Google has found a way to bring a variation of its clever “Circle to Search” gesture to iPhone users. The new interaction, launched in January, allows Android users to search from anywhere on their device by circling, highlighting, scribbling or tapping, making it easier to engage with Google Search from any screen. Of course, a […]
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Last week, the UK announced its largest ever military support package for Ukraine. The bill takes the U.K.’s total support for this financial year to £3 billion — not quite the $50 billion the US pledged recently, but still substantial.
But while most of those funds will be spent on very traditional military hardware, a new tech initiative launched last weekend was aimed at enhancing Ukraine’s asymmetric warfare capabilities against Russia. In fact, the London Defense Tech Hackathon was the first-ever event to bring together some of the UK’s brightest minds in technology, venture capital, and national security in a military setting. The idea was to hack together ideas to both assist Ukraine and also to create a far more porous layer between the worlds of fast-paced civilian tech and the very different world of the military.
Put together by Alex Fitzgerald of Skyral and Richard Pass of Future Forces, the two were joined by co-organizers that included the Honourable Artillery Company, Apollo Defense, Lambda Automata and D3 VC among others.
The event brought together developers skilled in both hardware and software to foster innovation in defense, national security, and deeptech. There was a key focus on drones and their applications on the battlefield, both the hardware and the electronic systems needed to fly them to their targets and counter-drone systems.
As most observers of the war have pointed out, this war has taken on a completely new dimension compared to previous wars. Today, drones and electronic countermeasures are the order of the day, as Ukraine has endeavored to fight off Russia, a much larger aggressor, with asymmetric methods.
Fitzgerald told me: “There are three groups of people coming to these events. There’s the builders, investors, and the military. I think for everyone, it’s trying to convince their colleagues to think more about defense technology as an option to either build or invest in.”
He explained that there were two main tracks of work: electronic warfare and drone or aerial systems: “There’s an acronym I learned from someone cleverer than me, which is that the future of defense technologies comes small, cheap and uncrewed.”
He explained that one main aim was to get people who had traditionally not been involved in defense either building for or investing in defense: “We’ve got people like the NATO Innovation Fund, the UK National Security Strategic Investment Fund. So yeah, it’s a mix of people who already invest in defense or who haven’t thought about investing before.”
He chose the hackathon format because “the focus is on getting stuff done. Get actual builders, not to just talk about building, because that’s actually where most of the innovation is happening.”
One of the inspirations for the event was the recent El Segundo, Calif., defense tech hackathon in February of this year.
“I think the key thing with military technology is making it as easy to use and as powerful as some of the the consumer technology that’s been built,” said Fitzgerald “There’s the classic line, ‘There’s more AI in a snap in Snapchat than there is often some most modern military systems.’”
Also attending the event was Catarina Buchatskiy, representing Apollo Defense. As engineers pored over cameras, Starlinks, and drones, she told me: “Defense tech is a difficult industry to enter. And it’s a difficult market to break into, for obvious reasons. We’ve found Hackathons an extremely exciting way for people to get involved because defense technology can seem like a giant black box of contracts that take 10 years, and technologies that are built [are often] hidden from the public eye. At a hackathon, you have 24 hours. Make something really cool.”
Interceptor done
She said the firm had seen “a lot of success” with the El Segundo event.
“We just realized that if people think it’s something that’s accessible to them [and] can do something quickly and make an impact, they want to participate,” she told me.
Buchatskiy, who is Ukrainian, also spoke powerfully about Ukraine: “These are very real things to me. When I say that I need a drone detector, it’s because I’m looking at one outside my window that we didn’t detect in time and it is going to kill my neighbor. That is the reality that we face.”
She added that it’s important for hackathon attendees to know “that they’re building for someone and this could actually save my family’s life.”
Despite the controversy surrounding defense technology in some quarters, she added, “To be involved in technology is to be interested in a better future. And I really, truly can’t think of a more interesting and better future than one that’s safe and one where we can guarantee peace.”
NATO, in the shape of the NATO Investment Fund, a fund with a billion euros to invest in defense tech over the next few years, was also represented.
