma in a doughnut-like tokamak, others are compressing fuel pellets by shooting them with powerful lasers. Avalanche, though, uses electric current at extremely high voltages to draw plasma particles into an orbit around an electrode. (It also uses some magnets to keep things orderly, though they’re not nearly as powerful as a tokamak’s.) As the orbit tightens and the plasmas speed up, the particles begin to smash into each other and fuse.

The approach has won over some investors. Avalanche recently added another $29 million in an investment round led by R.A. Capital Management with participation from 8090 Ventures, Congruent Ventures, Founders Fund, Lowercarbon Capital, Overlay Capital, and Toyota Ventures. To date, the company has raised $80 million from investors, a relatively small amount in the fusion world. Other companies have raised several hundred to a few billion dollars.

Space-based inspiration

Langtry’s time at the Jeff Bezos-backed space tech company Blue Origin influenced how Avalanche is tackling the problem.

“We’ve figured out that using this sort of SpaceX ‘new space’ approach is that you can iterate really quickly, you can learn really quickly, and you can solve some of these challenges.” said Langtry, who worked with co-founder Brian Riordan at Blue Origin.

Going smaller allowed Avalanche to speed up. The company has been testing changes to its devices “sometimes twice a week,” something that would be challenging and costly with a large device.

Currently, Avalanche’s reactor is only nine centimeters in diameter, though Langtry said a new version grow to 25 centimeters and is expected to produce about 1 megawatt. That, he said, “is going to give us a significant bump in confinement time, and that’s how we’re actually going to get plasmas that have a chance of being Q>1.” (In fusion, Q refers to the ratio of power in to power out. When it’s greater than one, the fusion device is said to be past the breakeven point.)

Those experiments will be carried out at Avalanche’s FusionWERX, a commercial testing facility the company also rents out to competitors. By 2027, the site will be licensed to handle tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that’s used as fuel and is crucial to many fusion startup’s plans for producing power for the grid.

Langtry wouldn’t commit to a date when he hopes Avalanche will be able to generate more power than its fusion devices consume, a key milestone in the industry. But he’s thinks the company is on a similar timeline as competitors like CFS and the Sam Altman-backed Helion. “I think there’s going to be a lot of really exciting things happening in fusion in 2027 to 2029,” he said.