Squarespace, a platform used by SMEs and individuals for building websites, blogs, and online stores, is going private in an all-cash deal that values the company on equity basis at $6.6 billion, or a $6.9 billion enterprise valuation. The acquiring company is U.K.-based private equity firm Permira. This is a breaking story, refresh for updates.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Rivian lost $1.45 billion in the first quarter, showing that its recent company-wide cost-cutting measures have a ways to go before it can approach profitability.
The EV-maker brought in $1.2 billion in revenue in the period, coming in just under its record haul from the prior quarter, according to its first-quarter earnings report that was released Tuesday after markets closed. That’s slightly more than the $1.16 billion expected by Yahoo Finance analysts. Rivian’s revenue grew 82% from the $661 million it generated in the first quarter in 2023.
Still, that wasn’t enough to assuage shareholders. Rivian’s shares fell more than 4% in after-hours trading.
The Q1 revenue figure, while showing growth year-over-year, reflected a somewhat tepid sales quarter. The company reported in April it produced 13,980 vehicles and delivered 13,588 of them in the first quarter of 2024. Both of those figures are down from the fourth quarter of 2023, where it built 17,541 and shipped 13,972.
Rivian reaffirmed on Tuesday that it plans to make around the same number of EVs as it did in 2023.
Rivian had an eventful first quarter that included a splashy reveal of its future R2 and R3 EV lineup as well as more belt tightening and layoffs. In February, Rivian laid off 10% of its workforce as the EV startup tried to rein in costs. This was the third round of layoffs for the EV company since July 2022, when Rivian cut 6% of its workforce. The company cut another 6% of jobs in February 2023.
This story is developing…
Oyo, the Indian budget-hotel chain startup, is negotiating with investors to raise a new round of funding that could cut the Indian firm’s valuation to $3 billion or lower, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The startup is engaging with investors, including Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah, for the new funding, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. The new funding round is likely to see some secondary transactions as well that will value the startup at as low as $2.5 billion, the sources added.
The proposed terms, if they materialize, would represent a steep drop from the peak valuation of $10 billion at which Oyo raised a funding round in 2019. A valuation of $3 billion or less would also be lower than the amount of capital Oyo has raised against equity and in debt over the years.
The deliberations for the new funding are ongoing, and its terms may still change, or a round may not materialize, the sources cautioned.
The curt in valuation is hardly a surprise. SoftBank, which owns more than 40% of Oyo, internally cut the valuation of the Indian startup to $2.7 billion in 2022. Oyo said at the time that there was “no rational basis” for the markdown of its valuation.
Oyo – which counts SoftBank, Airbnb, Peak XV Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners among its backers – disputed the “rumors,” asserting there wasn’t any “concrete transaction.” Khazanah didn’t respond to a request for comment. The terms about the proposed valuation haven’t been previously reported.
The deliberations for the new funding follow Oyo reportedly withdrawing its draft red herring prospectus for an initial public offering for the second time. The Indian startup originally filed the paperwork to go public in 2021, seeking to raise about $1.2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion at the time.
India’s market regulator, SEBI, has not approved the startup’s application for an IPO.
According to local media, Oyo’s founder and chief executive, Ritesh Agarwal, told employees that the company expects revenue for the fiscal year ending March to be more than $682 million.
Wayve, a UK-born startup developing a self-learning rather than rule-based system for autonomous driving, has closed a $1.05 billion in Series C funding led by SoftBank Group. This is the UK’s largest AI fundraise ever and sits among the top 20 AI fundraises globally to date.
Also participating in the raise was NVIDIA and existing investor Microsoft. Waye’s early stage investors included Meta’s head of AI, Yann LeCun.
Wayve, which was founded in Cambridge in 2017, raised $200m in a series B round in January last year led by Eclipse Ventures.
The company plans to use the fresh capital injection to develop its product for “eyes on” assisted driving and “yes off” fully automated driving, other AI-assisted automotive applications, and expand operations globally.