Fund partner Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky told me the fund was set up to back startups “that bolster our collective defense security and resilience. We invest in dual-use deep tech, but the fund was conceived before the war in Ukraine. The conflict has now very much impacted our investment thesis and we’re keen to invest in defense technologies that can make Europe safer and more secure.”
But why was NATO funding a hackathon?
“I think defense tech is new to a lot of a lot of founders and a lot of developers,” Schneider-Sikorsky said. “It’s not that easy for them to understand the problem statements and the challenges and also to get access to the end users.”
He said the hackathon format particularly lends itself to that: “It would normally, for many founders, take them months if not years to get in touch with the right people at defense ministries, and a lot of them are here today. So hopefully it will accelerate things substantially.”
Another attending investor, Alex Flamant from HCVC, told me: “There was a need for people in Europe to invest in proper defense technologies. It seemed from the investor standpoint, there’s restrictions around certain investors investing. One of the goals of this is to demystify what a lot of this is amongst young builders, and really to get people more aligned with the big mission that we’re all on.”
Machine learning specialist was there to focus on drone detection: “That’s in our machine vision and object detection knowledge. Ukraine are fighting for the whole of Europe at the moment and obviously the UK is pivotal to that. It’s essential that we that we ally with them and utilize what we have to help.”
The hackthon came at a time of increased tension around the use of technologies in defense.
Google recently fired 28 employees after their sit-in protest over the controversial Project Nimbus contract with Israel, for instance.
However, defense is clearly rising up the tech agenda.
Anduril recently moved ahead in a Pentagon program to develop unmanned fighter jets, and more broadly as we learned last year, venture capital is opening the gates for defense tech.
And in the UK, there is much talk about how high-powered lasers could be among the next wave of weapons. The DragonFire weapon is said to be precise enough to hit a £1 coin from a kilometre away, according to the MoD, and cost barely $15 to fire.
The projects to emerge from the hackathon may not have been not quite so sci-fi, but they were pretty damn close. How about a “High Speed Interceptor to take down Orlan Drones”? And at least they are likely to be deployed a lot sooner than a laser gun.
It may seem like a paradox to have virtualized Kubernetes clusters. They are, after all, an abstraction in themselves of virtual machines made popular by VMware in the early 2000s.
Loft Labs saw a similar problem with resource utilization in Kubernetes clusters that VMware saw with server utilization, and has built a virtualization tool to make them more efficient by sharing common underlying applications.
Today, the startup announced a $24 million Series A.
There are a set of applications that run with every single Kubernetes environment, like Istio, Rancher and Vault, and it gets expensive and unwieldy to manage and run these across multiple containers, especially as you scale. Loft Labs lets users share these common applications with multiple virtual clusters in the same way that VMs share server resources.
“We’re essentially turning many clusters into one cluster, and then have virtual clusters on top of the common applications,” CEO Lukas Gentele told TechCrunch.
So rather than running all your clusters as separate entities, you can just run a few — such as one for development, one for staging and one for production — and all of the relevant virtual clusters can live in each one.
“You get all this consolidation of the shared platform stack that is much cheaper, much more efficient, much more consistent because you only have maybe three instances of Istios running now instead of 5,000,” he said. And like virtual machines you get secure isolation to keep each one of these workloads and tenants separate, and Loft can handle management tasks such as shutting down clusters automatically that aren’t in use.
Investors have traditionally liked startups built on top of popular open source projects because they provide a ready top-of-sales funnel. But such startups must come up with a way to monetize that popularity.
Loft Labs has done both. Since releasing the open source version of the product, vCluster, in 2021, it has seen 40 million downloads and a million virtual clusters created, suggesting that a lot of people are interested in this concept.
It has also released vCluster Pro to monetize the idea in a novel way. Most open source startups add some enterprise features like security and authentication, or build a SaaS version to make it easier to install and manage. Loft has built a complementary product that helps companies manage high-volume Kubernetes cluster environments, which incentivizes their largest customers to buy the product.
