Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Okay, okay — remember last week when I suggested Tesla was being a bit extra in its bid to convince shareholders to vote in favor of relocating […]
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Struggling EV startup Fisker has laid off hundreds of employees in a bid to stay alive, as it continues to search for funding, a buyout or prepare for bankruptcy. Workers suspected layoffs were coming when the company directed everyone to work from home on Wednesday — an out-of-character directive, according to multiple current and former […]
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Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Look, I know this is our startups weekly newsletter, and as the most valuable company in the world, Apple is kind of the ultimate “not a […]
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The U.S.’ NHTSA has opened a fourth investigation into the Fisker Ocean SUV, spurred by multiple claims of “inadvertent Automatic Emergency Braking.”
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Henrik Fisker stood on a stage last August and proudly debuted two prototypes designed to catapult his eponymous EV startup Fisker into the mainstream. There was the Pear, a low-cost EV meant for the masses, and the Alaska, Fisker’s entry into the red-hot pickup truck market.
In the weeks that followed, Fisker stopped paying the engineering firm that helped develop those vehicles, according to a previously-unreported lawsuit filed in federal court this week. The firm, a U.S. subsidiary of German engineering giant Bertrandt AG, also accuses Fisker of wrongfully holding onto IP associated with those vehicles. It’s asking for around $13 million in damages.
The lawsuit adds to a pile of legal trouble facing Fisker, which is on the brink of bankruptcy. At least 30 lawsuits alleging lemon law violations have been filed, a handful of which Fisker has already settled. A former director has filed a proposed class action claiming unpaid wages. A textile supplier has also sued Fisker for more than $1 million that it alleges the EV startup never paid.
The engineering lawsuit stands out amid the legal trouble because it suggests that financial cracks were already forming inside Fisker last August despite the bold claims its CEO made on that stage.
“The lawsuit filed by Bertrandt is without merit,” Matthew DeBord, Fisker’s vice president of communications, said in an email to TechCrunch. “It is a legally baseless and disappointing attempt by what has been a valued partner to extract from Fisker payments and intellectual property to which Bertrandt has no right to under the relevant agreements or otherwise.” He declined to comment on the other cases.
Bertrandt says in the complaint filed in Michigan Eastern District Court that it entered into a “design and development agreement” with Fisker in May 2022 to perform “engineering, design, and development services” on the Pear – a contract worth north of $35 million, according to a copy of the design and development agreement attached to the lawsuit. (The agreement also shows that Fisker had previously hired Bertrandt to perform a feasibility study, cost analysis, timing proposal and other items for the Pear EV.)
At some point after entering into the agreement, Bertrandt says Fisker asked it to do similar work in connection with the Alaska pickup truck. Bertrandt says in the complaint that a formal written agreement was never executed with Fisker for the Alaska, but that it provided a quote of $1.66 million that Fisker agreed to pay.
Fisker stopped paying Bertrandt at the end of August 2023, according to the complaint. The company continued to fail to pay invoices through January 31, 2024, bringing the total unpaid to $7,061,443. The engineering firm also claims that Fisker’s decision to put the development work on the Pear and Alaska EVs on “pause” is an additional breach of the contract as it caused Bertrandt to suffer delay costs.
Bertrandt says it had a meeting with Fisker on February 6, 2024 where the EV startup “acknowledged its liability for payment of these invoices and agreed to promptly pay $3,685,000 as a partial payment” – but then never made that payment.
Breaching the contract, according to Bertrandt, has cost the engineering firm an additional $5,858,000 in “lost profits, delay costs, and incidental damages,” which is why it’s seeking $12,919,443 in total damages.
What’s more, the firm says it demanded on April 22 that Fisker “return all of Bertrandt’s intellectual property” and “certify in writing that Fisker had not retained any hard copies or electronic copies,” and claims the EV startup has “failed to do either.”
“Fisker has been unjustly enriched at the expense of Bertrandt,” lawyers for the firm write in the complaint.
Bertrandt isn’t the only supplier to sue Fisker so far.
Georgia-based Corinthian Textiles sued Fisker in Los Angeles Superior Court in early April. The supplier claims it entered into an agreement with the EV startup in early 2023 to provide it with “customized products for use in Fisker’s automobiles.” It doesn’t specify what products it made for Fisker, but the company’s website says its automotive division specializes in floor, trunk and cargo mats, as well as “automotive carpet.”
Corinthian says Fisker “refused, and continue[s] to refuse” to pay invoices and other fees in the amount of $1,077,571.75.
