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Elon Musk guts Tesla's charging team after winning over major automakers | TechCrunch

April 30, 2024 10:13 PM0


Tesla has gutted its charging team in a new round of layoffs, despite recently winning over major automakers like Ford and General Motors and making its connector the defacto standard in North America.

CEO Elon Musk announced the new layoffs in an overnight email to executives, first reported by The Information, in which he said he wants leaders to be “absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction,” as he ordered them to cut more employees who “don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test” or resign. Senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci and head of new vehicles Daniel Ho are out, according to The Information..

Tesla’s Supercharger network has long been seen as one of its greatest competitive advantages. It’s widely available, has far better uptime than other charging networks, and the connector technology — known as the North American Charging Standard, or NACS — is now being adopted by essentially every major automaker with a presence in North America.

Will Jameson, one of the charging team leads let go in the cuts, said in a post on Musk’s social media platform X that he “has let our entire charging org co.”

“What this means for the charging network, NACS, and all the exciting work we were doing across the industry, I don’t yet know. What a wild ride it has been,” he wrote.

The cuts are so complete that Musk even suggested in the email that the company will slow its expansion of the Supercharger network, writing that Tesla “will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction.”

Musk is dissolving Tesla’s public policy team as well, according to the reports. Rohan Patel, the former VP of that team, left the company two weeks ago at the same time that the layoffs were announced. Patel called it the “best policy/bizdev team in the business” at the time in a message to TechCrunch. “I know I’m extremely biased, but honestly the people who were on my team are just phenomenal,” he wrote.

Tesla’s policy team is largely responsible for the company winning around 13% of funding available from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and until recently was pursuing another federal grant of nearly $100 million to fund the buildout of a charging corridor for the company’s still-in-development electric big rig.

These cuts come just two weeks after Musk announced Tesla was laying off more than 10% of its workforce as part of a company-wide restructuring in service of going “balls to the wall for autonomy. The company is coming off a brutal first quarter where its profits dropped 55% on weaker EV sales. At the same time, the company’s board is trying to reinstate Musk’s $56 billion pay package that was struck down by a judge, and the CEO has publicly threatened to develop AI technology at his startup xAI unless he is given even more control over Tesla.




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Sachin Bansal's fintech Navi seeks $2B valuation in its first major external fundraise | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 2:07 PM0


Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal is in talks to raise capital for his new startup, Indian fintech Navi. Bansal is talking to investors to raise at a valuation of around $2 billion, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. One source said he is looking to raise between $200 million and $400 million.

Bansal has largely self-funded Navi up to now, and this would be the Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s first large outside fundraise since it was founded in 2018.

Talks have yet to materialize into a deal, so the terms, as well as Bansal’s appetite for outside funding, may change, the sources cautioned. A Navi spokesperson declined to comment.

Navi, which offers personal and home loans as well as health insurance to customers, has been through a few financial twists and turns. Navi originally wanted to raise $440 million in a public listing, according to paperwork it filed in 2022. With the IPO market in a slump, however, the startup abandoned those plans last year.

The funding deliberations point to a significant shift in the venture market in India and are an encouraging sign for fintech more globally. After a particularly rough 2023 in which overall startup funding fell 73% in the country, this could be a signal that growth-stage funding rounds are back on the table.

Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADIA is in talks to back Indian audio-storytelling platform Pocket FM, TechCrunch reported last month. Indian eyewear brand Lenskart, Temasek-backed consumer nutrition platform HealthKart, and bike-taxi aggregator Rapido are also in talks to raise new growth-stage rounds, Indian outlet Economic Times reported Thursday. Khazanah, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, is among investors that Swiggy-backed Rapido has engaged with in recent weeks, one source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. 

India’s startup ecosystem saw a steep decline in large funding rounds last year as global investors, including Tiger Global and SoftBank, reduced their investments, while domestic VC firms shifted their focus to early-stage companies, according to a recent Bain report.

The Reserve Bank of India’s regulatory actions in recent years have also impacted startups issuing cards and lending, further spooking many investors in the fintech sector.

Under Bansal, Flipkart was a trailblazer for startups in India, raising billions of dollars from a storied list of strategic and financial investors. He then left the startup in 2018 with a $1 billion windfall and opted for a bootstrapped approach for Navi, which he founded the same year.

Even if this might become Navi’s first external raise, that doesn’t mean Bansal has not been talking to interested parties. As TechCrunch previously reported, the fintech spoke to potential investors, including SoftBank, ahead of its IPO filing. Those discussions stalled after Navi’s application for a banking license was rejected by the country’s central bank, TechCrunch previously reported.