It took the company some time to get to the point where it built this particular solution. In fact, it started with a Platform-as-a-Service product that attempted to provide an environment for developers to access shared multi-tenant clusters, but quickly realized that there was no way to do that. At the same time, it was finding it hard to convince enterprises to use the platform, and shut down.
But as the co-founders were doing a post mortem, they realized that they had stumbled across a good idea: “Okay, what did we actually learn here? And the thing that we learned was the problem of sharing Kubernetes clusters, isolating tenants in the cluster and how hard it is. And then we asked ourselves, don’t other people have that same problem internally, especially in larger organizations?”
They found their way to vCluster, first releasing another open source project to see if they were onto something. “We launched an open source project called Kiosk, a multi-tenancy extension to test the waters. And it got quite some traction pretty quickly,” he said. AWS even put it in their multi tenancy best practices guide, giving them more confidence in their idea. “And then because that experiment was successful, we became obsessed with solving this problem,” he said. The end result was vCluster, which they first released at the end of 2021.
Today’s round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from existing investors Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, Emergent Ventures, Fusion Fund and Surface Ventures, with additional angel investment. The company has now raised a total of $28.6 million.
Amazon is trying to keep live shopping relevant with the launch of an “Amazon Live” FAST (free ad-supported TV) channel on Prime Video and Freevee. Previously only available as a feature on desktop, mobile and Fire TV, the new live channel will give customers in the U.S. more ways to engage with interactive, shoppable content.
Amazon Live’s FAST channel will feature 24/7 programming from popular creators and celebrities, such as reality TV stars Lala Kent (“Vanderpump Rules”) and Paige DeSorbo (“Southern Charm”), who is also launching her own original show on Amazon Live, where she’ll develop brand new content. Brands like Tastemade and The Bump will also host streams to sell their products.
Viewers can browse and buy the items influencers show off by using the Amazon Shopping app on their mobile device. When entering “shop the show” into the search bar, users are directed in real time to a shopping carousel featuring the products they see on TV.
This isn’t the first time Prime Video has introduced an e-commerce shopping experience on the streamer. To promote “The Boys” spinoff series “Gen V,” Amazon launched a virtual store selling merchandise and home goods based on Godolkin University, the superhero school in the show.
Last year, QVC and HSN — the top two shopping channels — launched linear offerings on Freevee, which were the only livestream shopping channels on the service at the time.
Amazon Live launched in 2019 as a QVC-like shopping experience to help brands get their products discovered and for talent to interact with fans. It rolled out the offering to customers in India in 2022. According to the company, more than 1 billion customers in the U.S. and India streamed Amazon Live’s shoppable videos in 2023 alone.
Despite Amazon’s success with live shopping, the format only makes up a small percentage of the e-commerce market. Last year, live shopping was anticipated to be worth $31.7 billion, however, total U.S. online retail sales reportedly reached $1.14 trillion.
Ambuj Kumar is nothing if not ambitious.
An electrical engineer by training, Kumar led hardware design for eight years at Nvidia, helping to develop tech including a widely used high-speed memory controller for GPUs. After leaving Nvidia in 2010, Kumar pivoted to cybersecurity, eventually co-founding Fortanix, a cloud data security platform.
It was while heading up Fortanix that the idea for Kumar’s next venture came to him: an AI-powered tool to automate a company’s cybersecurity workflows, inspired by challenges he observed in the cybersecurity industry.
“Security leaders are stressed,” Kumar told TechCrunch. “CISOs don’t last more than a couple of years on average, and security analysts have some of the highest churn. And things are getting worse.”
Kumar’s solution, which he co-founded with former Twitter software engineer Alankrit Chona, is Simbian, a cybersecurity platform that effectively controls other cybersecurity platforms as well as security apps and tooling. Leveraging AI, Simbian can automatically orchestrate and operate existing security tools, finding the right configurations for each product by taking into account a company’s priorities and thresholds for security, informed by their business requirements.
