Acquisitions are heating up, and Mercury eyes the fintech crown

Finally, some good news! This week, we were pleasantly surprised to see that FTX victims would be getting some money back – even if it’s not as much as they might have hoped. That wasn’t all, though: Mary Ann Azevedo, Kirsten Korosec, and Alex Wilhelm had plenty else to talk about this week on Equity. We discussed why investors are drawn to the fact that Amae Health is building an in-person approach to mental healthcare in an increasingly digital space and also how one North Carolina startup that started out by building drones to clean windows in tall buildings has also become a robotics company. Kirsten helped us understand what was behind Motional’s decision to delay its commercial robotaxi plans amid restructuring, and the greater context around that. We then dug into digital banking startup Mercury’s plans to branch out into software, and how it now fits into the increasingly crowded spend management landscape. And, we riffed on the fact that we covered three M&A deals this week (read about them here, here and here) and how refreshing that was considering M&A activity has been lighter than expected. (Spoiler alert: AI was involved in at least two of them).