Days before Bertrandt sued in federal court, Robert Lee, an employee who worked for Fisker from October 2023 to March 5, 2024, filed a proposed class action in Los Angeles Superior Court alleging a pattern of overworking employees and not properly compensating them. The suit also claims Fisker failed to reimburse expenses and pay out wages owed when employees separated from the company.
Lee claims that he and other hourly employees worked “well over” eight hours a day and 40 hours per week, and instead often worked over 12 hours per day. He claims they were “frequently compelled” to work weekends. Fisker did not compensate employees for that additional time, according to the complaint. Lee also claims Fisker failed to properly track hours worked, and even deducted commissions from their hourly pay.
He claims employees were “regularly compelled to work off the clock and [Fisker Inc] created a policy to account for less hours than the total amount of hours actually worked” in order to “meet certain goals, to generate more sales.”
Lee also claims Fisker “effectively coerced and pressured its non-exempt employees to work of-the-clock, have their wages deducted, have their wages miscalculated, to shorten (tantamount to a missed meal period) or forego meal and rest periods (or not be paid for their rest breaks).”
Fisker started getting peppered with lawsuits in California alleging that it was violating the state’s lemon law as early as last November, which TechCrunch previously reported. The company has started to settle some of those earlier lawsuits in what roughly amounts to buying back the vehicles, according to court filings and a person familiar with the settlements.
More lemon law lawsuits have continued to pour in across state, where Fisker has delivered the bulk of its cars in the United States.
Customers may have taken action in other states where Fisker has delivered cars, like New York, Florida and Massachusetts. Those states require that lemon law disputes run through arbitration, making it difficult to know just how many actions may be pending against the company.
In its recent annual filing for 2023, Fisker noted that it is still defending against a proposed class action lawsuit from shareholders alleging violations of securities laws. Fisker then goes on to vaguely say that “[v]arious other legal actions, claims, and proceedings are pending against the Company, including, but not limited to, matters arising out of alleged product defects; employment-related matters; product warranties; and consumer protection laws.”
It also implied that it has been contacted by unnamed government agencies for information about its business, including subpoenas, in a new line of text that it had never included in any of its prior SEC filings.
“The Company also from time to time receives subpoenas and other inquiries or requests for information from agencies or other representatives of U.S. federal, state, and foreign governments,” the company wrote. DeBord, the communications VP, told TechCrunch that Fisker “currently [has] no pending subpoenas from governments.”
Correction: The article incorrectly identified Robert Lee as Fisker’s former director of technical services. The Lee who filed the lawsuit is an employee who worked for Fisker from October 2023 to March 5, 2024. The article has been corrected.
EV startup Fisker Inc. is laying off more employees to “preserve cash,” one week after warning investors it would have to make cuts to stave off impending bankruptcy, according to an internal email viewed by TechCrunch.
Founder and CEO Henrik Fisker told employees Monday morning in the email that the company is “continuing to evaluate all viable options for our business, including a potential transaction, and we are committed to identifying potential buyers and pathways to infuse capital into the business.”
“That said, we must preserve cash to help keep these options available to us,” he wrote. He previously told staff in meeting last week that the company was still meeting with car companies under NDA, which was first reported by Business Insider.
“[I]t is with great personal pain and sadness that I deliver the difficult news that today we are making further reductions to our workforce,” Fisker wrote in the email.
It’s unclear how many employees Fisker Inc. is cutting. A spokesperson did not immediately didn’t respond to a request for comment. Fisker employed 1,135 people as of April 19, according to a regulatory filing. It previously announced cuts of 15% in February.
The company announced last week that it hired a chief restructuring officer who is now in charge of approving Fisker Inc.’s budget, as well as the decision-making process for any sale ofthe business. It reported having just $54 million in cash and equivalents as of April 16.
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Welp, Tesla earnings happened this week — and yeah that was a lot. A lot of what, you ask? A lot of the same kinds of promises and hand waving we’ve seen before, but just wrapped up in slightly different packaging. The stakes this time around remind me of Tesla’s pre-profit era circa 2018.
Now, to be clear, Tesla has enjoyed profitability since 2020. But it is facing downward pressure on its bottom line — the company saw profits fall 55% year over year — and an aging portfolio of its highest volume vehicles. (And yes, we covered the new Model 3 Performance variant; I’m talking about new mass market models here.)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk need to generate new sources of revenue. And fast. The company can’t wait two years — or more — to launch a new platform to deliver a sub-$25,000 EV.
