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SiriusXM, the satellite radio company and Pandora owner, disclosed today it’s laying off 475 employees, representing 8% of its workforce. In an email sent to employees, CEO Jennifer Witz said the cuts would impact “nearly every department” across the company, and follow a review of SiriusXM’s operations announced in November that aimed to identify areas where it could improve its agility and efficiency, she said. As part of that effort, the company made efforts to cut content, marketing and discretionary spending, decreased its real estate footprint, and tightened up its travel and entertainment policy. However, citing today’s “uncertain economic environment,” and the investments planned in the business this year, Witz said headcut reductions were also in order.
The news was announced via an SEC filing, which was first spotted by Variety.
“Over the past five years, our business has grown and expanded with the addition of new acquisitions, business lines, and revenue streams. Now, we have completed an assessment of our departments and functions to determine where we can improve collaboration, consolidate teams to achieve greater efficiencies, and ultimately, design an organization structure that is best positioned to achieve our priorities,” Witz wrote in the email. “As a result, nearly every department across SiriusXM will be impacted. We believe the new operational design will allow us to move faster and more effectively as we take on new challenges across our business.”
The company, as of its most recent quarter, reported a total gain of 134,000 subscribers — an improvement over the loss of 231,000 subscribers in the year-ago period, bringing its self-pay subscriber based to 32.4 million and its total users to 34.3 million. However, its Pandora business has not been faring as well amid competition from rival streamers like those from Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Google. In the final quarter of 2022, SiriusXM lost 52,000 net self-pay Pandora subscribers, to end the quarter with 6.2 million self-pay subscribers. Pandora’s monthly active users had also dropped from 52.3 million to 47.6 million year-over-year.
Though Pandora was an early leader in music streaming, its owner has not yet fully capitalized on its 2018 $3.5 billion acquisition. To date, it’s offered some integrations between the services, including a Pandora NOW station on the satellite streamer and bundle discounts at times.
Following the deal, the company in 2021 brought in a former Disney+ exec, Joseph Inzerillo, as its new Chief Product Officer, who has been shaking up how some of its internal workings operate. For instance, Inzerillo recently told TechCrunch the company’s previously separated SiriusXM and Pandora engineering teams were now completely integrated as the company aimed to approach its services going forward in a “much more platform-oriented view of this as opposed to a product-specific thing.”
The company suggested it had more changes on the horizon for 2023, which began with increased personalization for its SiriusXM app as it moves further from being a “radio”-style service with stations and buttons to one that’s modernized for today’s more digital car dashboards, like CarPlay.
In addition to Pandora, SiriusXM over the past few years acquired the podcast network Stitcher for $325 million in 2020 and, more recently, Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco podcast company for $150 million in May 2022. Witz told investors during the company’s last earnings call that these acquisitions provided the company with the opportunity to do cross-selling across live broadcasts, music streaming on and off platform and podcasts. However, she admitted, more investments were needed across the industry to provide better tech solutions for advertisers.
In the email to staff today, Witz said employes would be contacted directly about their departure and would have the ability to speak with a member of its People + Culture HR team. It’s also providing exit packages that include “severance, transitional health insurance benefits, Employee Advocacy Program continuation, and outplacement services,” the email noted.
SiriusXM announces layoffs of 475 people, or 8% of its total workforce by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
TechCrunch Disrupt, the premier early-stage startup conference, takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco. Sure, that’s six months from now. But if you want the best price, you gotta take action before prices go up in five days. That’s right, it’s now o’clock.
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Only 5 days left to save $1,000 on Disrupt passes by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/only-5-days-left-to-save-1000-on-disrupt-passes/
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is Alex and we are here to do our Monday show, a kickoff for the week that covers startup news, tech news, and a little bit of the money that powers both. Sound good? Here’s what we have for you this morning:
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We’d give an arm and a leg for an ARM IPO filing by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/wed-give-an-arm-and-a-leg-for-an-arm-ipo-filing/
Microsoft today introduced what it’s calling the “next generation” of AI product updates across its business apps portfolio. They touch on both Power Platform, Microsoft’s set of low-code tools for building apps and workflows, and Dynamics 365, the company’s suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Charles Lamanna, CVP of business apps and platform at Microsoft, described the updates as the logical next step on Microsoft’s automation journey. Powered by tech from AI startup OpenAI and built using the Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft’s service that provides enterprise-tailored access to OpenAI’s API, the new capabilities follow the rollout of OpenAI text-generating AI models in Power Platform four years ago and the more recent debut of generative AI capabilities in Viva Sales, Microsoft’s seller experience app.
