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Berlin-based Onomotion has come up with a scalable way to do micromobility-powered urban logistics — cargo e-bikes with built-in cover from the elements and attachable containers. Today, Onomotion has a couple hundred vehicles on the road in Germany with logistics partners like UPS, DPD and Hermes. Over the next few years, the company wants to expand to several thousands of vehicles across Europe and North America.

Onomotion just closed its Series A, with €6 million ($6.3 million) in equity and €15 million ($15.7 million) in debt. The equity comes from Proeza Ventures, Zu na mi GmbH, the European Innovation Council and existing investors; and the debt, in the form of a bond, comes from GLS Bank. Onomotion will pay GLS back after seven years, including a yearly interest rate of 5.5%, according to Beres Seelbach, co-founder and CEO. The executive said Onomotion will use the debt to purchase more vehicles so it can scale operations.

The funding comes as more cities and logistics companies move towards finding both more sustainable and efficient solutions for delivering packages in dense urban centers.

“We want to go to international markets in Europe like Paris or Brussels and then to North America, United States and Canada,” Seelbach told TechCrunch. “We want to improve the vehicle, make it even better by adding new features and building new versions, maybe with different modules. And of course, we would also like to invest into the marketing and sales team.”

Onomotion’s vehicle-as-a-service business model involves customers paying a monthly fee for vehicles, containers, chargers, maintenance and servicing. The startup also offers a fleet management program and provides over-the-air software updates so the vehicle mechanics can constantly improve, said Seelbach.

Since the company is largely vertically integrated — Onomotion designs its own vehicles and assembles them in Berlin — Onomotion is able to customize containers for different customer needs. For example, one IT customer uses a container that’s built with specific compartments to hold laptops and other gadgets securely, Seelbach said.

Most of Onomotion’s customers have their own delivery riders, but the startup is slowly growing another business unit that offers a logistics operations team.

“15% to 20% of our turnover this year will come from logistics-as-a-service,” said Seelbach. “Many of our customers have said it’s difficult to find a driver. It’s a big headache to organize the last mile logistics…So for some of our customers, we do everything, from giving them the vehicles to the drivers.”

Seelbach said Onomotion aims to expand that service to cities in Germany outside Berlin and Hamburg, where it’s currently offered.

“We have a pipeline of new customers for this business division,” he said.

Onomotion raises €21 million to expand e-cargo bike urban logistics business by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

The Indian arm of SBM Bank, one of the banks that has aggressively worked with fintech startups in the South Asian market, is engaging with investors to raise capital and pitching the vision of becoming one of the top banking-as-a-service providers in the country, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The Indian arm is in advanced stages of deliberations to raise between $50 million to $75 million at a pre-money valuation of about $200 million, the source said, requesting anonymity discussing private matters. The round hasn’t closed, so terms of the deal may change, the source said.

The firm sees its deep partnerships with fintech startups such as Bengaluru-headquartered fintechs Razorpay and Slice as a key growth pillar, according to an investor presentation seen by TechCrunch.

SBM Bank India declined to comment.

The bank has actively courted fintech startups as customers, offering them co-branded cards and powering their neobanks, as it sought to differentiate itself from the large competitors that for years avoided engaging with the younger firms.

Banks have long been a favorite investment for retail investors. Value of 100 rupees invested in HDFC and ICICI Bank shares on January 1, 2010 surged to — including with dividends — to over 1,039 and 672 rupees as of late last month, respectively, according to an analysis by Bernstein.

Some venture investors have also shown appetite to invest in banks in recent months – Accel and Quona recently backed Shivalik Small Finance Bank, for instance – but a growing number of other banks including RBL and Federal Bank have employed a similar strategy as SBM and courted many startups in the past two years.

Giant banks including HDFC and ICICI, at the same time, have have also somewhat reversed the course and are now not as hostile to startups anymore.

With the mounting pressure and local FDI rules, its valuation ask may rest on investors being convinced that it’s able to retain its business clients, their continued growth and it deepening its partnership with them to provide additional offerings.

The India arm generated a net revenue of $62.7 million in the financial year ending March this year, according to the presentation.

