Tech
Emil Michael, now a senior Pentagon official, says he’ll never forgive Uber investors who ousted him and Kalanick
Emil Michael, who serves as a senior technology official at the Department of Defense, is back in the spotlight over the government’s ongoing battle with Anthropic, and a newly released podcast interview offers one of the most detailed looks yet into his thinking on that dispute — as well as an unguarded settling of old scores from his Uber days.
The interview, released Monday and conducted last month by Joubin Mirzadegan, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who leads the venture firm’s portfolio operating team, covered a range of topics including policy and personal history — and was recorded before the DoD’s feud with Anthropic had fully come to a head. But it is Michael’s remarks about his departure from Uber — and his barely concealed bitterness about it — that grabbed our attention first.
When Mirzadegan asked him point-blank whether he had been shown the door alongside Travis Kalanick, Michael answered with a single word: “Effectively.”
Michael resigned eight days before Kalanick did in June of 2017, as part of the fallout from a workplace investigation triggered by allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the company. He was not named in those allegations, but the inquiry — led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder — concluded he should be removed. Kalanick followed, pushed out in what The New York Times described as a shareholder revolt by some of the company’s most prominent investors, including Benchmark.
When Mirzadegan asked whether he was still “salty” about it, Michael didn’t equivocate. “I’ll never forget that, nor forgive,” he said.
The ouster grates on both Michael and Kalanick not only because of the personal damage to their reputations but because they believed — and still believe — that autonomous driving was Uber’s future, and that the investors who forced them out killed it.
During the interview, Michael argued the decision was driven by a desire to protect near-term returns rather than build something lasting.
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“They wanted to preserve their embedded gains, rather than try to make this a trillion-dollar company,” he said.
Kalanick has been equally pointed. At the Abundance Summit in Los Angeles last year, he said the program was second only to Waymo at the time of its cancellation and closing the gap. “You could say, ‘Wish we had an autonomous ride-sharing product right now. That would be great,’” he told the audience.
Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora in what was widely perceived as a fire sale in 2020, three years after both men were gone. The decision looked defensible at the time; autonomous driving was burning cash, and the tech felt very distant. Now Waymo’s robotaxis are operating in 10 U.S. cities and expanding into new markets. Whether Uber ever had the staying power to get there is an open question, but it’s clearly one that still haunts both men.
For his part, Kalanick never really stopped building. This month he took the wraps off Atoms, a robotics company he has been developing in stealth since around the time he left Uber eight years ago. He also revealed he is the largest investor in Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites founded by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, and said he is on the verge of acquiring it outright.
Meanwhile, Michael has found a new battlefront. The interview was recorded just before the DoD’s negotiations with Anthropic publicly collapsed, and his account of that standoff is worth a listen. He describes Anthropic as one of only a handful of approved large language model vendors for the department, approved in part through its partnerships with Palantir. As Michael frames it, the DoD is hardly a free-for-all. It operates under such a dense web of laws, regulations, and internal policies that “we almost choke on them,” he tells Mirzadegan. Anthropic, he argues, wants to add its own layer on top of all of that.
“What I can’t do is have any one company impose their own policy preferences on top of the laws and on top of my internal policies,” he said, using an analogy to make his point. “If you buy the Microsoft Office Suite, they don’t tell you what you could write in a Word document, or what email you can send.”
Michael then went further, invoking a finding Anthropic itself had published last month ahead of his conversation with Mirzadegan. Chinese technology companies, he argued, had been hitting Anthropic’s models repeatedly in a technique called distillation — essentially reverse-engineering the model’s behavior closely enough to replicate its capabilities.
Through China’s civil-military fusion laws, he said, that would give the People’s Liberation Army access to something functionally equivalent to Anthropic’s full, unrestricted model. Meanwhile, the DoD would be working with a version hemmed in by Anthropic’s own guidelines. “I’d be one-armed, tied behind my back against an Anthropic model that’s fully capable — by an adversary,” Michael said. “It’s totally Orwellian.”
Michael added a bit later in the interview, before moving on to the next topic: “If you’re an American champion — and I believe they are, they’re one of the most important companies in the country — don’t you want to help your Department of War succeed with the best tools available?”
As industry watchers are well aware, the dispute has since moved from negotiating table to courtroom.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” in late February, and the government escalated further last week, filing a 40-page brief in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The brief argued that giving Anthropic access to the DoD’s war-fighting infrastructure would introduce “unacceptable risk” into its supply chains in part because the company could theoretically disable or alter its own technology to suit its interests rather than the country’s in a time of war.
Anthropic fired back on Friday, submitting sworn declarations, alongside a brief, arguing the government’s case rests on technical misunderstandings and claims that were never raised during months of prior negotiations. One of those declarations, filed by Anthropic’s head of public sector Thiyagu Ramasamy, directly challenged the government’s claim that Anthropic could interfere with military operations by disabling or altering how its technology behaves — something Ramasamy says is not technically possible.
A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in San Francisco.
Tech
Doss raises $55M for AI inventory management that plugs into ERP
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are often described as a company’s “central brain” because the software connects different departments — including finance, HR, and inventory — into a single database where everyone shares the same information.
In recent years, a new crop of AI-powered ERP startups, such as Rillet and Campfire, has emerged hoping to replace legacy offerings like NetSuite. These companies claim that traditional ERPs are clunky, expensive, and time-consuming to implement.
However, according to Doss co-founder and CEO Wiley Jones, many new AI ERPs lack robust inventory management, the process of ensuring that the data on physical goods remains synced with the accounting ledger.