“Over the last four years, we’ve been on a journey to bring generative AI and foundation models to the workplace,” Lamanna said via email, noting that Microsoft has a longstanding partnership with OpenAI to commercialize the vendor’s tech in Microsoft’s own products and through the Azure OpenAI Service. “And we’ve now reached the point where the tech and product can enable transformative outcomes for customers.”
In Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s launching what it calls Copilot (borrowing branding from GitHub’s Copilot service), which — broadly speaking — aims to automate some of the more repetitive sales and customer service tasks.
For example, in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales, Copilot can help write email responses to customers and create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook. The meeting summary pulls in details from the seller’s CRM, such as product and pricing information, Lamanna says, and combines them with insights from the recorded Teams call.
“We securely and intelligently access information from customers’ CRM, ERP and other enterprise data sources at runtime,” Lamanna added. “We use large language models to combine the enterprise data with underlying knowledge to produce responses tuned for each customer. Importantly, we don’t use customers’ data to train the models.”
Over in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot can draft “contextual answers” to customer queries via chat or email and provide an “interactive chat experience” for customer service agents that draws from knowledge bases as well as case history. These complement the new “conversation boosters” feature in Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft’s chatbot builder, which lets companies connect a bot to resources like a website or knowledge base to use that data to respond to questions that the bot hasn’t been trained on.
In turn, conversation boosters complements a new “GPT” model in Microsoft’s AI Builder tool that lets organizations embed text generation features into their Power Automate and Power Apps solutions. Lamanna says that, for example, a researcher could use it to summarize text from weekly released reports and have it sent to their email, while a marketing manager could tap the GPT model to create targeted, generated content ideas by entering specific keywords or topics.
Given Microsoft’s recent foray into generative text — i.e. Bing Chat — one might be reluctant to build an app using the company’s tech lest it go off the rails. But Lamanna asserts that conversation boosters and the GPT model — plus Copilot, for that matter — are “grounded in reality” by each customer’s CRM, ERP and other data sources.
“AI-generated content is always clearly labeled, and users are encouraged to verify the accuracy before using it. When relevant, we also cite the sources from which the answer was retrieved to better enable the user to verify the accuracy of the response,” Lamanna said. “We have monitoring and controls in place to allow us to quickly respond with manual intervention in case any issues slip through the above lines of defense.”
There’s nothing to prevent users from not taking the time to verify the content’s accuracy, of course. Time will tell whether that becomes an issue; studies on automation bias, or people’s tendency to place too much trust in AI, suggest that it might.
Fortunately, the rest of Copilot’s capabilities are less potentially problematic.
With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can receive suggestions about customer segments that they might not have previously considered and create target segments by describing the segment in their own words. They can also get ideas for email campaigns, typing in requests to see topics from Copilot, which generates them by pulling from an organization’s existing marketing emails as well as “a range” of internet sources, Lamanna says.
Microsoft’s playing catch-up in some respects. The CRM elephant in the room, Salesforce, has for years been injecting (or at least attempting to inject) its CRM family of products with AI-powered capabilities. Startups like Glint have embraced AI, too, mostly to automate customer service workflows. But as an increasing number of marketers say they plan to sprinkle AI throughout their content strategies, it might not matter who’s first to the punch, necessarily, but who deploys it first at scale.
“CRM and ERP have long been mission-critical customer and business data sources; however, they frequently require burdensome tasks like manual data entry, content generation and notetaking,” Lamanna said. “Dynamics 365 Copilot automates these tedious tasks and unlocks the full creativity of the workforce.”
Beyond the sales realm, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft’s business management system, tries to streamline creating ecommerce product listings. Lamanna says that Copilot can generate product attributes like color, material and size with descriptions that can be tailored by adjusting things such as the tone of voice, format and length.
It’s a bit like Shopify’s recently-introduced AI-generated product descriptions tool, a fact that Lamanna indirectly acknowledged. He pointed out that Business Central customers using Shopify can publish products with AI-generated descriptions to their Shopify store in “just a few clicks” (after they’ve reviewed them for accuracy, hopefully).
Elsewhere, riding the wave of automation in the supply chain industry, Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center can proactively flag issues like weather, financials and geography that might impact supply chain processes. Supply chain planners can then choose to have Copilot automatically draft an email to alert any impacted partners.
Lamanna argues that even simple AI-imbued processes such as these — automating emails — can lead to a measurable boost in productivity.