San Francisco has become known as the epicenter for autonomous driving roll-outs, with Alphabet-owned Waymo and GM-owned Cruise both operating services in the city. By contrast, Wayve’s “end-to-end” self-driving system began its life around the tiny streets of Cambridge on an electric Renault Twizy.
Since then, it has been training its model on delivery vehicles for the likes of companies like UK grocery delivery company Ocado, which invested $13.6 million in the startup.
Wayve’s approach to autonomous driving is similar to Tesla’s, but Wayve plans to sell its autonomous driving model to a variety of auto OEMs. The implication, of course, is that Wayve will garner a great deal more training data on which to improve its model, as Tesla must rely on someone buying their car brand. The company has not announced any such automotive partners yet, however.
Wayve calls its hardware-agnostic mapless product an “Embodied AI”, and it plans to distribute its platform not just to car makers but also to robotics companies serving manufacturers of all descriptions, allowing the platform to learn from human behavior in a wide variety of real-world environments. The company’s research on multimodal and generative models, known as LINGO and GAIA, will offer “language-responsive interfaces, personalized driving styles, and co-piloting,” the firm promises.
Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall told Techcrunch: “Seven years ago, we started the company to go build an embodied AI. We have been heads down building technology … What happened last year was everything really started to work.”
He said the key moment has been the automotive industry’s “step change” into having cameras surrounding new cars, from which Wayve can draw data for its autonomous platform: “Now their production vehicles are coming out with GPUs, surrounding cameras, radar, and of course the appetite to now bring AI onto, and enable, an accelerated journey from assisted to automated driving. So this fundraise is a validation of our technological approach, and gives us the capital to go and turn this technology into product and bring this this this product to market.”
He added that Wayve has big plans for robotics as well.
“Very soon you’ll be able to buy a new car, and it’ll have Wayve’s AI on it… Then this goes into enabling all kinds of embodied AI, not just cars, but other forms of robotics. I think the ultimate thing that we want to achieve here is to go way beyond where AI is today with language models and chatbots. But to really enable a future where we can trust intelligent machines that we can delegate tasks to, and of course they can enhance our lives and self-driving will be the first example of that.”
In a move that signified the importance of this fundraise more broadly to the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak issued a supporting statement saying: “From the first electric light bulb or the World Wide Web, to AI and self-driving cars – the UK has a proud record of being at the forefront of some of the biggest technological advancements in history.”
“I’m incredibly proud that the UK is the home for pioneers like Wayve who are breaking ground as they develop the next generation of AI models for self-driving cars. The fact that a homegrown, British business has secured the biggest investment yet in a UK AI company is a testament to our leadership in this industry, and that our plan for the economy is working,” he said.
“We are leaving no stone unturned to create the economic conditions for businesses to grow and thrive in the UK. We already have the third highest number of AI companies and private investment in AI in the world, and this announcement anchors the UK’s position as an AI superpower,” he added.
Also in a statement, Kentaro Matsui, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers and a Wayve boardmember said: “AI is revolutionizing mobility… The potential of this type of technology is transformative; it could eliminate 99% of traffic accidents. SoftBank Group is delighted to be at the forefront of this effort with Wayve, as advanced intelligence redefines mobility and connectivity, contributing to a more convenient and safer society.”
If you were concerned about slowing cloud infrastructure growth for a time in 2023, you can finally relax: The cloud was back with a vengeance this quarter. The market as a whole was up a healthy $13.5 billion to $76 billion, up 21% over the first quarter in 2023, per Synergy Research.
That’s healthy growth by any measure.
If you’re wondering what’s driving the growth, you probably guessed that it’s related to generative AI and the copious amount of data required to build the underlying models. Whether it’s Microsoft’s close links to OpenAI, Google Cloud making a slew of AI announcements at its recent customer conference or Amazon’s infrastructure managing the data side of the equation, AI is driving lots of business for these vendors.
