Latest from Rebecca Bellan
Transportation
Self-driving truck startup Aurora Innovation to sell up to $420M in shares ahead of commercial launch
Self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation is looking to raise hundreds of millions in additional capital as it races toward a driverless commercial launch by the end of 2024. Aurora is…
AI hardware has taken on a new shape with Friend’s $99 necklace — a pendant that gives you an AI friend to talk to and…
When Xiaoyin Qu was growing up in China, she was obsessed with learning how to build paper airplanes that could do flips in the air. Her parents, though, didn’t have…
Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle-based e-bike startup that has raised more than $300 million from investors, went through another round of layoffs in July, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. This is…
Perplexity AI will soon start sharing advertising revenue with news publishers when its chatbot surfaces their content in response to a user query, a move that appears designed to assuage…
Shared micromobility giant Lime is piloting two new vehicles designed to appeal to women and older folks who might appreciate a lower step-through frame, smaller wheels and an upgrade from…
Welcome back to another recap of Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today’s episode is packed with M&A talk, how one YouTuber…
The California Department of Motor Vehicles this week granted Nuro approval to test its third-generation R3 autonomous delivery vehicle in four Bay Area cities, giving the AV startup a positive…
The California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Proposition 22 — the ballot measure that passed in November 2020 and classified app-based gig workers as independent contractors rather than employees —…
Don Burnette, CEO and co-founder of self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics, had an “aha” moment when the company started working with the U.S. Department of Defense. Kodiak’s mission has always…
Alphabet will spend an additional $5 billion on its self-driving subsidiary, Waymo, over the next few years, according to Ruth Porat, the company’s chief financial officer. Porat announced the commitment…
Waymo has started testing on public roads in San Francisco a new robotaxi built by Chinese electric automaker Zeekr. Waymo has “less than a handful” of the Zeekr vehicles in San…
On today’s episode of Equity, Rebecca Bellan did a deep dive into the CrowdStrike outage that affected around 8.5 million Windows devices around the world,…
Featured Article
Tracking the EV battery factory construction boom across North America
A wave of automakers and battery makers — foreign and domestic — have pledged to produce North American–made batteries before 2030.
The CrowdStrike outage that hit early Friday morning and knocked out computers running Microsoft Windows has grounded flights globally. Major U.S. airlines including United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air…
Welcome back to another recap of Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast about the business of startups. This episode is packed with deals, antitrust musings, AI and…
Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an “AI native” education platform. In tech speak, that usually means built from the…
On today’s episode of Equity, Rebecca Bellan explored Google’s reported talks to acquire Wiz, a cloud security company, for around $23 billion. Wiz provides an…
When VanMoof declared bankruptcy last year, it left around 5,000 customers who had preordered e-bikes in the lurch. Now VanMoof is up and running under new management, and the company’s…
Archer Aviation and Southwest Airlines are teaming up to figure out what it will take to build out a network of electric air taxis at California airports. Southwest’s customer data…
Welcome back to another recap of Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast about the business of startups. This episode is packed with deals, antitrust musings, AI and…
Joby Aviation is still a year away from commercially launching its electric air taxi designed for urban environments, but the startup is already looking toward its next chapter: intercity flight,…
Seven years ago, Uber and Lyft blocked an effort to require ride-hailing app drivers to get fingerprinted in California. But by launching Uber for Teens earlier this year, the company…
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News outlets are accusing Perplexity of plagiarism and unethical web scraping
In the age of generative AI, when chatbots can provide detailed answers to questions based on content pulled from the internet, the line between fair use and plagiarism, and between routine web scraping and unethical summarization, is a thin one. Perplexity AI is a startup that combines a search engine…
Amid a fraught environment for battery startups, Sila has raised $375 million to finish construction of a U.S. factory that will scale its next-generation battery technology for customers like Mercedes-Benz…
Wisk Aero, a subsidiary of Boeing, has acquired Verocel, a software verification and validation company that’s served the aerospace industry for 25 years.
Uber Freight and Aurora Innovation have announced a multi-year collaboration that will see Aurora’s autonomous driving technology offered on the Uber Freight network through 2030. The deal gives Aurora access…
Apple has been named the first of tech’s so-called “gatekeepers” to be charged for violating the EU’s Digital Markets Act. In a press release this…
Really, X should have learned its lesson by now.
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‘What’s in it for us?’ journalists ask as publications sign content deals with AI firms
Journalists understand the basic structure of the deals, but they still have questions.