“According to our recent survey on business trends, 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks in their jobs. AI-powered assistants are now table stakes for business apps,” Lamanna said. “We believe Dynamics 365 Copilot will help employees get work done faster so organizations can spend more time on the creative, innovative aspects of their jobs — like building long-term customer relationships.”
As always, the truth lies clouded in some marketing fluff. But what’s clear is that Microsoft isn’t slowing its investments in AI and automation. It was just in January that Microsoft invested billions more in OpenAI, and the company’s eager to see a return on investment.
Copilot will be included in existing Dynamics 365 licenses like Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise at no additional cost, Microsoft says. It’ll launch in preview beginning March 6, with general availability to follow sometime down the line.
Microsoft brings an AI-powered Copilot to its business app suite by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/microsoft-dynamics-copilot/
Amongst a ton of product changes to make Twitter a more attractive platform, Elon Musk has mentioned multiple times his desire to make direct messages better and more secure. So much so that he wants DMs to “superset Signal” — the encrypted messaging app.
Over the weekend, Musk said that the end-to-end encrypted DM feature will roll out this month. Along with that, users will also get the ability to reply to individual messages and use any reaction emoji. “Aiming to roll out ability to reply to individual DMs, use any reaction emoji & encryption later this month,” Musk wrote. Currently, users can only choose among seven emojis as reactions.
End-to-end encryption protection means that no one, including Twitter, will be able to read your chats (except the recipients of your messages). Several other apps and messaging protocols like WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage already use this kind of encryption. Currently, Twitter employees can potentially read the content of direct messages on the platform. It’s not clear at the moment if the encryption will be available for both individual and group chats. Similarly, it’s unclear whether end-to-end encryption will be enabled by default or will be an opt-in feature.
Encrypted DMs are not exactly a new project. Twitter started working on them back in 2018 but abandoned its efforts later. Last year, app researcher Jane Manchun Wong discovered new code suggesting that the social network has resumed its work on the feature under the new management.
What’s more, Twitter designer Andrea Conway also showed off a concept in February, which indicated that DMs will have a banner at the top of a conversation to indicate that it is protected through end-to-end encryption.
Other new functions are just part of Twitter trying to achieve feature parity with chat apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. The Meta-owned app expanded its emoji reaction feature last year and Telegram pushed custom reactions behind a paywall.
Elon Musk says Twitter is ‘aiming’ to roll out encrypted DMs this month by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Remote work lends people a certain amount of freedom in how they go about doing their jobs, so it’s not surprising that an asynchronous style of working would be one of the side effects of not working from a centralized location.
But it’s not always good for employees. In this arrangement, people often end up working more, and meeting culture takes over because people can no longer see their colleagues in an office setting, which is a natural habitat for collaboration and communication.
And when you’re talking to people online, understanding each other is usually more difficult because you’re less in tune with what’s happening in their lives at that moment. Jumping on a call with someone also doesn’t come naturally to everyone.
Ultimately, to reduce the number of meetings so people can focus on other tasks, employees need to find new ways to foster a culture of open communication and collaboration, and individuals and teams need to introduce boundaries and rituals into their workday.
The routines people create are negotiated over time, but it’s something we’ve come to take for granted. Any organization hoping to scale can create rituals that engage people in their work and inspire them to be their best selves.
Ultimately, asynchronous work only serves you when you compartmentalize phases of work with your team.
With remote work come hours of video conferencing calls and employees who’ll show up and not contribute a single word. People will often refrain from unmuting their mics and many won’t turn their cameras on, leaving the speaker with only a dark screen to talk to.
Making matters worse, on a call with a lot of attendees, important information can be left undiscussed. Even setting up a quick five-minute clarifying call can be tough to negotiate sometimes.
To trigger active listening and get people invested in a meeting, try a Socratic dialogue structure. In this approach, a moderator will ask participants to summarize what the previous speaker said and encourage them to build on top of the full conversation.
Conversations like this involve examples, definitions, sub-questions and assumptions, and help people look for arguments that prove a point instead of validating their opinions. It’s a proven way to kick-start constructive dialogue and get multiple perspectives on a topic so that you can arrive at a shared viewpoint. It also shows employees that every perspective is valuable, which fosters an environment of trust.
If there is an elephant in the room, bring it to people’s attention and put their minds at ease before it becomes a larger issue. It’s key to remain open and proceed with sensitivity and accept that others may not agree with your opinions. Leaders should be the role models here and should ask questions and encourage team members to speak up and take initiative.
