# AI Infrastructure Funding and VC Governance Risks

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-02-17

## Transcript

This is TechCrunch.
This episode is brought to you by Modulate.
Speech is more than just text.
It's all about how you say something.
With Modulate's AI model Velma, you can decode intent, emotion, stress, behavior, and authenticity in messy multilingual audio.
You get human level voice intelligence made for real world conversations.
I mean Velma was built on 21 billion minutes of audio, so you know what that means.
Velma is fast, cheap, and accurate.
Go to modulate's live ungated preview of Velma at preview.ai.
That's preview.modulate.ai to see why Velma ranks number one on leading benchmarks for conversation understanding, deep fake detection, and emotion detection.
Entertainment poor with Prime Video.
From the authorin from Culpa Mia Meine Schuld com Dimelo Bajito, a drix geschichte over forboten Liebe by Prime.
Aboniere HBO Max and Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the new Game of Thrones series after the bestseller from George R.
R.
Martin.
VC Masha Booker, the Jeffrey Epstein Associate and Daily One Founder, explains herself.
This is a TechCrunch Daily Crunch special.
Now, before we go any further, let's learn the latest and start business news all in about one minute with our friend producer Dennis.
Thanks, Imran.
And after raising nearly $12 million, African defense tech Terra Industries announced that it's raised an additional $22 million in funding.
Terra Industries launched in 2024 to design infrastructure and autonomous systems to help African nations monitor and respond to threats.
Terrorism remains one of the biggest threats in Africa, but much of the security intelligence on which its nations rely on come from Russia, China, or the West.
And NASA, an Indian AI infrastructure startup, has secured backing from U.S.
private equity firm Blackstone amid India's push to build homegrown AI capabilities.
Blackstone and co-investors have agreed to invest up to $600 million of primary equity in NASA, giving Blackstone a majority stake.
Blackstone and NASA told TechCrunch, the startup also plans to raise an additional $600 million in debt financing as it expands GPU capacity, a sharp increase from the $50 million it had raised previously.
And that'll do it for me.
Imran, back to you.
All right.
Masha Booker, a Silicon Valley VC and founder of Day One Ventures, took to X this week to address news reports documenting her close business and personal relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Booker's name, primarily under her maiden name, Masha Drakova, appeared in the latest dump of Epstein files over 1,600 times.
The San Francisco Standard reported this.
He made me feel I could be safe from the regime.
Someone with power and connections, who could shield me from threats she associated with her home country Russia, which she said she feared after she obtained her U.S.
screen card she wrote in the post.
I was naive.
I didn't dig deep enough early on, she wrote about why she agreed to work with Epstein.
I believed his story that his earlier conviction was about sleeping with a girl who lied about her age and trusted validations from multiple investors and scientists, she said.
She also apologized to her founders, team, and investors, saying that this situation has caused pain she never intended.
Now the files paint a picture of how Bucher, whose Silicon Valley career began in social media and public relations, agreed to become Epstein's publicist in 2017, helping rehabilitate his reputation after his 2008 sex trafficking conviction and setting up meetings between him and various journalists, as Forbes reported.
The documents show that Epstein supported and encouraged her in the early days of Day One Ventures.
The firm has since grown substantially, as Bucher told TechRon to closed its most recent fund, a $150 million dollar third vehicle in 2024, bringing its assets under management to $450 million dollars.
Some of the most salacious details from the emails involve Epstein giving her money and a Prada bag, and on one occasion, asking her for nude photos, though there's no indication whether she complied, according to SF Gate.
Bucher is certainly a well-known VC in the valley, having backed breakout companies like Superhuman, Remote, Worldcoin, and Truevill, which exited to rocket companies in 2021.
Until just 11 days before his arrest in July 2019, Forbes reported.
Epstein died in jail roughly one month later.
And that's your daily crunch.
We'll be back here tomorrow.
Same tech time, same crunch channel.
And until then, find us at techrunch.com.
Hey, Berlin.
Wusstest du, dass du mit deinem Ökostrom richtig was bewegen kannst?
Denn je mehr den Ökostrom der Berliner Stadtwerke beziehen, desto mehr können wir gemeinsam für unsere Stadt tun.
Denn die Berliner Stadtwerke investieren direkt hier vor Ort in eine saubere Stromversorgung.
Zum Beispiel in Solaranlagen auf den Dächern unserer Stadt und in viele weitere grüne Energieprojekte.
Berliner Stadtwerke.
Gut für dich.
Gut für Berlin.