So, Musk tweaked that plan, from what we know so far. Which isn’t a lot. During the Q1 earnings call, Musk presented an opaque plan, with few details, to launch multiple cheaper EVs in 2025 (and maybe even late 2024).
Musk understands that the market has rewarded him in the past for being a forward thinker and an innovator — even if those plans don’t come to fruition. So, Musk also pulled on that futurist lever, promising greater levels of automated driving capability in its FSD driver-assistance software and a robotaxi (again). Lest you forget, Musk announced during the company’s Autonomy Day in 2019 that Tesla was going to launch a robotaxi network by the following year. Musk has talked about the Tesla Network and ambitions to allow owners to place their vehicles on the ride-hailing app since 2016.
Shareholders responded with glee because the future is now, or maybe next year. Okay, maybe at the end of the decade? Anyway, it’s exciting.
In an unrelated note, the recently departed high-profile Tesla exec Drew Baglino sold about 1.14 million of his shares worth $181.47 million. The filing described it as an exercise of stock options.
Let’s go!
A little bird pointed out to me that Valeo CTO Geoffrey Bouquot is leaving the company after eight years. For the unfamiliar, Valeo is a French car parts supplier that has pushed into the EV and automated driving space. The company even has an AI research center dedicated to automotive applications.
That EV sector had been promising for Valeo, but this recent quarter reflected what is happening in the rest of the sector. The company posted lower first-quarter sales after its high-voltage electrification system sales fell by nearly half. Valeo is now adjusting to automakers’ needs aka hybrids.
Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com, Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com or Rebecca Bellan at rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com. If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.
Who’s got deals? We do. Here are a handful that stood out.
Chemix, a company using AI to speed up the development of next-gen EV batteries, raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Ibex Investors. Other participants included Mayfield Fund, Berkeley SkyDeck and Urban Innovation Fund as well as strategic investors BNP Paribas Solar Impulse Venture Fund, Global Brain’s KDDI Open Innovation Fund III and Porsche Ventures.
LanzaJet, a sustainable fuels technology company and fuels producer, received an undisclosed investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. A report in Axios Pro says the company is raising $100 million and expects to close this quarter.
Outpost, an Austin, Texas-based startup that manages a network of semi-truck parking facilities, raised $12.5 million in a Series A funding round led by GreenPoint Partners. The newly branded company, founded in 2021 under the name Semi-Stow, also received backing from Speedwagon Capital Partners.
Radical, a Seattle-based startup developing solar-powered, high-altitude autonomous aircraft, raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Scout Ventures, with additional funding from investors, including Inflection Mercury Fund and Y Combinator.
Solera, the automotive data and software-as-a-service company, is evaluating an initial public offering that could raise more than $1 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Stark Future, a Spanish startup that makes off-road electric motorcycles, raised €25 million from Big Bets. The company will use the funds to expand production capacity for its Stark VARG electric off-road motorcycle.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed a long-standing investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot driver-assistance system after reviewing hundreds of crashes involving its misuse, including 13 that were fatal and “many more involving serious injuries.” Tl;dr: The agency called Tesla’s driver engagement system “weak” and said it was “not appropriate for Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities.”
TC reporter Rebecca Bellan has been keeping track of legislative activity in California — one of the hotbeds of AV activity. Check out the latest on four bills that are being considered by the state legislature and how one in particular could put cities in a more powerful position.
Faraday Future is about to get booted from the Nasdaq Capital Market — a tier within the exchange for lower valued companies — because its share price has been too low, for too long.
Fisker is planning more layoffs less than two months after cutting 15% of its workforce. The company expects to seek bankruptcy protection within the next 30 days if it can’t come up with that money, according to a regulatory filing.
Mercedes gave us a close look at the upcoming all-electric G-Class — the “Birkin bag” of the automaker’s portfolio. Read more about how it compares to the gas-powered version.
Rivian is offering discounts of up to $5,000 on its EVs — and a year of free charging — to customers willing to trade in eligible gas-powered trucks and SUVs. Those eligible vehicles, which include the Ford F-150, reveal what customers Rivian is targeting.
Amazon ended Prime Air drone delivery operations in Lockeford, California. The Central California town of 3,500 was the company’s second U.S. drone delivery site, after College Station, Texas.
Joby Aviation, the California company developing electric aircraft, signed a memorandum of understanding agreement with three Abu Dhabi government departments to establish an electric air taxi service ecosystem.