“There is a symbiotic relationship between the rapid advancement and adoption of AI and the scalable ‘Big 3’ cloud infrastructure providers,” said Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner at Glasswing Ventures, a firm that invests heavily in AI startups. “AI actually makes the cloud providers more valuable. By creating more capabilities for computing through automation and augmentation within the enterprise, there is a corresponding increased demand for the underlying computational power provided by the Big 3 cloud infrastructure vendors, as evidenced by their immense growth in recent quarters.”
Seseri also sees the cloud vendors making it easier for startups to build on top of their infrastructure in the coming years. “For startups, many depend on the cloud providers, having built atop these immense platforms. I predict we will see immense investment in AI-optimized infrastructure by the major cloud platforms, as it is a key driver behind the sustained growth in cloud computing, which will make it easier to build AI platforms and products on the cloud,” she said.
And these companies are reaping the financial windfall for the newfound interest in this technology. Altimeter partner Jamin Ball reports that those rewards started coming in last quarter, and the ball kept on rolling into this one. Amazon cloud growth had dropped as low as 12% in Q2 and Q3 last year, climbing a bit to 13% in Q4. But the company really kicked it up a notch this quarter with revenue of $25 billion, up 17% over the prior year. That’s a $100 billion run rate, good for 31% market share.
Ball’s numbers indicate that Azure continues to kill it. The company now has 25% market share, good for a $76 billion run rate, up 31% over the previous year. Google is a strong third with 11% market share, up 28% YoY (although it’s important to note that Ball’s number includes Google Workspace, and Synergy’s numbers are only infrastructure and platform numbers).
Image Credits: Jamin Ball
The days of cost cutting in the cloud appear to be over. And although we probably aren’t going back to the heady growth numbers of 2021 and 2022, AI seems to be bringing a new wave of substantial growth to the cloud vendors.
“In terms of annualized run rate, we now have a $300 billion market, which is growing at 21% per year,” Synergy’s chief analyst John Dinsdale said in a statement. “We will not return to the growth rates seen prior to 2022, as the market has become too massive to grow that rapidly, but we will see the market continue to expand substantially. We are forecasting that it will double in size over the next four years.”
As companies’ continuing thirst for AI and the data management related to that grows, it seems that the cloud glory days are back. The growth may not be as gaudy as back in the day, but it’s still pretty darn good for a maturing industry sector, with all signs pointing to solid growth in the coming years.
Image Credits: Synergy Research
Hyundai has agreed to spend nearly $1 billion on Motional, an investment that will give the automaker a majority stake while providing the self-driving startup with the necessary capital to keep operating.
The Korean automaker invested $475 million directly into Motional as part of a broader deal that includes buying out joint venture partner Aptiv. As part of the deal, Hyundai will spend another $448 million to buy 11% of Aptiv’s common equity interest in Motional, according to information revealed Thursday in Aptiv’s first-quarter earnings report.
Aptiv also shared that it expects to reduce its common equity interest in Motional from 50% as of March 31 to about 15%, leaving Hyundai with the remaining 85% control. Aptiv Chairman and CEO Kevin Clark flagged in January that the company would reduce its ownership interest in Motional. The company said at the time that it would stop allocating capital towards Motional due to the high cost of commercializing a robotaxi business and the long road ahead to profits.
Aptiv on Thursday reduced its full-year net sales forecast for 2024 to be between $20.85 billion and $21.45 billion, down from between $21.3 billion to $21.9 billion.
Motional confirmed the new funding round and increased stake from Hyundai. The company did not respond to TechCrunch’s inquiry regarding the accuracy of Aptiv’s figures. Hyundai could also not be reached for confirmation.
Motional started as Boston-based autonomous vehicle startup nuTonomy in 2013, before being acquired by Delphi for $400 million. Delphi would later split it’s business with the Aptiv unit absorbing nuTonomy. The entity became Motional under a $4 billion Hyundai-Aptiv joint venture in 2019. While it’s clear from Aptiv’s earnings report that the company is trying to manage risks and optimize finances amid a less positive outlook, the company’s retreat, and Hyundai’s step forward, raises questions about Motional’s future.
In March, TechCrunch reported that Motional secured a bridge loan for an undisclosed amount as a lifeline while the AV startup secured its next round of longer-term funding. While it’s likely that this funding round from Hyundai fits that bill, Motional has not responded to TechCrunch’s request for more information about whether it will need to acquire more investors in the future.
Motional has been testing its autonomous vehicles with a safety driver behind the wheel in Boston, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Singapore. The company’s go-to-market strategy involves partnering with existing ride-hail platforms like Uber, Lyft and Via to give customers rides. Motional has stated its goal of launching a robotaxi service using driverless Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicles in 2024.
Motional and Hyundai announced plans in November 2023 to co-develop production-ready versions of the all-electric Ioniq 5 robotaxi at the automaker’s new innovation center in Singapore, the Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center Singapore (HMGICS). During CES 2024, Motional also announced plans to work with Kia on a next-generation vehicle that will enter commercial operations later this decade, with initial development stages beginning this year.
Motional’s financial shifts come as the robotaxi industry continues to face uncertainty. The startup has been inching slowly towards commercialization, launching pilots in at least five cities. Crucially, Motional has not yet begun charging for rides or deliveries yet. Meanwhile among the competition, Waymo continues to expand its fully driverless, paid robotaxi service in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, with plans to hit Austin later this year. GM’s Cruise is still mainly off the streets after an incident in October 2023 that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by one of its robotaxis, but the company has begun mapping again in Phoenix as part of a slow, deliberate reintroduction to public roads.
Then there’s Tesla. CEO Elon Musk has shaken up his company, laying off thousands and increasing investment into AI, in a stated goal to go “balls to the walls for autonomy” and deliver a robotaxi in August.
TechCrunch recently broke the news that Elon Musk’s xAI is raising $6 billion at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion.
The deal hasn’t closed yet, so the numbers could change. But it sounds like Musk is making an ambitious pitch to investors about his 10-month-old startup — a rival to OpenAI, which he also co-founded and is currently suing for allegedly abandoning its initial commitment to focus on the good of humanity over profit.
You may be wondering: Doesn’t Musk have enough companies already? There’s Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, The Boring Company … maybe he should spend his time on the existing businesses that have struggles of their own.
But in the xAI pitch, Musk’s connection to these other companies is a feature, not a bug. xAI could get access to crucial training data from across his empire — and its technology could, in turn, help Tesla achieve its dream of true self-driving cars and bring its humanoid Optimus robot into factories.
Of course, Musk’s hype doesn’t always match up to reality. But with this impressive new funding, xAI could become an even more formidable competitor in the AI world. Hit play, then leave your thoughts below!
Swiggy plans to raise $1.25 billion in an initial public offering and has secured approval from its shareholders, the Indian food delivery and instant commerce startup disclosed in a filing to the local regulator.
The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, which competes with publicly-listed Zomato and StepStone Group-backed Zepto, plans to raise $450 million through issuance of new shares and offer $800 million of shares from existing backers in the IPO, it wrote in a filing to Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
The Indian startup ecosystem has been eagerly anticipating Swiggy’s public debut, which is slated for later this year. Swiggy counts Prosus, Accel, SoftBank and Invesco among its backers. It was last valued at $10.7 billion in a funding round unveiled in early 2022. Some of its investors, including Invesco and Baron, have since publicly marked up the valuation of Swiggy to over $12 billion.
Swiggy had earlier intended to go public in 2023, TechCrunch previously reported, but deferred the plan due to not-so-favorable market conditions.
This is a developing story. More to follow.
Checkr, a 10-year-old startup that offers employee background checks and was last valued at $5 billion in April 2022, has laid off 382 employees as companies are not significantly hiring talent.
TechCrunch exclusively learned that Checkr conducted the layoffs across all departments and different levels on Tuesday. The San Francisco–based startup confirmed the layoffs in an email.
“In response to economic conditions that have impacted companies’ hiring, we made the difficult and painful decision to reduce the size of our team. This will allow us to operate more efficiently and ensure the long-term health of our business,” a Checkr spokesperson said in the statement.