With Simbian’s chatbot-like interface, users can type in a cybersecurity goal in natural language, then have Simbian provide personalized recommendations and generate what Kumar describes as “automated actions” to execute the actions (as best it can).
“Security companies have focused on making their own products better, which leads to a very fragmented industry,” Kumar said. “This results in a higher operational burden for organizations.”
To Kumar’s point, polls show that cybersecurity budgets are often wasted on an overabundance of tools. More than half of businesses feel that they’ve misspent around 50% of their budgets and still can’t remediate threats, according to one survey cited by Forbes. A separate study found that organizations now juggle on average 76 security tools, leading IT teams and leaders to feel overwhelmed.
“Security has been a cat-and-mouse game between attackers and defenders for a long time; the attack surface keeps growing due to IT growth,” Kumar said, adding that there’s “not enough talent to go around.” (One recent survey from Cybersecurity Ventures, a security-focused VC firm, estimates that the shortfall of cyber experts will reach 3.5 million people by 2025.)
In addition to automatically configuring a company’s security tools, the Simbian platform attempts to respond to “security events” by letting customers steer security while taking care of lower-level details. This, Kumar says, can significantly cut down on the number of alerts a security analyst must respond to.
But that assumes Simbian’s AI doesn’t make mistakes, a tall order, given that it’s well established that AI is error-prone.
To minimize the potential for off-the-rails behavior, Simbian’s AI was trained using a crowdsourcing approach — a game on its website called “Are you smarter than an LLM?” — that tasked volunteers with trying to “trick” the AI into doing the wrong thing. Kumar explained that Simbian used this learning, along with in-house researchers, to “ensure the AI does the right thing in its use cases.”
This means that Simbian effectively outsourced part of its AI training to unpaid gamers. But, to be fair, it’s unclear how many people actually played the company’s game; Kumar wouldn’t say.
There are privacy implications of a system that controls other systems, especially concerning those that are security-related. Would companies — and vendors, for that matter — be comfortable with sensitive data funneling through a single, AI-controlled centralized portal?
Kumar claims that every attempt has been made to protect against data compromise. Simbian uses encryption — customers control the encryption keys — and customers can delete their data at any time.
“As a customer, you have full control,” he said.
While Simbian isn’t the only platform to attempt to apply a layer of AI over existing security tools — Nexusflow offers a product along a similar vein — it appears to have won over investors. The company recently raised $10 million from investors including Coinbase board member Gokul Rajaram, Cota Capital partner Aditya Singh, Icon Ventures, Firebolt and Rain Capital.
“Cybersecurity is one of the most important problems of our time, and has famously fragmented ecosystem with thousands of vendors,” Rajaram told TechCrunch via email. “Companies have tried to build expertise around specific products and problems. I applaud Simbian’s method of building an integrated platform that would understand and operate all of security. While this is extremely challenging approach from technology perspective, I’ll put my money — and I did put my money — on Simbian. It’s the team with unique experience all the way from hardware to cloud.”
Mountain View-based Simbian, which has 15 employees, plans to put the bulk of the capital it’s raised toward product development. Kumar’s aiming to double the size of the startup’s workforce by the end of the year.
Google Photos is getting an AI upgrade. On Wednesday, the tech giant announced that a handful of enhanced editing features previously limited to Pixel devices and paid subscribers — including its AI-powered Magic Editor — will now make their way to all Google Photos users for free. This expansion also includes Google’s Magic Eraser, which removes unwanted items from photos; Photo Unblur, which uses machine learning to sharpen blurry photos; Portrait Light, which lets you change the light source on photos after the fact, and others.
The editing tools have historically been a selling point for Google’s high-end devices, the Pixel phones, as well as a draw for Google’s cloud storage subscription product, Google One. But with the growing number of AI-powered editing tools flooding the market, Google has decided to make its set of AI photo editing features available to more people for free.
Image Credits: Google
There are some caveats to this expansion, however.
For starters, the tools will only start rolling out on May 15 and it will take weeks for them to make it to all Google Photos users.