SBM Bank India, building BaaS platform, seeks funding at $200 million valuation by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

The real estate and infrastructure sectors contribute about 40% of global carbon emissions, and part of solving the climate crisis is fixing how those industries work. Accacia gives large property owners a way to track their carbon impact in real-time by integrating with ERPs and property management systems like Yardi. It’s already been deployed to over 20 million square feet of real estate in Asia and announced today $2.5 million in seed funding that will be used to expand across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the United States and Canada.

The funding was led by Accel and B Capital. Participants included Blume Ventures, Good Capital, Zerodha’s Rainmatter Fund, Loyal VC and angel investors.

Founded in 2022 by Annu Talreja, Piyush Chitkara and Jagmohan Garg. Before Accacia, Talreja worked for more than 15 years in real estate, with companies like AECOM and Marriott.

During that time, she saw an evolution in how the industry was affected by climate-related events.

“Climate change-led flash floods, hurricanes and forest fires have impacted property prices globally and rising energy costs have necessitated the use of alternative energy sources,” she told TechCrunch. “Unlike many other sectors, the impact of climate change in real estate is ‘here and now’ and as someone who has worked on building design, construction and investments, the combination of my skill sets allowed me to look at this impact in a holistic way.”

Accacia’s target customers are large real estate owners and asset managers, including REITs, pension and sovereign funds, and developers. Most own and manage real estate AUMs of more than $1 billion. Accacia’s platform can track carbon emissions from all investment asset classes, including commercial, retail, multi-family housing and data centers. It is also used by consulting firms that are serving real estate and infrastructure companies that have set net-zero goals.

Emissions tracked by Accacia include Scope 1 (direct emissions), Scope 2 (indirect emissions from purchasing generated energy) and Scope 3 (emissions from a company’s value chain) for real estate, including embodied carbon, financed emissions and emissions from business operations.

An example of how Accacia can be used is a commercial real estate fund that has over 10 million square feet of assets. After it deployed Accacia, it was able to cut its direct emissions by 20% within the first six months of using the platform. Another client, a listed hotel company with more than 100 assets, used Accacia to reduce its Scope 3 emissions through the platform’s vendor recommendation engine.

In a statement about the investment, B Capital partner Karan Mohla told TechCrunch, “As an industry, real estate and infrastructure requires a nuanced and focused approach towards climate reporting, adaptation and mitigation. Accacia is taking a leadership role in building a global platform in solving this challenge. A B Capital. we believe in their vision of building a tech-led and scalable SaaS platform to get to net zero targets for real estate owners and asset managers.”

Accacia tackles the real estate industry’s massive carbon emissions problem by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

A group of about 300 quality assurance (QA) testers at video game company ZeniMax Media are seeking to form the first ever union at Microsoft, the parent company to their studio. ZeniMax includes subsidiaries like Bethesda Softworks and id Software, producing franchises like The Elder Scrolls, Doom and Fallout.

Union organizing has been on the rise in the video game industry, particularly among QA workers. QA testers at Activision Blizzard have successfully formed unions at Raven Software and Blizzard Albany through the Communication Workers Alliance (CWA), which will also represent ZeniMax’s union. But while Activision Blizzard has attempted to stall union organizing at every turn, Microsoft pledged in June that it would not stand in the way of employee organizing. So far, Microsoft has held true to its promise (and of course, that promise will get complicated if Microsoft’s $69 billion bid to buy Activision Blizzard closes).

On Friday, union organizers opened a portal where ZeniMax QA testers can vote yes or no to a union through the end of the month. If more than half of eligible workers vote yes, then — if the company stays true to its word — Microsoft will recognize the union without turning it over to an official, bureaucratic vote with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Zachary Armstrong, a senior quality assurance tester II at id Software, told TechCrunch that the unit is organizing to fight for better pay.

“Right now, we’re not being paid a wage that reflects the respect and the value that we bring to our company,” Armstrong told TechCrunch. “This is something that is the case across all video game QA.”

It’s not a coincidence that other major union pushes in gaming have also come from QA testers.

“QA testers are consistently placed at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to game development, to the point that we’re not even considered game developers.” Armstrong said. QA workers rigorously test all facets of video games to identify and resolve problems that impact user experience. “That’s reflected in our pay, and that’s reflected in our work, especially with regard to crunch.”

In the lead up to a major game release, QA testers are sometimes expected to work unsustainable hours, which is referred to as “crunch.” Before announcing their intent to unionize, the first major U.S. gaming union at Raven Software went on strike to protest layoffs affecting 12 contractors — before those contracts were terminated, the QA testers had been working overtime for five weeks straight.