Creating remote work rituals that stick by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/creating-remote-work-rituals-that-stick/
An international law enforcement operation has led to the arrests of suspected core members of the prolific DoppelPaymer ransomware operation.
German and Ukrainian police, working with law enforcement partners including Europol and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), said they took action last month against the notorious group blamed for numerous large-scale attacks since 2019.
German police said they raided the house of a German national believed to have played a “major role” in the DoppelPaymer ransomware group. At the same time, Ukrainian police officers interrogated a Ukrainian national who is also believed to be a core member of the Russia-linked ransomware operation. The authorities say they are analyzing the equipment seized during the raids to determine the suspects’ exact role and links to other accomplices.
A police raid in Germany involving a suspected member of the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang. Image Credits: Europol
German police have also released arrest warrants for three additional suspects based in Russia: Igor Turashev, Igor Garshin, and Irina Zemlianikina. Turashev, who is also wanted by the FBI for his alleged role in the sanctioned Evil Corp hacking group, is accused of “having committed acts of blackmail and computer sabotage in particularly serious cases”
German police said DoppelPaymer had targeted at least 601 companies worldwide, including a total of 37 organizations in Germany. Europol added that victims in the United States — the exact number of which was not shared — paid out at least €40 million (about $42.5M) to the gang between May 2019 and March 2021.
One of the most serious attacks DoppelPaymer carried out by the gang targeted University Hospital in Düsseldorf. The subsequent failure of critical systems caused delays in emergency treatment, including the death of a 78-year-old patient, possibly the first death caused by ransomware.
Other DoppelPaymer victims include Visser, a parts manufacturer for Tesla and SpaceX; Kimchuk, a medical and military electronics maker; and manufacturing giant Foxconn.
DopplePaymer ransomware, which was the subject of an FBI warning in December 2020, is believed to be the successor to BitPaymer, a similar variant of ransomware linked to Evil Corp. According to reports, DoppelPaymer has since rebranded to “Grief.”
Updated with more from German authorities.
Police arrest suspected members of prolific DoppelPaymer ransomware gang by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch
It’s taken rather longer than a month for Meta-owned WhatsApp to commit to address complaints swirling around how it imposes terms of service on users but the European Commission has just announced that the messaging platform has agreed to improve how it communicates to users and presents future ToS updates.
Early in 2021, WhatsApp triggered a major user backlash after it pushed out an aggressive and confusingly worded update to its ToS that required users to accept the update in order to continue using the platform without making it clear what exactly was changing. The episode caused widespread confusion and drove some users to ditch the platform altogether — with rivals like Signal and Telegram reporting a surge in adoption.
In July 2021 the European consumer protection association umbrella group, the BEUC, along with eight of its member organizations, lodged a complaint about WhatsApps’ confusing ToS with the EU’s executive, the Commission, and with the European network of consumer authorities. This led on to warnings from the bloc to WhatsApp that it needed to fix a variety of issues — including a letter last summer when the Commission gave the end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging platform a month to straighten out its messaging to users.
At the same time, the Commission asked WhatsApp to confirm whether or not it derives any revenue from commercial policies related to user data.
While message content on WhatsApp is E2EE, user metadata is not protected so it has remained unclear how Meta might use this information, given an earlier decision the tech giant took — in August 2016 — abandoning a privacy pledge by the WhatsApp founders by saying it would link their accounts to others on public social services it operates, such as Facebook, potentially giving the adtech giant the ability to enhance its profiling of WhatsApp users by cross-linking their digital activity with other social services it owns.
Today, the Commission said WhatsApp has confirmed that users’ personal data is not shared with third-parties or other Meta companies — including Facebook — for advertising purposes. Although it is unclear whether the EU is simply taking Meta at its word on this — and whether or not it intends to audit the claim; we’ve asked if it will be taking any follow on steps and will update this report with any response.
The question of whether WhatsApp uses user data for marketing was an issue Ireland’s Data Protection Commission declined to look into, after it announced its final decision this January on a separate, multi-year data protection-related investigation of the platform, despite the European Data Protection Board instructing it to do so. So this aspect of WhatsApp’s operation remains under-scrutinized by regulators.
“In June 2022, the CPC Network sent a second letter to WhatsApp reiterating their request that consumers must be clearly informed about WhatsApp’s business model and, in particular, whether WhatsApp derives revenues from commercial policies relating to users’ personal data. Following discussions among the CPC Network, the Commission and WhatsApp, the company confirmed that it does not share users’ personal data for advertising purposes,” the Commission said in its press release today.