In recent quarters, Navi has narrowed its focus. It sold its microfinancing unit Chaitanya India for $178.5 million in August as part of a “strategic plan to focus on our digital-first businesses,” Bansal said at the time.

In an interview published by the Indian outlet Moneycontrol on Tuesday, Bansal said he would revive plans for the IPO, but only in a “few months, once we are ready.”

Bansal has also not given up the idea of turning Navi into a bank. “For now, I would say we have parked them, until we see that it is a possibility again in the future,” he told the Indian outlet. “Then we will pick up again when there’s some green light from the regulator at the right time.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Rooms, a 3D design app and 'cozy game,' gets a major update as users jump to 250K | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 5:13 AM0


Five months ago, Rooms, a 3D design platform made by ex-Google employees, launched its beta version on the App Store. Today, the free iOS app is getting a big update that will bring a wave of new discovery-first features, including an activity feed, an explore page, the ability to browse by category, and more.

Rooms is an interior decorating app that falls under the cozy game category. Players can build and code intricate 3D rooms and mini-games using a library of over 7,500 digital items. Users can customize items by editing code with Lua, the programming language that’s also used in Roblox Studio.

Rooms touts a quarter of a million registered users, up from 40,000 in 2023. The user growth is a notable accomplishment for a scrappy three-person team that released its web platform less than a year ago.

“When we launched last November, it was in some ways an experiment to see if this idea we had would resonate with people,” co-founder Jason Toff told TechCrunch. “We were pleasantly surprised that people not only used it, but that they also made rooms a lot, [and] a lot better rooms than we expected.”

Toff previously worked in Google’s AR/VR division. His former colleague Bruno Oliveira is also on the founding team, as well as Nick Kruge, who has experience working at Uber, YouTube, and Smule.

Image Credits: Things Inc. (Rooms’ parent company)

At launch, the mobile app only had three TikTok-style vertical feeds to choose from: a “For You” feed, Editor’s Picks, and a Recent feed. However, as Rooms continues to grow, the founders want to give its users a way to easily discover other user-generated rooms and praise creators for their designs.

With today’s launch of “Rooms 2.0,” the company added a Trending feed to the home screen, helping boost popular creators and their most-liked contributions. Plus, users can scroll through over a dozen new categories, including “Games,” “Art,” “Fantasy,” “Nature,” and “Weird.” There’s also “Tribute,” a selection of rooms inspired by popular IPs, such as Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda, Hello Kitty, and others. The feeds were previously curated but now it’s added algorithms that control the order of rooms that appear in the feeds.

There’s also a new Explore page with even more ways to discover, such as exploring user profiles, the top games, and all-time favorites.

Additionally, the app is introducing “Honeycomb View,” a hexagonal grid that provides a new way to browse multiple rooms at once. Users can tap on different rooms and zoom in or zoom out to see fewer or more designs.

“Our lack of discovery became a hindrance… Everyone wants their work to be seen. We also heard from creators that they like [discovering] other people’s rooms… I think it will help a lot to have not just one surface, but dozens of new [feeds] for content to be discovered,” Toff said.

Rooms’ new Activity tab lets creators track likes and comments, along with when their room is “remixed” or posted. Each room has an icon at the bottom to indicate its total number of remixes.

The Remix feature, which allows people to use someone’s design as a template, was also updated to detect copycat rooms, which hopefully prevents creators from imitating someone’s design that took hours to make. (According to the company, 1 in 8 users have spent over two hours editing their rooms.)

Under the hood, the team implemented a mesh optimization method (which minimizes the complexity of 3D objects) to make large rooms render up to 20 times faster.

The majority of the updates are on the iOS app, but Rooms is adding the new categories and speed improvements to its web version.

In the future, Rooms is considering an AI-powered tool to make coding easier on the app. The feature would “look at your code and tell you where there are obvious mistakes,” Toff shared.

As TechCrunch previously reported, the company was exploring a generative AI feature to help with designing rooms, including the ability to generate images for the walls and floors of a room. Toff said they’re not actively working on that feature due to the high costs. However, in the future, Rooms may offer a premium subscription offering but the company is waiting until the app gets more traction.

Rooms will launch a desktop app on Steam in a few months. The company is also considering an Android app but isn’t making it a top priority.

Rooms, an interactive 3D space designer and ‘cozy game,’ arrives on the App Store


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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