# Q1 2026 VC Surge, Microsoft AI Models, Creator Shift

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-04-03

## Transcript

This is TechCrunch.
Stimmt, krass.
Feeling we steu an erledigt?
Safe.
Hey, Berlin.
Wusst du that Ökostrom richtig was bewegen kannst?
Berliner Stadtwerke.
Microsoft takes on AI Rivals with three new foundational models.
I'm Aran Shake and your Daily Crunch for Friday, featuring three big tech headlines and a little bit of startup business news.
Starts right now.
And yet, now that they're in space, these four brave astronauts face their most formidable obstacle yet, Microsoft Outlook.
In the first of their 10 planned days in space, Artemis 2 commander Reed Weissman was having trouble using Microsoft Outlook.
See, astronauts are just like you and I.
So he contacted Mission Control for tech support, according to the live stream of Launch Communications.
At first, Weissman was having issues related to Optimus software, but then he flagged a more pedestrian concern.
There were two instances of Outlook running on his personal computing device, or PCD, Microsoft Surface Pro per NASA.
Soon after Weissmann reported the issue, Mission Control brought the astronaut some good news.
We wanted to let Reed know we are done remoting into his PCD one, the person at Mission Control said.
Continuing, we were able to resolve the issue for Optimus and for Outlook, we were able to get it open.
It will show offline, which it's expected.
And I know you're asking, what are astronauts even emailing about anyway?
Well, isn't being in space reason enough to set an out-of-office response?
Neither NASA nor Microsoft responded to TechCrunch's requests for comment.
Meanwhile, if any freelance NASA engineer wants to take a look at my Outlook inbox, please give me a ring.
Beehive, which is a newsletter platform, is introducing native podcast hosting.
The company told TechCrunch.
With this move, creators can now host, distribute, and monetize their podcast directly on Beehive.
Users will be able to publish an episode, share it with subscribers, and track their analytics all on the platform.
Podcasting was an obvious move, Beehive co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk told TechCrunch in an email.
Continuing, fundamentally, newsletters and podcasts have massive overlap.
Both are typically episodic, long-form content distributed to an owned audience, monetized via sponsorship.
Our roadmap is heavily driven by our customers.
They've told us that they really want to consolidate all of their tools into Beehive, and podcasting specifically has been requested consistently across customers of all sizes.
Denk says Beehive already has thousands of users with podcasts hosted elsewhere, which is why it makes sense to bring the format in-house.
Of course, the move signals Beehive's continued efforts to turn its platform into an all-in-one platform for creators, challenging Patreon and Substack, both of which have long supported podcasts.
The push into podcasting builds on the company's recent launch of a suite of creator-focused tools, covering website creation, analytics, and more.
By moving into podcasting, Beehive aims to attract creators to its platform as its rivals pursue similar strategies.
Now, one way Beehive is convincing creators to switch from said rivals like Substack and Patreon is by not taking a cut of their revenue.
Denk says creators keep 100% of what they earn, and the company does not take a share.
Of course, by comparison, Substack takes a 10% cut of revenue from paid podcast subscriptions, while Patreon takes 8%.
Microsoft AI, the Tech Giants research lab, announced the release of three foundational AI models on Thursday that can generate text, voice, and images.
The release signals Microsoft's continued push to build out its own stack of multimodal AI models and compete with rival AI labs, even though it remains tied to OpenAI.
MAI Transcribe One transcribes speech across 25 different languages into text, and is two and a half times faster than Microsoft's Azure Fast offering, according to a company press release.
MAI Voice One is an audio generating model.
This voice model allows users to generate 60 seconds of audio in one second and allows users to create a custom voice.
MAI Image 2 is a video generating model.
MAI Image 2 was originally released on MAI Playground, a new large language model testing software on March 19th.
Now all three models are being released on Microsoft Foundry, and the transcription and voice models are available in MAI Playground as well.
The models were developed by Microsoft's MAI Superintelligence team, an AI research team led by Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, that was formed and announced all the way back in November 2025.
In an increasingly crowded LLI market, MAI hopes a selling point for these models is that they're cheaper than those from Google and OpenAI, the company wrote in the blog post.
Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion into the AI research lab and hosts its models in its various products through a multi-year partnership.
Microsoft takes the same stance with CHIPS.
It both produces its own and buys from outside players as well.
And now we've got the latest instead of business news all in about one minute with our friend producer Dennis.
Imran, thank you.
And according to new Crunch-based data, global investing in startups hit $297 billion in Q1 2026, breaking all records.
This is a massive two and a half times increase over the $118 billion raised in the previous quarter.
This single quarter haul outpaces every full year of global VC activity prior to 2019.
This unprecedented spike was fueled by just four behemoth deals, each a record breaker in its own right.
Last month, OpenAI announced that it is now valued at $852 billion after collecting $122 billion, surpassing the previous record for the largest funding round ever, also held by OpenAI when the Chat GPT maker raised $40 billion a year ago.
The quarter also saw Anthropic, its main rival, raised $30 billion at a valuation of $380 billion.
That funding haul effectively made it the third largest VC round on record.
The other two mega deals of the quarter included a $20 billion fundraise by XAI and Waymo's $16 billion round.
These four rounds collectively raised $188 billion, accounting for more than 63% of total funding in the quarter.
While it might appear that without them, fundraising appears to be on a more typical trajectory, anecdotal evidence implies otherwise.
Investors and founders say, for example, that seed stage AI startups are commanding bigger dollars and higher valuations at earlier stages than ever before.
And that'll do it for me.
Imran back to you.
And folks, that's your daily crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Rebecca Schutak, Aisha Malik, Amanda Silberling, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
We'll see you here tomorrow, same tech time, same crunch channel.
And until then, find us at techrunch.com.
Stop!
Raus of the recruiting spirale.
So sparen they have 570% cost pro beer and are flexible.