“Following a dialogue with EU consumer protection authorities and the European Commission (CPC network), WhatsApp committed to being more transparent on changes to its terms of service. Moreover, the company will make it easier for users to reject updates when they disagree with them, and will clearly explain when such rejection leads the user to no longer be able to use WhatsApp’s services,” the EU’s executive added.
Commenting in a statement, the EU’s justice commissioner, Didier Reynders, also said: “I welcome WhatsApp’s commitments to changing its practices to comply with EU rules, actively informing users of any changes to their contract, and respecting their choices instead of asking them each time they open the app. Consumers have a right to understand what they agree to and what that choice entails concretely, so that they can decide whether they want to continue using the platform.”
In an overview of the commitments made by WhatsApp, the EU said that — for any future policy updates — the messaging platform will:
So the EU appears to have extracted a commitment from Meta not to resort to any more dark pattern designs to try to force WhatsApp users to swallow self-serving ToS updates — such as the deceptive choices it pushed out, back in 2016, when it tried to force WhatsApp users to agree to share their mobile phone number and last seen status on the app with the parent company (what was then known as Facebook and is now called Meta) and with any other companies it owned.
Of course the devil will be in the detail of how Meta interprets these ToS commitments — and how effectively the bloc’s regulators (which could include the Commission itself) monitor its design choices and enforce against any breaches.
That said, Meta has more reason not to ignore rules in this area than previously.
First up, a 2019 modernization of EU consumer protection law, which began to apply last May, brought in more dissuasive penalties — especially for widespread infringement issues which cut across borders and affect many EU consumers — allowing national authorities to issue fines of at least up to 4% of global annual turnover for confirmed breaches.
Additionally, the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) — which is set to apply for a subset of larger platforms (most likely including Meta) later this year — foresees what the Commission describes as “an obligation for services to have clear terms and conditions, explaining to the user in comprehensible language when their content or their account can be affected by certain restrictions, and an obligation to apply such restrictions in a diligent, objective and proportionate manner”.
Penalties for infringements of the DSA can be as high as 6% of global annual turnover — and, for larger platforms, aka VLOPs, the Commission itself will take on a centralized oversight and enforcement role. So the days of multi-year ‘dialogues’ that let tech giants kick the can down the road for ages before — eventually — offering up some incremental correction or tidbit of information should be on the way out in the EU.
We contacted WhatsApp about today’s announcement but a spokesperson told us it is not commenting.
We understand BEUC will be publishing a response later today.
WhatsApp agrees to clean up its user messaging in the EU by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/whatsapp-tos-commitments-eu/
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free.
Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.
FYI, next week I will be in Austin to attend SXSW. I’ll be on stage March 14 and March 15 and you can find me by going to the SXSW schedule. See ya there.
In the days leading up to Tesla Investor Day, there was a lot of chatter and speculation about what future products CEO Elon Musk might reveal. Welp, I wouldn’t describe the four-hour event as particularly illuminating.
Don’t get me wrong, Musk and an unusually long line of senior-level employees, talked a lot about how Tesla would be the driver of a global shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. There just wasn’t a lot of specifics on exactly how the company was going to achieve that. (I give a full rundown of the major highlights here, including confirmation that it is building a lithium refinery in Corpus Christi.
The bulk of the event was focused on the past. And there were no new details on Tesla’s next-generation EV and its upcoming factory in Mexico (besides confirmation that it was happening) nor did they address current issues with its Full Self-Driving software that is currently unavailable to those who opted to buy the $15,000 option due to a recall.
The market didn’t respond positively, perhaps because the event lacked that big product announcement, specific details on the next step in its so-called master plan 3 or Musk’s signature “one more thing” line.
You can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.
Aventon has launched its first cargo e-bike, the Abound for $2,199. The bike has options for front and rear storage and a payload capacity of 440 pounds. It’s got a top speed of 20 miles per hour, a 750w motor and range of up to 50 miles.
Cake is launching a B2B subscription offer for its e-mopeds and bikes. Cake Subscribe is an all inclusive service that gives businesses everything from vehicles to servicing and insurance for a monthly payment and no money down.
Delhi says it will only permit motorbike taxis if they’re electric. Uber said the city is risking the livelihood of over 100,000 drivers in the city. The announcement comes just a week after this newsletter reported that Delhi was coming down on apps like Ola and Uber operating motorbike taxi services without a permit.
France has proposed a bill that would require owners of e-bikes and e-scooters to register their vehicles.