Zipline passed a major milestone this week. One of its autonomous drones, called “Zips,” carried two bags of IV fluid from Zipline’s distribution center in Ghana’s Western North Region to a local health facility — the company’s millionth delivery.
Here’s a nerdy one I enjoyed. Automotive electronics supplier Elektrobit announced EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications. What do those words even mean? Ars Technica has a nice explainer, but basically Elektrobit developed an open source-based automotive operating system that has been certified for automotive safety compliance. If you care about “software-defined vehicles,” this matters!
The 2024 Lexus LC 500h is not an EV. But over here at TC, we are also interested in hybrids! Plus, it’s been a minute since I have spent some time exploring the many offerings under the Lexus brand. The Lexus LC 500h starts at $101,250, but the version I drove popped up to $113,350 thanks to some additional premium touches like an upgraded audio system, retractable wing and a carbon fiber roof.
The Lexus LC 500h isn’t a vehicle you see every day, or year even. I suppose it’s because coupes are not so popular these days — crossovers rule that roost — although I quite like the looks and proportions of the Lexus LC 500h and its V8-engined twin.
This vehicle comes with a 3.5L, six-cylinder hybrid engine that produces 354 horsepower thanks to the addition of an electric motor that delivers power to the rear wheels. Another electric motor is what charges up the vehicle’s battery.
The curious part is that this vehicle has a multistage transmission. So basically this means that Lexus took its existing electronically controlled, continuously variable transmission system and then added another gearbox (a four-speed transmission) behind it. The thinking is that this gives drivers a sportier experience and 10 different gear selections via the paddles behind the steering wheel when the vehicle is in manual mode. The Lexus multistage hybrid system has been around for years now, but I had yet to really play around with it.
My take: After some time in manual mode, I found myself just putting it back in “drive” and letting the vehicle do the work for me.
Fisker says it’s planning more layoffs less than two months after cutting 15% of its workforce, as the EV startup scrambles to raise cash to stay alive. Fisker expects to seek bankruptcy protection within the next 30 days if it can’t come up with that money, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulatory filing.
The imperiled company said in the regulatory filing Tuesday it had just $54 million in cash and equivalents as of April 16, and another $11.2 million that can’t be immediately accessed. Fisker said in the filing that it’s currently trying to raise money to pay off a loan that it defaulted on in order to avoid bankruptcy. The outstanding balance as of mid-January was north of $300 million.
Fisker still employed 1,135 people globally as of April 19, according to the filing. That’s down from 1,560 at the end of 2022, and around 1,300 at the end of of September 2023. The company also said Tuesday that it will be “reducing its physical footprint.”
This follows Fisker’s announcement Monday evening that a second member of its board of directors has left the company, with the first coming at the end of March. The company has also hired a Chief Restructuring Officer who is now solely in charge of approving Fisker’s budget, as well as the decision-making process for any sale of Fisker’s business.
Fisker finds itself on the brink of bankruptcy following a troubled launch of its first electric vehicle, the Fisker Ocean SUV, that kicked off in June 2023.
The Ocean has been hampered by numerous problems, including buggy software, reports of sudden power loss and brake failure, and insufficient customer service, as TechCrunch reported in February. Fisker struggled to meet internal sales goals and lost track of millions of dollars of customer payments for some of the vehicles it did sell, triggering an internal audit that helped recover a majority of that money. It has spent the last few months attempting to pivot to a dealership model.
The Ocean is now subject to three separate federal investigations from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The company has not issued any recalls, but has paused production of the SUV. In the meantime, it slashed prices on its existing inventory by as much as 39% in an attempt to generate short-term cash. The company has also been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
If Fisker ultimately seeks bankruptcy protection, it would be founder Henrik Fisker’s second automotive startup to do so. His previous effort, Fisker Automotive, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2013.
Humane AI raised more than $230 million before it even shipped a product. And when it finally released its Ai Pin – which costs $699 plus a $24 monthly subscription – pretty much every tech reviewer came to the same disappointing realization: this much-hyped product, which promises to disrupt the smartphone’s dominance, is not very good.
Yet some onlookers are declaring that Marques Brownlee, the hugely popular YouTuber known as MKBHD, will be single-handedly responsible for the company’s eventual downfall. So, one of the biggest conversations as Humane AI dropped its long-awaited product was not about the product itself – it was about how Brownlee spoke about it.
Brownlee’s video title is admittedly a bit clicky: “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed… For Now.” But when you watch the actual video, the title delivers on its promise.