In addition, there are some hardware device requirements to be able to use them. On ChromeOS, for instance, the device must be a Chromebook Plus with ChromeOS version 118+ or have at least 3GB RAM. On mobile, the device must run Android 8.0 or higher or iOS 15 or higher.
The company notes that Pixel tablets will now be supported, as well.
Magic Editor is the most notable feature of the group. Introduced last year with the launch of the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, this editing tool uses generative AI to do more complicated photo edits — like filling in gaps in a photo, repositioning the subject and other edits to the foreground or background of a photo. With Magic Editor, you can change a gray sky to blue, remove people from the background of a photo, recenter the photo subject while filling in gaps, remove other clutter and more.
Previously, these kinds of edits would require Magic Eraser and other professional editing tools, like Photoshop, to get the same effect. And those edits would be more manual, not automated via AI.
Image Credits: Google
With the expansion, Magic Editor will come to all Pixel devices, while iOS and Android users (whose phones meet the requirements) will get 10 Magic Editor saves per month. To go beyond that, they’ll still need to buy a Premium Google One plan — meaning 2TB of storage and above.
The other tools will be available to all Google Photos users, no Google One subscription is required. The full set of features that will become available includes Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, Sky suggestions, Color pop, HDR effect for photos and videos, Portrait Blur, Portrait Light (plus the add light/balance light features in the tool), Cinematic Photos, Styles in the Collage Editor and Video Effects.
Other features like the AI-powered Best Take — which merges similar photos to create a single best shot where everyone is smiling — will continue to be available only to Pixel 8 and 8 Pro.
Palo Alto Networks urged companies this week to patch against a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability in one of its widely used security products, after malicious hackers began exploiting the bug to break into corporate networks.
The vulnerability is officially known as CVE-2024-3400 and was found in the newer versions of the PAN-OS software that runs on Palo Alto’s GlobalProtect firewall products. Because the vulnerability allows hackers to gain complete control of an affected firewall over the internet without authentication, Palo Alto gave the bug a maximum severity rating. The ease with which hackers can remotely exploit the bug puts thousands of companies that rely on the firewalls at risk from intrusions.
Palo Alto said customers should update their affected systems, warning that the company is “aware of an increasing number of attacks” that exploit this zero-day — described as such because the company had no time to fix the bug before it was maliciously exploited. Adding another complication, Palo Alto initially suggested disabling telemetry to mitigate the vulnerability, but said this week that disabling telemetry does not prevent exploitation.
The company also said there is public proof-of-concept code that allows anyone to launch attacks exploiting the zero-day.
The Shadowserver Foundation, a nonprofit organization that collects and analyzes data on malicious internet activity, said its data shows there are more than 156,000 potentially affected Palo Alto firewall devices connected to the internet, representing thousands of organizations.
Security firm Volexity, which first discovered and reported the vulnerability to Palo Alto, said it found evidence of malicious exploitation going back to March 26, some two weeks before Palo Alto released fixes. Volexity said a government-backed threat actor that it calls UTA0218 exploited the vulnerability to plant a backdoor and further access its victims’ networks. The government or nation state that UTA0218 works for is not yet known.
This Palo Alto’s zero-day is the latest in a raft of vulnerabilities discovered in recent months targeting corporate security devices — like firewalls, remote access tools and VPN products. These devices sit at the edge of a corporate network and function as digital gatekeepers, but have a propensity to contain severe vulnerabilities that render their security and defenses moot.
Earlier this year, security vendor Ivanti fixed several critical zero-day vulnerabilities in its VPN product, Connect Secure, which allows employees remote access to a company’s systems over the internet. At the time, Volexity linked the intrusions to a China-backed hacking group, and mass exploitation of the flaw quickly followed. Given the widespread use of Ivanti’s products, the U.S. government warned federal agencies to patch their systems and the U.S. National Security Agency said it was tracking potential exploitation across the U.S. defense industrial base.
And the technology company ConnectWise, which makes the popular screen sharing tool ScreenConnect used by IT admins for providing remote technical support, fixed vulnerabilities that researchers deemed “embarrassingly easy to exploit” and also led to the mass exploitation of corporate networks.