HumanForest, the shared e-bike and e-moped service, has partnered with Uber Eats to provide couriers who use the platform with discounted rates. Couriers are eligible to receive a 10% discount on minute bundles, which translates to rides as cheap as £2.25 per hour.
Indonesia will start introducing a $460+ two-wheeler EV incentive in March.
Mosa has completed its first public trial in the UK of its smart parking infrastructure to help fight bicycle theft.
Ola will invest $920 million in battery and EV production in India’s state of Tamil Nadu.
Rad Power Bikes is doubling down on its utility e-bike offerings. The company launched its next-gen Rad Runner 3 Plus with an extended payload capacity of 350 pounds, alongside a suite of new cargo accessories like the Rad Trailer, complete with pet storage insert.
Yulu and Bajaj Auto are working together to produce a new electric moped for sharing.
— Rebecca Bellan
Just a bunch of deals this week. Here are the ones that got my attention.
Air Company, a startup backed by JetBlue and Toyota that turns carbon dioxide into aviation fuel (and perfume, vodka and hand sanitizer), struck an up-to $65 million deal to help the Air Force capture CO2 and turn it into “sustainable” aviation fuel on base.
Avocargo, a German-based e-cargo bike rental service, filed for insolvency. And Kumpan Electric, a German moped manufacturer, filed for bankruptcy.
iMotion Automotive Technology Suzhou Co., a China-based automated driving developer, is considering a Hong Kong initial public offering that could raise $200 million to $300 million, Bloomberg reported citing sources familiar. The listing could take place as early as this year.
Jet Token, a private aviation booking and membership platform, plans to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Oxbridge Acquisition Corp.
Li-Cycle Holdings, lithium-ion battery recycler in North America, has been conditionally approved for a $375 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy through the agency’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program.
PteroDynamics, a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft manufacturer based in Colorado Springs, raised $7.5 million in a seed round co-led by existing backer Kairos Ventures and new investors Lavrock Ventures and CS Venture Opportunities Fund.
Stellantis agreed to sell its distribution business in Turkey for €400 million euros ($425 million) to its local partner.
Tier is reportedly trying to raise about $1 billion in debt and maybe in equity as the company tries to reach profitability this year.
Velotric, founded by Lime and Didi alumni, raised $7.4 million in a Series A round, which the company will use to expand its e-bikes in the United States.
Remember Argo AI, the Pittsburgh-based AV company backed by Ford and VW that shut down last year after the two automakers pulled support? Ford has resurrected parts of it. The automaker created a Pittsburgh-based subsidiary called Latitude AI that will work on improving Ford’s existing advanced driver-assistance system known as BlueCruise and developing new automated driving technology for its next-generation of vehicles. The 550-person subsidiary is primarily former Argo employees. (Reminder that Ford took a $2.7 billion writedown on Argo)
Aurora and Waymo, two companies attempting to commercial autonomous trucks, want a five-year exemption from Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulations that require reflective triangles to be place around a vehicle if it pulls onto a highway shoulder. The companies want to instead use beacons mounted to the trucks.
Waymo issued a second round of layoffs this year. Combined with the initial cuts in January, the self-driving technology company has let go of 8%, or 209 employees, of its workforce. Meanwhile, the company said it will begin testing its autonomous Jaguar I-Paces without a human safety operator in Los Angeles in the next couple of weeks.
Embark Trucks is in trouble. The company is cutting 70% of its workforce (about 230 employees) and shutting down two offices. CEO Alex Rodrigues noted in an email to employees that the remaining 30% of workers will focus on winding down operations.
Blink Charging had a mixed Q4 and full-year earnings report. Revenue beat analysts’ expectations by 5.2% with $61.1 million for Q4, but the company missed EPS estimates by 4.3%. Blink reported a net loss of $91.6 million. Shares were down for the company as investors worry that Blink has less than one year of cash runway. The company is unprofitable and doesn’t expect to reach that milestone in the next three years.
Innoviz reported $6 million in revenue for 2022, about an 11% increase from 2021. The company, which says its program with Volkswagen is still on track, did see its net losses shrink year over year. Innoviz reported a net loss of $126.8 million in 2022, down 17% from the $153.5 million in losses from the prior year.
Rivian generated $663 million in revenue in the fourth quarter and $1.66 billion for the full year, a result that was buoyed by an uptick in production and deliveries towards the end of the year but still wasn’t enough to meet Wall Street’s expectations. Rivian also said it would increase production in 2023 to 50,000 vehicles, a figure that was lower than expected. Shares fell on the trio of suboptimal news, including missed expectations, a recall and an increased, but still lower-than-expected production forecast for 2023.