Armstrong expects that the ZeniMax QA testers have the votes necessary to win their union at the end of December. For now, Armstrong is optimistic that Microsoft will continue to let the workers organize without interference.

“It’s made it a lot easier to reach out to people who are more concerned about retaliation and consequences for supporting a union,” Armstrong said about Microsoft’s union policies. “We understand that it’s been a lot more difficult at other studios, and the fact that we have not received that level of resistance has been a huge relief for us.”

If the union vote passes, the QA testers at ZeniMax will have formed the first union at Microsoft, as well as the largest U.S. video game union to date.

Microsoft could get its first official union as ZeniMax QA testers organize by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Autonomous trucking technology company TuSimple and truck manufacturer Navistar have scrapped their deal to co-develop self-driving trucks, the companies said Monday. Neither company provided a reason for ending the partnership.

Two years ago, TuSimple and Navistar had agreed to jointly develop and produce purpose-built autonomous semi trucks by 2024; this would be a move away from retrofitting existing trucks with autonomous sensors and technology. Navistar bought an undisclosed stake in TuSimple at the time.

TuSimple has received close to 7,000 reservations for its Navistar trucks with customers like DHL Supply Chain, Schneider and U.S. Xpress. It’s not clear if any of those orders will be fulfilled now. Neither company responded to TechCrunch for comment, but a statement from the companies states, “The decision to end the development agreement does not preclude the companies from working together in the future.”

TuSimple stated in October that it plans to achieve commercialization in 2023.

The move to end the partnership comes less than a month after Cheng Lu returned to his role as CEO of TuSimple after previously being ousted. The return of Lu came days after the company fired his predecessor following an internal probe that showed certain employees having ties and sharing information with Hydron, a China-backed hydrogen-powered trucking company.

TuSimple and Navistar end deal to co-develop autonomous trucks by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

If your Instagram is awash in algorithmically generated portraits of your friends, you aren’t alone. After adding a new avatar generation tool based on Stable Diffusion, the photo editing app Lensa AI went viral over the last few days, with users sharing their uncanny AI-crafted avatars (and the horrible misfires) in stories and posts.

Lensa’s fun, eminently shareable avatars mark the first time that many people have interacted with a generative AI tool. In Lensa’s case, it’s also the first time they’ve paid for computer-generated art.

Stable Diffusion itself is free and a lot of people are playing around with it for research purposes or just for fun. But Lensa and other services like it — Avatar AI and Profilepicture.AI, to name a few — are making money by selling the computing cycles required to run the prompts and spit out a set of images. That certainly changes the equation a little.

Lensa is built on Stable Diffusion’s free, open source image generator but acts as a middleman. Send Lensa 10-20 selfies and $7.99 ($3.99 if you sign up for a free trial) and the app does the heavy lifting for you behind the scenes, handing back a set of stylized portraits in an array of styles like sci-fi, fantasy and anime. Anyone with sufficient processing power can install Stable Diffusion on a machine, download some models and get similar results, but Lensa’s avatars are impressive and Instagram-ready enough that droves of people are more than happy to pay for the convenience.

While the tech world has celebrated the advancements of AI image and text generators this year — and artists have watched the proceedings warily — your average Instagram user probably hasn’t struck up a philosophical conversation with ChatGPT or fed DALL-E absurdist prompts. That also means that most people haven’t grappled with the ethical implications of free, readily available AI tools like Stable Diffusion and how they’re poised to change entire industries — if we let them.

From my experience over the weekend on Instagram, for every 10 Lensa avatars there’s one Cassandra in the comments scolding everyone for paying for an app that steals from artists. Those concerns aren’t really overblown. Stable Diffusion, the AI image generator that powers Lensa, was originally trained on 2.3 billion captioned images — a massive cross-section of the visual internet. Swept up in all of that is all kinds of stuff, including watermarked images, copyrighted works, and a huge swath of pictures from Pinterest, apparently. Those images also include many thousands of photos pulled from Smugmug and Flickr, illustrations from DeviantArt and ArtStation and stock images from sites like Getty and Shutterstock.