Read more on TechCrunch:
Google is rolling out the April update to ChromeOS users with features like the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts and mouse button actions. The update also brings improved offline text-to-speech voice support. The ChromeOS M123 update is rolling out to users over the next few days.
Let’s go through these new features. The main new feature is a way to assign custom keyboard shortcuts to actions. It’s a feature that has been available in other desktop systems.
However, users will need to turn on this feature manually by enabling a setting flag called “#enable-shortcut-customization.” The company said that the keyboard customization shortcut will be enabled by default with the next ChromeOS update, M124.
With the ChromeOS M123 update, users can assign custom keyboard shortcuts according to their usage Image Credits: Google
With this update, Google is also allowing users to customize mouse button actions. If you have a mouse with more than two buttons, you can assign them for tasks like taking a screenshot, muting, unmuting and inserting emojis. Plus, you can set a dedicated key combination for an action performed by a keyboard shortcut.
ChromeOS lets you assign actions to additional buttons on your mouse. Image Credits: Google
The ChromeOS M123 update also has a few smaller upgrades such as the ability to change preferred languages per the Android app through “Settings > Apps > Manage your apps > App language”; and an improved text-to-speech feature with a voice that should sound more natural. It supports 31 languages and it works when you’re offline.
Spotify announced on Tuesday that it’s bringing its free audiobooks perk to Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. Users in these markets will be able to access 15 hours of free monthly audiobook listening time. Spotify also announced that it’s expanding its audiobooks catalog from 200,000 to 250,000 titles. The perk is already available in the U.S., U.K. and Australia.
The expansion comes two months after Spotify said its audiobooks service is the second-largest audiobook provider behind Amazon-owned Audible. Spotify says users have listened to more than 150,000 titles since the free service’s launch last November.
Audiobooks can be found in the Home feed of the Spotify app or via the search tab. Any audiobook marked as “Included in Premium” can be listened to with a Spotify Premium subscription. You can track your listening hours in the settings of your Spotify app. If you run out of listening hours, you can purchase additional 10-hour allocations for CAD $14.99, IRE €12.99 and NZD $19.99.
Spotify recently launched a $9.99 per month plan that allows its free users to access its audiobooks collection in the U.S. The plan, which includes 15 hours of listening, gives Spotify a way to compete with Audible by targeting users who aren’t as interested in its music service. While Audible’s $14.95 per month subscription gives users one credit to buy a title, Spotify’s $9.99 plan allows users to listen to 15 hours across its catalog, which is often enough time to listen to more than one audiobook.
India is getting an electric three-wheeler passenger vehicle that charges from 0 to 100% in 15 minutes. The launch of the new EV — a collaboration between auto manufacturer Omega Seiki Mobility and battery-tech startup Exponent Energy — comes amid India’s ambition to electrify 80% of all its three-wheelers by 2030 in an effort to reduce emissions.
The new three-wheeler, called the Stream City Qik and priced at $3,900 (324,999 Indian rupees), launched Friday and will go on sale from May 15 in Delhi and Bengaluru. It’s a take on the previous Omega Stream City and carries an 8.8kWh proprietary battery pack to deliver over 86 miles (126 kilometers) of range. It is equipped with Exponent Energy’s charging tech, which the startup claims fully charges a battery in 15 minutes when connected at the startup’s charging station (dubbed e^pump).
Currently, Exponent Energy has 60 charging stations in six cities: Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Hyderabad. It plans to have 100 charging stations in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru in 2024 and 1,000 stations in total by 2025, all of which will be available to drivers of the Stream City Qik, according to the company.
The partnership signifies an expansion for Exponent Energy into the new territory, as the Bengaluru-based startup previously only offered its rapid charging tech for three-wheelers to cargo and fleet operations. India’s passenger three-wheeler segment is over 4x the number of cargo three-wheelers, per government data. The segment grew by more than 43%, with over 45,000 three-wheeler passenger vehicles sold in January alone.