Ford will restart production of the Ford F-150 Lightning on March 13.
Redwood Materials identified and recovered 1,268 end-of-life battery packs, totaling about half a million pounds of material a year after launching an EV battery recycling program in California. The packs were transported and recycled at its facility in Northern Nevada. From the recovered metals, Redwood said it is already beginning to produce battery materials, anode and cathode that can be returned directly to U.S. battery cell manufacturers.
Scout, the EV upstart spun out of VW Group, has picked South Carolina for its $2 billion factory. But there’s a lot more. Tim Stevens interviewed CEO Scott Keogh and learned more about the company’s plans to bring two rugged EVs — a truck and SUV — to market by 2026. Expect more information this coming week on the incentives package Scout received from the state.
TechCrunch+ reporter Tim De Chant explores why there are so many “gigafactories?” Hint: it’s not just EVs driving the expansion.
Chick-fil-A opened a break room at a location in NYC for a limited time to provide delivery workers a place to rest, warm up, charge their phones and have a snack in between deliveries. Meanwhile in India, Zomato is building out a series of Rest Points for gig workers to relax between deliveries.
Uber rolled out updates to its Shop and Pay feature that address three of the most commonly raised courier issues: out of stock items, digital payments and order clarity before accepting a trip. Rebecca Bellan writesUber is coming for Instacart.
Cariad, the software subsidiary under VW Group, launched a group application store (using Harman’s framework) that will bring dozens of apps including Spotify, Amazon Music, TikTok and gaming hubs Vector Unit and FRVR to Audi and eventually other brands under the German automotive group. The intent is for the group application store to stretch across VW Group’s lineup, including the rest of Audi’s portfolio and then onto Porsche and Volkswagen.
Ford applied for a patent on a system that would use connected car tech to help repossess vehicles.
Luminar held its investor day and provided details that built off its announcement at Mercedes-Benz tech event. A few items of note. The company acquired lidar-related IP from Seagate (the data storage technology company) and launched a semiconductor company called LSI that takes the chip design companies it has acquired and puts them all under one entity and with one focus. Luminar also unveiled its next-gen Iris lidar and software, which is the product that will be integrated into Mercedes vehicles by mid decade.
This was another interesting item: Luminar has hired Swiss Re to evaluate its tech’s safety claims and will develop an insurance product based off of those findings.
Tesla paused the rollout of its Full Self-Driving beta software in the United States and Canada following a recall of the system that federal safety regulators warned could allow vehicles to act unsafe around intersections and cause crashes.
See y’all next week.
Another AV company hits the skids, Scout Motors picks a home and Tesla’s tepid investor day by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
After a slow start in the UK and Europe, open banking is catching on with fintechs, who are using APIs to access banking data and rails and using them as an alternative to traditional credit networks to build products.
Now, a UK-based consumer lending service called Abound is doubling down on its ambitions in the space with a big fundraise to fuel its own open-banking-based business. The startup has raised a whopping £500 million ($601 million at today’s rates) — money that it will be using to help finance loans, to bring more customers on to its platform, and to invest in its technology, which combines open-banking data and machine learning algorithms to build what Abound believes is a better “credit score” for applicants. To complement its direct-to-consumer offer in the UK, Abound also plans to expand as a B2B service in Europe, which has been building out its own open banking framework, PSD2.
“We see ourselves as going beyond credit scoring,” CEO and co-founder Gerarld Chappell said in an interview, who describes the bank transaction data that Abound uses to build its AI-based risk and lending profiles as akin to “financial X-rays.” These in turn help Abound “understand true affordability” when it comes to loans.
Its rise comes at the same time that we’re are seeing a lot more activity around open banking. Last year, Visa acquired open banking developer Tink, with provides API rails for thousands of banks, for more than $2 billion. Another major rails provider, TrueLayer, last raised at over a $1 billion valuation (granted that was back in 2021…). Meanwhile, Token.io and Vyne are, similar to Abound, examples of startups building more specific applications on open banking standards (respectively person-to-person payments and merchant services).
Abound’s new funding includes both debt and equity: with U.S. bank Citi plus clients of Waterfall Asset Management providing the debt portion; and K3 Ventures, GSR Ventures, and Hambro Perks providing equity.