Individual artists didn’t opt in to appearing in the training data set, nor can they opt out. According to LAION, the nonprofit that created the huge datasets to begin with, the troves of are data are “simply indexes to the internet,” lists of URLs to images across the web paired with the alt text that describes them. If you’re an EU citizen and the database contains a photo of you with your name attached, you can file a takedown request per the GDPR, Europe’s groundbreaking privacy law, but that’s about it. The horse has already left the barn.

We’re in the earliest stages of grappling with what this means for artists, whether it’s independent illustrators and photographers or massive copyright-conscious corporations that get swept up in the AI modeling process. Some models using Stable Diffusion push the issue even further. Prior to a recent update, Stable Diffusion Version 2, anyone could craft a template designed to mimic a specific artist’s distinct visual style and mint new images ad infinitum at a pace that no human could compete with.

Andy Baio, who co-founded a festival for independent artists, has a thoughtful interview up on his blog delving into these concerns. He spoke with an illustrator who discovered an AI model specifically designed to replicate her work. “My initial reaction was that it felt invasive that my name was on this tool,” she said. “… If I had been asked if they could do this, I wouldn’t have said yes.”

By September, Dungeons & Dragons artist Greg Rutkowski was so popular as a Stable Diffusion prompt used to generate images in his detailed fantasy style that he worried his actual art would be lost in the sea of algorithmic copies. “What about in a year? I probably won’t be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art,” Rutkowski told MIT’s Technology Review.

Those worries, echoed by many illustrators and other digital creatives, are reverberating on social media as many people encounter these thorny issues — and the existential threat they seem to pose — for the first time.

“I know a lot of people have been posting their Lensa/other AI portraits lately. I would like to encourage you not to do so or, better yet, not to use the service,” voice actor Jenny Yokobori wrote in a popular tweet thread about Lensa. In another, Riot Games artist Jon Lam shared his own discomfort with AI-generated art. “When AI artists steal/co-opt art from us I don’t just see art, I see people, mentors and friends. I don’t expect you to understand.”

Personally, I was sick and stuck at home over the weekend, where I spent more time than usual idly scrolling on social media. My Instagram stories were a blur of flattering digital illustrations that cost cents a piece. Lensa has clearly tapped into something special there, appealing to both the vain impulse to effortlessly collect 50 stylish self portraits and the interactive experience of polling your friends on which are your spitting image (most, from my experience) and which are hilarious mutations that only a computer doing its best human impersonation could spin up.

Some friends, mostly artists and illustrators, pushed back, encouraging everyone to find an artist to pay instead. Some creative people in my circles paid too and it’s hard to fault them. For better or worse, it’s genuinely amazing what the current cohort of AI image generators can do, particularly if you just tuned in.

Soon, we’ll all be paying attention. In the name of story research and vanity, I downloaded Lensa and gave the app a try. I’d only paid once for an artist to make me a profile picture in the past and that was just one image, all the way back in 2016. Now for less than 10 bucks I had a set of 50 epic avatars generated from my most me photos, but these were extra me. Me in various futuristic jumpsuits stepping out of the pages of a graphic novel, me in purple robes looking like an intergalactic saint, me, me, me.

I see the appeal. A handful of friends remarked on how the pictures made them feel, hinting at the gender euphoria of being seen the way they see themselves. I wouldn’t fault anyone for exploring this stuff; it’s all very interesting and at least that complicated. I like my avatars, but part of me wishes I didn’t. I don’t plan to use them.

I thought about my own art, the photography I sell when I remember to stock my online store — mostly mountain landscapes and photos of the night sky. I thought back to a handful of the prints I’ve sold and the effort I had to put in to get the shots. One of my favorite photos involved special permission from the National Park Service and a five-hour backpack up to a remote fire lookout in Washington. Many entailed lonely hours of tending my tripod alone in the freezing cold, tracking the Milky Way as it rotated above a dark horizon like the hand of a clock.

The AI models already have enough training fodder to faithfully recreate photos of one tucked away mountain spot nearby that only local nightsky photographers seem to know about. Three years ago, when I shot photos there, I had to snag a competitive campsite and drive for miles up a potholed forest service road only to wait in the dark for hours. I cooked an expired packet of ramen noodles with a small camp stove to stay warm, tucked the feathers back into my jacket and jumped at everything that made a noise in the dark.