“It was really hard to come up with a title for this video,” Brownlee says in the video itself, which currently has over 5 million views. “But I will say, at one point, my working title for this was, ‘This product is either the dumbest thing ever, or I’m an idiot.’”
Sure, Brownlee is unusually influential with over 18 million YouTube subscribers, but his critiques are on par with other reviewers’ commentary: the pin has bad battery life; it is difficult to wear; it makes mistakes too often to be reliable; its laser projection screen is completely ineffective outdoors; and it’s simply not worth the same sticker price as an Android phone.
Yet Brownlee bears the brunt of the ire from the company’s fans.
“I find it distasteful, almost unethical, to say this when you have 18 million subscribers,” Daniel Vassallo wrote on X. “Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great responsibility. Potentially killing someone else’s nascent project reeks of carelessness. First, do no harm.”
The tweet set off a firestorm, with many defending MKBHD for telling consumers the truth about his experience with the Ai Pin. MKBHD even tweeted back to the upset user, saying, “We disagree on what my job is.”
Vassallo is not the only commentator with this sentiment. Another tech content creator, Alex Finn, wrote on X: “MKBHD bankrupted a company in 41 seconds,” referring to the opening of his video. He later commented, “If this video never came out, they would have sold so many more.”
When reached for comment, Vassallo said, “Many people thought I was defending Humane or its product. I wasn’t. My observation was about MKBHD’s scale of influence and how that power deserves more rigor than the sensational headline on YouTube: ‘The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed.’ The power to crush a company shouldn’t be taken lightly, and that headline is what most people will see. The actual review was fair and balanced.”
Critics of MKBHD’s video are operating as though Humane AI is an underdog in the space. But this isn’t a green, early-stage startup trying their hand at building new hardware. This is a company that raised a Series C round and attracted investors like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and various top venture capital firms before consumers even got their hands on the product.
“Call me cynical, but I’m wary of startups with huge war chests of capital but no commercialized product to speak of,” TechCrunch reporter Kyle Wiggers wrote after last year’s Series C raise.
When asked for comment, MKBHD directed TechCrunch to his YouTube response to the situation.
“All that any honest review actually does is just accelerate whatever was already going on,” he said in the video. Less than a day after posting it, his follow-up video has over 2 million views.
This isn’t an isolated incident for MKBHD. The YouTuber was also accused of inciting the downfall of EV startup Fisker after he negatively reviewed the Fisker Ocean car in a similarly titled video last month: “This is the Worst Car I’ve Ever Reviewed.”
After Brownlee posted his review, Fisker laid off 15% of its staff and stopped production, since it only had $121 million left in the bank. But Fisker was already in free fall before Brownlee said that the Fisker Ocean was the worst car he’d ever reviewed.
In the month preceding the MKBHD review, federal safety regulators began investigating the Fisker Ocean for complaints about the brakes not working well. Then, TechCrunch exclusively learned that Ocean drivers had been complaining to Fisker about poor brake performance, faulty key fobs and sudden power loss for months. One customer wrote to Fisker that they feared for their life when their car suddenly lost power while driving on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles.
So, is Fisker failing because it put out a dangerously poor product, or is it because a very popular YouTuber said that the car is bad?
Thankfully, Humane AI’s subpar pin won’t put anyone in mortal danger. But these parallel incidents display the same misplaced rage at Brownlee over his honest critique of troublesome products.
Some Black techies viewed the critique of MKBHD through a different lens.
The Humane AI pin was widely panned across the tech review board, but the only person receiving outsized and long-lasting criticism for his review is MKBHD, a Black man.
There were also some familiar tropes in how he was being criticized: continuous hampering on how he presented the review mimics tone policing, a technique used commonly to dismiss especially what Black people say, just because a person doesn’t like the way it was said. Black people are judged harshly on how they present a topic and are undermined until they present it in a way that makes the accuser more comfortable.
“If Brownlee were anything other than Black, this would be ‘an honest review that shines a light on the AI bubble,’” one Black founder told TechCrunch. “Instead, he’s ‘harsh,’ and ‘it’s not fair that he can bankrupt such a well-funded company. He should be more graceful in his critique.’ In a world full of shams and frauds, Marques should do exactly what he thinks is right. And he did.”
The tone of the review’s headline also depends on how you see it — MKBHD did include “for now” in the title, allowing the possibility that Humane AI could eventually improve what every reviewer now agrees is a flawed product.
It is also notable that the tech community reserved particular criticism for a Black man exercising power through his reviews, and not the other white male tech podcasts, voices, and online reviewers who always share their voices and are praised for their remarks and criticisms of products. It felt as if some expected MKBHD to be held to a higher standard in a way that isn’t usually vocalized against prominent white tech influencers.
“Tech has issues with bias against Black people, tech has issues with the media being a critic, not a cheerleader, so of course, tech has issues with a Black tech media take that is critical of fanboy topics like AI and IoT,” a Black investor told TechCrunch. “That doesn’t make his review less valid or the crying less thin-skinned, but it does make me question how anyone can watch this playout without noticing all the dog whistles.”
But it’s notable in itself – both for Brownlee and the creator economy at large – that a YouTuber can conceivably have such a big impact.
In an interview with Colin and Samir, Brownlee reflects on a past era of media when tech reviewers at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times were some of the only voices that people went to for opinions on new tech. But now, anyone on the internet can have a say, regardless of their institutional affiliation.
“When a YouTube video of mine goes up on a product, there are very frequently hundreds others going up on the same product around the same time,” he said. “There are so many more voices now.”
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the notable happenings in tech over the past few days.
This week, TC’s auto reporter Sean O’Kane revealed how EV startup Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that started in December and took months to complete.
Elsewhere, Lorenzo reported how Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in a secret project known internally at Meta as “Project Ghostbusters.” According to court documents, the goal was to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers.
And Manish wrote about the resignation of Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque late last week. Mostaque’s departure from Stability AI — the startup known for its popular image generation tool Stable Diffusion — comes amid an ongoing struggle for stability (pun intended) at the company, which was reportedly spending ~$8 million a month as of October 2023 with little revenue to show for it.
Lots else happened. We recap it all in this edition of WiR — but first, a reminder to sign up to receive the WiR newsletter in your inbox every Saturday.
Fisker suspended: Fisker’s bad week continued with a halt in the startup’s stock trading. The New York Stock Exchange moved to take Fisker off the exchange, citing its “abnormally low” stock levels.
AI-powered itineraries: In an upgrade to its Search Generative Experience, Google has added the ability for users to ask Google Search to plan a travel itinerary. Using AI, Search will draw on ideas from websites around the web along with reviews, photos and other details.
Robinhood’s new card: Nine months after acquiring credit card startup X1 for $95 million, Robinhood on Wednesday announced the launch of its new Gold Card, powered by X1’s technology, with a list of features that could make Apple Card users envious.
At AT&T, mum’s the word: The personal information of some 73 million AT&T customers spilled online this week. But AT&T won’t say how — despite the hack responsible having happened over three years ago.
Booming Copilot: Copilot, the budgeting app, has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Nico Wittenborn’s Adjacent. The app is benefiting partly from the death of Mint, Intuit’s financial management product.
Liquid assets: In a piece looking at the wider VC-backed beverage industry, Rebecca and Christine note canned water startup Liquid Death’s recent $67 million fundraise, which brought the company’s total raised to more than $267 million. Talk about liquidity.
HVAC venture: Dan Laufer, a former Nextdoor exec, has raised $25 million from Canvas Ventures and others for PipeDreams, a startup that acquires mom-and-pop HVAC and plumbing companies and scales them using its software that helps with scheduling and marketing.
Is Nvidia the next AWS?: Ron writes about how there’s lots of parallels in Nvidia’s and AWS’ growth trajectories.
This week on Equity, the crew dug into Robinhood’s new credit card, Fisker’s latest woes and even Databricks’ new AI model that it spent $10 million to spin up. They also spotlit two companies building startups focused around kids, and, to wrap up, looked at a new $100 million fund that seeks to back innovative climate tech.
Meanwhile, on Found, Allison Wolff, the co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, a cloud-based planning and monitoring tool for adaptive land management, discussed why the wildfires we’re seeing today are hotter and spreading more quickly than we can contain and how proper land management can help foster lower, slower-burning fires.
And on Chain Reaction, Jacquelyn interviewed Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time. Space and Time aims to be a verifiable compute layer for web3 that scales zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic action used to prove something about a piece of data without revealing the origin data itself.
Spotify tests online learning: In its ongoing efforts to get its 600 million+ users to spend more time and money on its platform, Spotify is spinning up a new line of content: e-learning. Beginning with a rollout in the U.K., the (traditionally audio) streaming platform is testing the waters for an online education offering of freemium video courses.
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..