The job cuts — which affected 32% of the company’s workforce — came nearly two years after Checkr announced the acquisition of Inflection, the startup behind GoodHire, a background-checking platform for small- and midsized businesses. At the time, The Wall Street Journal reported the deal was worth $400 million.
Backed by storied investors, including Durable Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research, Franklin Templeton, BOND and Coatue Management, Checkr lets companies do background checks by looking into driving and criminal records and basic identity confirmation of their potential employees. The startup offers an online form to let companies run those checks or use its API, which can be integrated within their hiring systems or onboarding software, including Workable and Zenefits.
Founded in 2014, Checkr counts Uber, Instacart, Netflix, Adecco, Airbnb and Coinbase among its key customers. Its customer base grew to more than tens of thousands of companies ranging from small and medium businesses to Fortune 500 employers in 2022. Initially, the startup was limited to Silicon Valley, but it expanded its presence beyond the Valley in 2016.
Checkr has given the affected employees a minimum of 10 weeks of severance and health insurance, as well as career and mental health support, the spokesperson said.
The startup did not answer questions about its runway and fundraising plans. To date, it has raised $679 million, with the last round of $250 million announced in September 2021.
Social media startup ShareChat’s valuation has cratered below $2 billion from nearly $5 billion in a new funding round, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch, marking a steep decline for the nine-year-old Indian startup that boasts over 400 million users in the South Asian market.
The Bengaluru-based startup, which operates a popular social network supporting a dozen Indian languages as well as a short-form video app, announced on Monday that it had raised $49 million in a convertible round. It did not disclose the valuation at which the funds were raised but strongly denied that its new valuation was below $2 billion, asserting there was “no valuation” attached to the round.
Existing investors including Lightspeed, Temasek, Alkeon Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures and HarbourVest have invested in the new round, the startup said. Their debt will convert to equity at a valuation below $2 billion in the next round, according to a source with direct knowledge of the terms. The source requested anonymity to speak candidly. TechCrunch reported in December that ShareChat was facing a steep valuation cut.
ShareChat also counts Google, X, Snap, Tiger Global and Tencent among its backers. It has raised about $1.75 billion to date. ShareChat was valued at $4.9 billion in a funding round it raised in mid-2022.
The markdown comes despite ShareChat experiencing a remarkably positive year, aggressively cutting expenses while managing to double its revenue. “When the market turned, we had to temper [acquisitions and creator payments] and move towards more profitable growth,” Ankush Sachdeva, ShareChat’s co-founder and chief executive, told TechCrunch in an interview.
ShareChat has not spent money acquiring users in the past year, with Sachdeva crediting improvements to the startup’s content recommendation engine for driving user retention and engagement. The company has also invested heavily in AI talent, particularly for senior roles in its London-based team. ShareChat also unveiled that it has doubled the ESOP grant for each employee in the firm as part of a special bonus grant.
It has also been able to pare down its single-largest expense, the cost to serve content, he said. “When you fetch content on one of our apps, we do a lot of computation to find the 10 best content. To serve and consume that, there is another delivery cost. Optimizing this has helped us lower our burn,” he said.
ShareChat has reduced its monthly cash burn by 90% over the past two years while doubling revenue, attracting large FMCG firms and gaming companies as advertisers.
The startup also remains committed to the short-video market in India, despite strong competition from YouTube and Instagram following the country’s ban on TikTok in 2020.
“In terms of traffic, ours is lower than those of Instagram and YouTube, but we are the largest in terms of a standalone app,” said Sachdeva. He believes ShareChat’s unique focus on live-streaming as a destination for entertainment and creator-user connections will differentiate it from American rivals. The startup acquired local rival MX TakaTak in a deal valued over $700 million in 2022.
Founded in 2017, Atoms Lanka Solutions is a provider of IT consulting and software development services. Throughout the company’s history, we have worked with over 160 customers from 5+ countries..