I don’t make a living off of my art. But it still feels like a loss to think that those experiences and the human process they represent — learning how to predict a cluster of ancient stars in the blackness, slipping on wet stones and chipping my hotshoe, keeping extra batteries warm in a down pocket — could be worth less in the future.

Lensa AI, the viral app making ‘magic avatars,’ raises red flags for artists by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch

Micromobility operator Spin is leaving 10 U.S. markets due to a combination of low demand, over-regulation, under-regulation and poor cost structures, according to a company-wide email sent Friday by Philip Reinckens, Spin’s CEO, that was shared with TechCrunch.

Reinckens said the market exits would help Spin cut costs and focus on growing markets that provide “the best financial outlook for the company in 2023.” Reinckens took over as CEO from Ben Bear in May, a couple of months after Berlin-based Tier bought Spin from Ford and officially entered the U.S. market.

According to the email, Spin is leaving Atlanta, Bakersfield, Cleveland, Detroit, Ft. Pierce, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Omaha, Miami and Wichita. All workers affected by market exits were informed by their market leadership team, wrote Reinckens. While Spin has tried to place affected staff in alternate roles where possible, there will undoubtedly be layoffs. Reinckens said Spin is providing severance packages and resume and job searching support for those affected. The CEO didn’t respond in time to TechCrunch’s request for information as to how many workers would be out of work.

Reinckens said the decision wasn’t taken lightly and pointed to factors outside the company’s control.

“We based the decision on the evaluation of current market fundamentals and our ability to overcome key financial challenges,” wrote Reinckens. “Factors such as low consumer demand, prohibitive regulations (i.e. curfews, no ride/parking zones), unregulated competitive landscapes, and/or disadvantageous operating cost structures greatly limit our ability to operate profitably in these markets.”

It has long been Spin’s policy to pursue more exclusive city partnerships. Manifesting that strategy means leaving markets where that isn’t the case. Two months ago, Spin exited Seattle and Canadian markets and laid off 10% of its workforce — mainly white-collar jobs in policy and government and even a handful of executive roles — to solve for redundancies between Spin and Tier and put the former on the path to near-term profitability.

At the start of the year, Spin also decided to leave “all open permit markets,” which resulted in a 25% staff cut.

Spin’s decision also follows competitor Bird’s flight from “several dozen additional, primarily small to mid-sized markets” in the U.S., as well as Germany, Norway and Sweden, citing similar reasons. In a blog post at the time, Bird said it was specifically leaving markets that lack a “robust regulatory framework,” which leads to too much competition and an oversupply of vehicles on crowded streets.

Shared micromobility company Lime hasn’t had major layoffs and market exits since the pandemic. Josh Meltzer, head of government affairs at Lime, told TechCrunch he sees over-regulated markets as a potential culprit for companies now choosing to exit cities.

“For many years, new companies that were interested in quickly building market share and entering new cities would over-promise technological features and operational capabilities that did not reflect reality,” Meltzer told TechCrunch. “These promises, in some cases, led to unrealistic expectations from regulators. While we’re not seeing as much of this recently, it has led to some very highly regulated and therefore hard-to-operate markets, which could be why some companies are now feeling squeezed.”

One such technological feature has been scooter ARAS (advanced rider assistance systems) that are advertised to help detect and correct sidewalk riding and improper parking. Spin has worked with Drover AI to implement a computer vision-based system in certain cities, but neither company has confirmed to TechCrunch which cities and if the program is still scaling today.

Like many tech companies this year, Spin needs to focus on growing markets where it has a chance to turn a profit.

“We are confident that following this hard decision, we are in a position to pursue our strategy to profitability and can continue to build our success in the remaining markets,” Reinckens continued, noting that more on the future outlook of the company would be discussed at the company’s next all-hands on Friday.

TechCrunch reached out to several cities for comment on Spin’s departure, but didn’t receive any responses in time. Reinckens said in his email that Spin is working closely with authorities in remaining markets to “provide full transparency through this process.”

Tier-owned Spin exits 10 US markets amid low demand, unfavorable city regulations by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Are you ready for TC’s Space event!? It’s happeningtomorrowin Los Angeles. Give me a shout-out if you’ll be attending, I’d love to meet you.

In this issue:

ICON’s in-space construction tech ambitions
Astra’s management switch-up
News from ispace, Metaspectral and more

ICON, a construction tech company that’s raised more than $400 million in funding, has landed a new contract from NASA to develop new systems to build on the moon and Mars.

