Welcome back to Equity Friday!

In this week’s episode, Mary Ann, Becca Szkutak,and Haje Kamps tackled three deals of the week: xAI, Elon Musk has once again proven that his name alone can shake up the investment world, raising a staggering $6 billion for his AI startup. Solutions by Text, The Dallas-based company, which has been bootstrapped for over a decade, secured $110 million in funding. And WeatherXM, which is a company bringing Web3 into the weather forecasting space that raised $7.7 million in a Series A.

Then they discussed the Synapse Collapse and what it means for the larger FinTech ecosystem. Synapse, a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) provider, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy leaving many startups and customers in the lurch. 

Lastly, the crew wraps it up by discussing Becca’s piece on who is (and is not) going to IPO this year and what that signals to the industry.

That’s it for this week, but we’ll be back bright and early Monday morning with more tech and startup news, along with another round of Pitch Deck Teardown. Talk soon!

Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.