Three-wheeler vehicles are popular with gig workers in India who use them to transport ride-hail passengers and deliver packages. The Indian government has been incentivizing companies to spur electric three-wheeler manufacturing and has subsidized their sales to attract customers.
The partnership between Exponent Energy and Omega Seiki builds on the former’s previous partnerships. In 2022, Exponent worked with Reliance Industries-backed Altigreen and Indian conglomerate Murugappa Group-owned Montra Electric to launch cargo three-wheelers equipped with its fast charging tech. The startup also partnered with Magenta Mobility, funded by Morgan Stanley and BP Ventures, and Fyn Mobility to offer rapid charging on their fleet. Over 1,000 vehicles, completing over 100,000 charging sessions, presently have Exponent Energy’s tech, which the startup aims to grow to 25,000 by 2025.
“We started with cargo to prove out the tech,” Arun Vinayak, co-founder and CEO of Exponent Energy, told TechCrunch in an interview. “As we scaled, we realized that individual drivers really love rapid charging because these guys can’t charge their vehicles at home. And they are far more hungry to do more kilometers… they need to keep running, keep going wherever the demand is and go wherever the passenger needs to go.”
Exponent Energy and Omega Seiki Mobility ran close controller pilots for the last couple of months to test consumer behavior. They found three-wheelers carrying up to three passengers sometimes run for up to 22 hours a day, with two drivers using them sequentially to milk intra-city demand. This makes it crucial for the passenger three-wheelers to access fast charging. The other alternative to rapid charging in this case could be battery swapping, but that does not work at scale, according to Vinayak.
“Unless you rapidly charge a swap battery, you run out of batteries. And because these are swappable batteries, you are limited in the size of batteries and have a fairly limited range,” he said.
Exponent Energy’s battery tech involves lithium-ion batteries along with its in-house battery management system, which monitors every cell in real time when on charging. Additionally, the startup has its own charging stations that use an off-board thermal management system, which transfers refrigerated water through the charging plug. This helps maintain the temperature of every battery cell while charging and makes 0-100% charging possible in 15 minutes along with a 3,000-cycle life warranty.
Vinayak told TechCrunch that Exponent Energy’s charging stations offer 10x efficiency by charging 20 to 30 vehicles daily, whereas other EV charging stations typically charge two vehicles. Similarly, setting up an Exponent charging station costs nearly $6,000 (500,000 Indian rupees), while a CNG station demands hundreds and thousands of dollars. This has restricted the availability of CNG to around 60 stations in Bengaluru, while Exponent Energy already has 40 charging stations in the city, the executive said.
Image Credits: Omega Seiki Mobility
“If you give people very rapid refueling capability, very rapid recharging capability, a reliable and dense enough network, people actually stop caring about range,” he stated.
The Stream City Qik will be initially available in Delhi and Bengaluru, with plans to enter new cities later this year. Omega Seiki Mobility is also optimistic about taking its rapid-charging three-wheeler to markets beyond India once it gains enough traction.
“I can open up markets all across the globe. We have testing going on all across Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, Africa,” Uday Narang, founder and chairman of Omega Seiki Mobility, told TechCrunch.
New Delhi-based Omega Seiki Mobility has an annual capacity of producing 20,000 vehicles, with three factories in North India and one in the eastern state of Jharkhand. Exponent Energy, on the other hand, has a monthly capacity of building 500 charging units, which it plans to increase to 3,000 by July-August.
At $3,900 (324,999 Indian rupees), the Stream City Qik is competitively priced with other electric and gas-powered three-wheelers on the market in India. Vinayak and Narang said they are not looking to beat the competition on the pricing but want to help eradicate the charging anxiety among three-wheeler drivers and increase their monthly income by up to 30%.
Founded in 2020, Exponent Energy, which counts Eight Roads Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and TDK Ventures among its key investors, has raised $44.4 million so far. The startup generated an annual recurring revenue of $6 million in 2023 and aims to reach about $72 million by 2025. It is also looking to deploy its charging tech on electric buses in India later this year.
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