Doss claims to solve this by providing an AI-native inventory management layer that integrates with existing accounting systems, whether traditional ERPs or ones built by AI-based startups.
On Tuesday, Doss announced that it raised a $55 million Series B co-led by Madrona and Premji Invest, with participation from Intuit Ventures. Other new and existing inventors in the round include Theory Ventures, General Catalyst, Contrary Capital, and Greyhound Capital.
Doss, founded in 2022, originally focused on a core accounting product similar to those offered by AI-native startups like Rillet and Campfire. But last year, the startup decided instead of competing with these companies, “we would rather partner with them, and play a different game,” Jones told TechCrunch.
Jones explained that AI-native ERP companies manage accounts receivable, accounts payable, and other finance functions, but most don’t offer procurement and inventory management that integrates with accounting workflows.
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“We’re building a lot of the traceability for the supply chain, but through the lens of plugging into a finance and accounting partner,” Jones said.
The company’s main partners include Rillet and Campfire. Many clients also use Doss in conjuction with Intuit’s QuickBooks.
“The reason that they work with us is that [physical goods management] is not something that they’re likely going to build as a core competency without putting in a lot of energy and effort,” Jones said.
Doss’ core customer base consists of mid-market consumer brands, typically generating between $20 million and $250 million in top-line revenue. One such customer is Verve Coffee Roasters, a high-end specialty coffee brand.
The startup sees itself as competing with traditional ERPs. But these players are not sitting ideal in the age of AI, either. NetSuite, for instance, has recently introduced its updated AI ERP. It also competes with other agentic procurement startups such as Didero.
While Jones admits that selling two ERP systems, one for accounting and another for inventory management like Doss, “is a hard sell,” he says that legacy ERPs are so hard to implement that many customers are choosing to have two newer, AI-powered systems.
“I think it’s going to be a very intense fight inside of mid-market that ultimately will be determined by whoever rebuilds their architecture to be most legible and usable for agents,” Jones said.
Editor’s Note: The story corrected the list of Doss’ partners.
Tech
Crunchyroll confirms data breach after hacker claims unauthorized access
Anime streaming service Crunchyroll has confirmed a data breach involving customer service ticket information following an incident with a third-party vendor, after a hacker claimed to have accessed user data and internal systems.
The streaming site, which Sony acquired from AT&T in 2020 for $1.18 billion, operates as a joint venture between U.S.-based Sony Pictures Entertainment and Japan-based Aniplex. Crunchyroll has more than 2,000 titles in over 12 languages and serves 15 million subscribers worldwide, per its website.
Reports of a threat actor claiming access to Crunchyroll user data surfaced online this week, with a hacker alleging that they obtained data about millions of users.
Crunchyroll said it is investigating the claims.
“Our investigation is ongoing, and we continue to work with leading cybersecurity experts,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch, adding that it has not identified evidence of ongoing unauthorized access.
Separately, materials shared with TechCrunch by a cybersecurity-focused account, International Cyber Digest, indicate the attacker may have gained access to Crunchyroll’s Zendesk support system. Screenshots we have seen appear to show the company’s internal Slack messages and stolen support data, apparently stolen by hacking an employee at Telus Digital, an outsourcing giant that handles customer support for Crunchyroll. The hacker allegedly stole customer support ticket data until early 2025, at which point their access was revoked.
The cybersecurity account said the hack was separate from a recent breach affecting Telus Digital, which the company confirmed last week.
Crunchyroll did not respond to a follow-up question about whether the third-party vendor relates to its support partner, Telus Digital.
Telus Digital did not respond to requests for comments.
The hacker told BleepingComputer they had downloaded about eight million support ticket records from Crunchyroll’s systems, including roughly 6.8 million unique email addresses, though the claims have not been independently verified. The hacker also told the publication they gained access on March 12 after compromising an Okta single sign-on account belonging to a Crunchyroll support agent.
Tech
BKR Capital raises $14.5M (so far) to invest in Black founders
Canada’s BKR Capital announced Monday that its Fund II has closed CA$20 million (around $14.5 million), bringing it closer to its CA$50 million target.
This fund is looking to back “high-growth technology companies led by founders from the Black community, building solutions for the future of work, living, and global connectivity,” managing partner Lise Birikundavyi told TechCrunch. The firm is mainly looking at Canada but is open to backing select companies globally. The average check size will be between $250,000 and $1.5 million, she said.
Birikundavyi said that almost 70% of the Black population in Canada is first- or second-generation immigrants, “resulting in founders who build globally from day one, unlocking early access to international markets and creating a structural advantage in scaling.”
Though many U.S. firms have shied away from openly advertising a mission that could be perceived as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Birikundavyi said her Toronto-based fund doesn’t share those exact fears. What’s happening in Canada is less of a DEI rollback and more of a reframing, she said, where investors are “prioritizing discussion on performance,” even though “the underlying opportunity remains unchanged.”
She added, “Expanding access to overlooked founders continues to surface high-quality deals, making this less about DEI and more about arbitrage investing.” She believes investors in Canada still see “inclusive investment” as good for the ecosystem and full of potentially lucrative business opportunities.
The firm’s thesis is rooted in the belief that “overlooked markets and diverse lived experiences can unlock outsized venture opportunities,” Birikundavyi said. The firm launched in 2021 and raised $22 million for its Fund I (which Birikundavyi said is performing better than at least 75% of the other funds launched around the same time). She said BKR Capital hopes to make its final close for Fund II in December and invest in 25 companies.
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