The $57.2 million contract is a continuation of a previous Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) dual-use contract with the U.S. Air Force, which was partly funded by NASA. This award will support the development of what ICON is calling “Project Olympus,” an ambitious plan to build structures on the moon and Mars using in-situ resources.

“To change the space exploration paradigm from ‘there and back again’ to ‘there to stay,’ we’re going to need robust, resilient, and broadly capable systems that can use the local resources of the Moon and other planetary bodies,” ICON CEO Jason Ballard said in a statement. It’s clear that NASA agrees. Indeed, the agency has explicitly stated that one of the goals of its ambitious Artemis lunar program is to establish a long-term human presence on the moon. But as of yet, NASA has established no clear plans on where those astronauts will stay once they get there.

If ICON has its way, that will soon change.

Astra star hire Benjamin Lyon resigns, management team restructured

Space company Astra’s management team is undergoing another shake-up. The company said Friday that chief engineer Benjamin Lyon has resigned after just short of two years in the role. Rather than seek a replacement for that position, Astra promoted four key staff to management positions that will now directly report to CEO Chris Kemp and other C-Suite staff.

Astrahired Lyon in February 2021, after a two-decade-plus career at Apple. The move from consumer electronics to rockets may have been unconventional, but at the time CEO Chris Kemp was adamant that the company sought someone from outside the aerospace industry.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Kemp said it was a “very well-coordinated and collaborative transition.”

“[Lyon] hired a bunch of star players,” he said. “One thing that became pretty clear to all of us was the caliber of his team and the opportunity to elevate them onto our management team would really streamline things.”

Kemp added that Lyon had an opportunity to join a Fortune 500 company in a C-level position, and that at least two of the promotions — Giovanni Greco, who is now leading launch system delivery, and Jonathan Donaldson, who will lead Astra Spacecraft Engine delivery — were green-lighted around a month ago. The other promotions include Doug Kunzman to lead launch and test operations and Bryson Gentile to lead manufacturing.

More news from TC and beyond

Amazon Web Servicessuccessfully ran a software suite on a D-Orbit satellite, a 10-month experiment that could be a game changer for satellite data connections. (CNBC)
AST SpaceMobile’sBlue Walker 3 demonstration satellite is now one of the brightest objects in the night sky. A major astronomical association expressed concern over the satellite’s brightness, and also how it may affect radio astronomy research in the future. (IAU)
China’sShenzhou-15 mission docked with the Tiangong Space Station, where the taikonauts conducted the first-ever crew handover. (Andrew Jones/Twitter)
Phantom Spacelanded four task orders to launch four missions for NASA, under the agency’s Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare launch contract program. The CubeSats will launch no earlier than 2024 per the contract. (NASA)
Rocket Lab is establishing a subsidiary to handle business with American government and defense partners, called Rocket Lab National Security LLC. (TechCrunch)
Sierra Space has hired Tom Marshburn, former NASA astronaut and head of ISS Medical Operations, as chief medical officer for its Human Spaceflight Center and Astronaut Training Academy. (Sierra Space)
South Korea’s leader laid out ambitious plans to reach the moon by 2023 and Mars by 2045, adding that he would double the country’s space development budget in the next five years. (SpaceNews)
SpaceXlaunched its 26th commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station, delivering solar arrays and other critical supplies to astronauts on board. (SpaceX)
SpaceX’sBooster 7 completed a static fire test of 11 Raptor 2 engines from the launch pad in Starbase, Texas. (SpaceX)
SynMax, a satellite data analytics startup, raised $6 million from customers to scale its team and build products for the energy and maritime industries. (SynMax)
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administrationreached its 500th licensed commercial space launch, a mind-boggling number for an industry that still feels oh-so-nascent. (FAA)
The U.S. Federal Communications Commissionhas authorized SpaceX to launch and operate up to 7,500 next-gen Starlink satellites, a fraction of the 30,000 SpaceX proposed in its application. (Endgadget)

We’re offering Max Q subscribers free tickets to TechCrunch’s in-person space event. Find out more about the event and get your free ticket by clicking here.

Max Q is brought to you by me, Aria Alamalhodaei. If you enjoy reading Max Q, consider forwarding it to a friend.

Max Q: Building on the moon and Mars by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch