Mary Ann and Alex were a dynamic duo this week, and here's what they got into:

• The fascinating backers of Checkmate, and the future of online shopping: Mary Ann covered a very interesting Series A for Checkmate, a startup that not only has shown real legs on the competitive App Store, but also on social media platforms far and wide.
• Cava's IPO won't save the IPO market, but it could help all the same: Alex is so IPO-deprived that he's drawing connections between anything that files and the startup market. This time it's not even that much of a stretch!
• Daylight calls it quits: From the 'not a huge surprise' category comes the end of Daylight, a neobank aimed at the LGBTQ+ market that has been struggling for a while yet. This begged the question are themed neobanks going to make it?
• Layoffs, Layoffs, Layoffs: Soundcloud is cutting staff to get to profitability, which we can understand. Meta is cutting staff because it, well, wants to conserve capital for more share buybacks?
• Anthropic's massive funding round and who is going to win the AI war? When is $450 million not that much money? When you are building foundational AI models that are taking on OpenAI and others. Also in this section: Cold War metaphors.

And with that, we're heading off into a holiday weekend here in the US, so Equity will be back next Tuesday.

For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. 

Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more!

Credits: Equity is hosted by TechCrunch's Alex Wilhelm and Mary Ann Azevedo. We are 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.