As is typical with lending startups, the vast majority of the $601 million here is debt, which will be used for lending; the smaller equity part will be used for investing into the business itself. Abound is not disclosing valuation, but for some context, Chappell confirmed that the startup, previously known as Fintern.AI (which is technically still the parent company’s name), had previously raised just under $11 million in equity and around $60 million for loaning.
More pointedly, the reason for the big sum raised here is that Abound has been seeing surge of interest since launching in 2020.
Its service — based around loans of between £1,000 and £10,000, with repayment options extending up 5 years (although average repayments have been 2.5-3 years), with interest rates the company guarantees are lower than those offered by banks (currently they are 24.8% APR) — has been growing on average 30% month-on-month; it has issued loans to more than 150,000 customers to date; and it says it is on track to loan out £1 billion ($1.2 billion) by 2025.
All of that signals not just something about the state of the economy today, but also the state of fintech. Yes, loans are definitely in demand for average consumers at the moment to supplement their regular monthly income. But it’s also notable to see how new fintech services are being accepted and adopted as a means to getting that liquidity. It’s no longer a novelty to use neobanks and apps to manage money, in other words; it’s just another way, and maybe for some a better way, getting it done.
Chappell said that he his co-founder Michelle He came up with the idea of building Abound years ago when both were working in management consulting — Chappell at McKinsey and He at EY — where they worked with giant financial services clients helping to build credit products and working around the foundations of open banking. The two saw that the API framework presented a clear opening for those who could understand how and where they could be used, he said.
“Consumer credit is very broken,” he said. “Most of it is deeply entrenched in tech from the Seventies and Eighties.”
That entrenchment involves FICO credit scores, and access to that data dominated by companies Equifax and Experian to determine credit-worthiness. Add to this a generally poor consumer experience for loans, and the fact that we’ve seen a lot of exploitation with predatory loan practices, and you can see the gap in the market for better products that address customer needs in a better way.
Ironically, the status quo for loan products actually might be fine for many consumers, in particular, those who have credit histories, he added, and can be clearly categorized as “prime” or “subprime” cases. However, it’s practically unusable for those who are new in the market, so-called “near prime” consumers. There are some 15 million of these in the U.K. alone, Chappell estimates.
Most lenders will reject loan or credit applications from these consumers, he said: “They are just too uncertain.”
So the solution was obvious: build a system that taps open banking to get basic, real-time details about how an individual manages incomings and outgoings in a regular bank account; extrapolate insights from that data using AI; and create a new kind of credit score. This is what Abound took some three years to build before launching in 2020, and it is what now forms the basis of its business.
It might seem obvious that a bank itself could, should, and would come up with something similar to provide its own banking-data-based loan products — at least for its own customers, if not loans for those who bank with others. But Chappell said it’s not as simple as it looks.
“This is very non-trivial. It would take banks five years or more to change their processes,” he said. Their processes typically are those very services entrenched in 70s and 80s methods: FICO scores, combined economics data from the UK’s statistics office, ONS, to determine loan eligibility, as well as how likely it is that a customer might default on a loan, or pay it back as agreed.
Meanwhile, Abound says its proof has been in the pudding, so to speak: Chappell said that in the last two years, the startup has had 70% less default rates than the industry average in the U.K.
That’s to say, it’s not perfect, but appears to work better than what it’s looking to replace. “For every 10 defaults at a competitor, we have three,” he said.
But since this is technology we are talking about, the race doesn’t end when big banks or other startups build what Abound has built: Abound believes it has first-mover advantage, and so, in the time that it will take competitors to build something similar, Chappell believes that Abound will have developed even better AI algorithms to manage its own rates better.
That head start is also what is motivating investors to back the company.
“The lending industry is dominated by old practices, like traditional credit scoring, which ignore technological developments of the last decade,” noted Kuok Meng Xiong, CEO of K3 Ventures, in a statement. “Abound is delivering a unique product and a differentiated approach which is already proving itself to work for thousands of customers. We are excited to see Abound’s offer grow in the years ahead.”
“Waterfall is pleased to be part of Abound’s business expansion as it seeks to utilize open banking in a more informed way to help the consumer,” added Krishin Uttamchandani, director at Waterfall Asset Management, in a statement. “Abound is led by a strong management team that we are excited to work with, supported by, what we believe is, a robust tech stack, underwriting methodology and view on risk. What Abound has achieved in its first two years of lending has been very impressive and should lay the groundwork for a strong platform to better serve the customers who should be able to access cheaper credit with open banking. We are excited to be a partner in the Abound journey.”
Open banking startup Abound nabs $601M to supercharge its AI-based consumer lending platform by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch