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Often, first-time ecommerce entrepreneurs don’t know what they need to build an effective funnel and cart experience for their platforms. It’s not their fault; the problem’s challenging. According to one source, the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is 69.57%. That means roughly seven out of 10 shoppers won’t complete their transaction, leading to an estimated $18 billion in segment-wide lost sales revenue each year.

Startup founder Josh Bartlett several years ago proposed a solution in ThriveCart, a toolkit small- and medium-sized businesses can use to build ecommerce carts and funnels. ThriveCart quickly caught on with businesses, it seems, growing to tens of thousands of customers and more than $1 billion in sales processed annually.

The rapid growth piqued investors’ interest. ThriveCart today announced that it raised $35 million in a funding round led by LTV SaaS Growth Fund, the company’s first public outside investment. Kevin McKeand, who was recently named the company’s CEO, said the fresh cash will be put toward further developing ThriveCart’s platform and tripling the size of the company’s workforce.

“The pandemic prompted many people to start their own digital businesses. The recent slowdown in tech has not been seen among small businesses and entrepreneurs, the core users of ThriveCart’s tech,” McKeand told TechCrunch in an email interview.

With ThriveCart, businesses can create upsell funnels, bump offers (i.e. offers for other services shown during checkout), trials and “pay what you want,” split payments, monthly subscriptions and more. The platform provides codes for embeddable carts that can be added to existing websites, as well as backend dashboards that can be connected to tools like third-party fulfillment services.

ThriveCart can calculate sales tax rates based on location and product type, tracking totals with reports. It also allows for automation rules, for example automatically following up with visitors who abandon a cart, modifying affiliate commissions based on refund rate and sending notifications to let customers known when payments are due.

“ThriveCart’s solution does the heavy lifting for site engagement, funnel and checkout experiences, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on developing great ideas,” McKeand said. “Our affiliate partners are talking with veteran and new entrepreneurs every day, guiding them on the best practices for launching digital-first businesses and acting as ambassadors for ThriveCart’s solutions.”

ThriveCart presumably collects a fair amount of personal customer data to accomplish what it does. TechCrunch asked McKeand about the company’s data usage policy, but somewhat discouragingly, he declined to answer.

ThriveCart’s competitors include Gum Road and SamCart on the cart and checkout side. Other rivals are Snipcart, which web building platform Duda acquired in September 2021. and Carrot, a plug-in that automatically categorizes what shoppers add to their carts.

While McKeand declined to reveal ThriveCart’s revenue figures, he said that he’s pleased with the company’s current growth trajectory and believes ThriveCart is “poised for growth” as a result of the “rise of the digital entrepreneur.”

In an emailed statement, LTV SaaS Growth Fund VP of investments Marina Vizdoaga added: “ThriveCart is one of the most exciting ecommerce investment opportunities we have seen in some time that will deliver a strong growth profile with attractive economics. Loyalty among their affiliate network and their end customers is unrivaled. We firmly believe in the company’s growth trajectory, and we are already seeing how the infusion of capital allows them to think and plan big with respect to the product roadmap, market penetration and expansion and strategic alliances. The popularity of the creator economy made this a perfect time to invest in a cart and funnel solution for digital products.”

ThriveCart, which sells tools to build ecommerce carts, raises $35M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Autonomous trucking startup Waabi has bagged Volvo Group Venture Capital AB, the automaker’s VC arm, as a strategic investor. The companies aren’t disclosing the amount invested, nor many other details about the deal, but having Volvo on board will both provide Waabi access to Volvo’s extensive industry network and help the startup explore opportunities for large-scale commercialization.

“We’ve been extremely selective in terms of who we bring on board as an investor, and this is the right time for Waabi to bring on a strategic OEM,” Waabi’s CEO and founder, Raquel Urtasun, told TechCrunch.

The partnership also symbolizes Volvo’s own commitment to self-driving trucking. Volvo Group has been exploring autonomous mobility solutions for years. As early as 2017, Volvo had developed an autonomous concept truck that would be used for hub-to-hub transportation of goods — a model that Waabi is also pursuing. In 2019, the automaker unveiled Vera, its autonomous, electric “truck” that looks more like a sports car with a trailer placed on top. Last we heard, the Vera was being used in Sweden to move goods packed in cargo trailers from a logistics center to a port terminal, in partnership with logistics company DFDS. Volvo didn’t respond in time to provide an update.

More recently, Volvo teamed up with autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation to jointly develop autonomous semi-trucks, with the Aurora Driver technology stack integrated into the trucks, for the North American market.

“We represent for Volvo a strengthening commitment to self-driving trucking, as well as their understanding that there is next-generation technology, and they want to be the leader of next generation technology,” said Urtasun, nodding to Waabi’s AI-first and simulation-heavy approach to autonomy. “They want to be part of that story.”

The investment, which is an extension to Waabi’s $83.5 million Series A that was led by Khosla Ventures, comes a few months after the startup unveiled its first generation of trucks that are purpose-built for OEM integration. That means that rather than adding on cameras, lidar and other sensors to an already built truck, Waabi’s Driver — which includes software, sensors and compute power — is manufactured directly into the vehicle from the assembly line. The result to an onlooker is a smoother vehicle exterior — no chunky after-market sensor ornamentation — that’s easier to clean and maintain.

“We build deep partnerships with OEMs because we don’t believe in after market installations,” said Urtasun. “So for us, OEM partnerships are the most important partnerships.”

Urtasun was mum about whether Volvo will indeed be a future manufacturing partner — although we’d guess that Volvo is — but she did say to stay tuned for news to come in the next few months on that front.

Waabi has told TechCrunch that its simulator, in addition to testing, training and teaching Waabi’s self-driving software, has also helped the company design its next-gen truck by testing different sensor placement on a digital twin of the vehicle. By building out and testing the truck in simulation, Waabi avoided potentially years of building and testing real world vehicles, said Urtasun.

Aside from the ability to speed up design and production at a fraction of the cost, Waabi’s simulator became a selling point for Volvo because of its safety applications, said Urtasun.

“When you say Volvo, what comes to mind for everybody is a symbol of safety, and that’s where we are super aligned in terms of our very differentiated approach to safety that Waabi is providing,” said Urtasun. “Waabi is simulation-centric, instead of deploying large test fleets, and that’s one of the things that Volvo really highlights in terms of their investment.”

Urtasun said that OEM partners have also been excited by Waabi’s ability to “scale from day one” due to its simulator.

“This is an important stepping stone on our path,” said Urtasun. “We are in a very unique position in terms of the competitive landscape because we have a multi-year runway and we have a very lean approach, which means we can go super fast with a fraction of the cost and people.”

Waabi was founded in 2021 and already the company claims to have the most advanced simulator in the industry and a truck that looks like a next-generation truck for most other companies operating today.

“What really defines Waabi is that we saw the super capital intensive approach that is very slow, and instead we said we need to build different technology so we can get there faster and in a much more scalable fashion,” said Urtasun.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether Waabi’s promises of fast, cheap scaling will actually pan out. The company has test vehicles on the ground, but has yet to announce any commercial pilots with OEM or shipping partners.

Self-driving truck startup Waabi brings on Volvo VC as strategic investor by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

The starry-eyed founder story usually goes something like this: Start an earthbound company, make lots of money, launch a rocket company to go to Mars.

If that’s the stereotypical narrative, then Chris Graves has it all backward.

Graves started with the Red Planet, helping to develop a key instrument for NASA’s Perseverance rover that’s currently roaming the Jezero crater. That instrument inspired him to invent a novel battery technology that today forms the foundation of his startup, Noon Energy.

On Mars, the MOXIE instrument is intended to test the viability of making rocket-ready oxygen on Mars to enable return trips to Earth, saving mass on the outbound leg of the trip. The device sucks in carbon dioxide and strips off an oxygen atom, which it stores on board. The remaining carbon monoxide is exhausted into the thin Martian atmosphere.

Here on Earth, Noon’s carbon-oxygen battery is targeted at larger-scale applications to help bridge intermittencies that naturally occur with wind and solar. It runs a modified version of the same chemical reaction as MOXIE, though the goal is to store electricity rather than produce oxygen.

Noon Energy brings Mars tech down to Earth with carbon-oxygen battery system by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

Good Meat announced today it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency to use serum-free media for the production of its cultivated meat. The brand, which is the cultivated meat division of U.S.-based food startup Eat Just, says it is the only cultivated meat producer in the world with the ability to sell to consumers. Its lab-grown chicken is currently available in Singapore, where Eat Just gained regulatory approval to sell its lab-grown chicken meat in 2020.

“Today’s news is another historic milestone for us and for the entire industry as it brings us all closer to a more scalable and sustainable production of real meat without slaughter,” said Eat Just head of communications Andrew Noyes. “Our R&D team worked diligently to replace serum with other nutrients that provide the same functionality and their hard work over several years paid off.”

The latest approval from the SFA means Good Meat will be able to sell chicken meat cultivated without using animal serums. Serums like fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is made from the blood of fetuses extracted from cows during the slaughter process, are usually needed for cells from a living animal to duplicate. Finding way to produce cultivated meat without animal serums is one of the key challenges alternative protein startups are trying to solve.

Good Meat is currently working on its Singapore production facility, which it says will house the largest bioreactor (a 6,000-liter vessel built with ABEC) in the cultivated meat industry. Once it opens next year, the facility will be capable of using the serum-free production process and producing tens of thousands of pounds of meat.

Eat Just’s backers include the Qatar Investment Authority (the sovereign wealth fund of the state of Qatar), Vulcan Capital and C2 Capital Partners, which has Alibaba as its anchor investor.

The Singaporean government has supported alternative protein startups as the island nation seeks to make its food industry more self-sustaining. In a statement, Singapore Economic Development Board executive vice president Damian Chan said, “Good Meat is a key member of our growing ecosystem of more than 70 alternative protein companies and we look forward to their continued contributions in driving agrifood innovation from Singapore for the region and beyond.”

Good Meat approved to sell serum-free cultivated meat in Singapore by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Barely a year after Tanzania capped the commissions that e-hailing firms like Uber and Bolt charge their partners at 15%, the authority in charge has backtracked on the order, taking away drivers’ prospects of increased earnings.

The fee was increased to 25% effective last Sunday after the Land and Transport Regulatory Authority (Latra) issued a notice on December 30, which superseded the initial direction of March last year. Latra sets and approves fares for all operators including those in the ride-hailing sector.

Uber and its main rival in Europe and Africa, Bolt, halted some of their services in April last year claiming that reducing the commission on partners would dent their earnings. However, the reduced fee meant increased incomes for drivers, who have in the past, like their counterparts in Kenya, protested poor earnings from the apps.

Uber resumes full operations in Tanzania

Uber, which halted UberX, UberXL and UberSave services in April, kicked off efforts to resume full operations Monday, TechCrunch has learnt, joining Bolt whose services were restored in October. Uber charged a 25% commission while Bolt charged 20%. Their withdrawal left the market to homegrown brands like Little, which charges a 15% commission, and Ping.

“We made the difficult decision to pause our operations in Tanzania because the regulatory changes that were introduced created an environment that was challenging for our business to operate under. We have, since the pause, maintained our engagements with LATRA and other regulatory bodies in Tanzania as a show of our commitment to resume full operations in the market, providing drivers with an avenue to earn and riders, an enhanced mobility option,” said Uber’s East and West Africa head of communications, said Lorraine Onduru.

“We welcome the new pricing order issued by the Land and Transport Regulatory Authority which we believe will significantly contribute to the growth and development of the ride-hailing industry in Tanzania,” said Onduru.

The resumption of the e-hailing services comes after stakeholders, including representatives ofUber and Bolt lobbied for the rates to be reviewed; leading Tanzania to announce last September that a middle ground had been found and the firms would resume operations.

“Our efforts and engagements were aimed at ensuring an enabling regulatory environment for mobility services in Tanzania among drivers, vehicle owners, passengers and ride-hailing operators. The overall objective was to develop the nascent ride-hailing sector in the market,” said a Bolt spokesperson, adding that the company reinstated all its services on October 13, 2022.

Bolt said that following the decision by LATRA, it will soon introduce some changes on passenger fare pricing.

Aside from Tanzania, Kenya also capped commission at 18% last year, after new regulations came into force. Efforts by ride-hailing operators, to have new regulations scraped, have been unsuccessful so far.

Uber, Bolt drivers hope for increased earnings foiled as Tanzania reinstates 25% commission by Annie Njanja originally published on TechCrunch

Meet Kate, a French company that wants to create a tiny car that you can use for your daily commute and various errands. In addition to CEO Matthias Goldenberg and CTO Pierre Escrieut, Kate is also co-founded by Thibaud Elzière, the serial entrepreneur behind Hexa, the startup studio formerly known as eFounders.

While Kate is a car manufacturer at heart, it doesn’t want to produce big SUVs with sophisticated entertainment systems. The company wants to change mobility by producing the most minimalistic electric car possible.

Instead of starting with the vehicle, Kate is starting with the use case. “We want to sell this to people who really need a vehicle, people who live on the outskirts, in mid-sized cities or even in the countryside,” Kate CEO Matthias Goldenberg told me.

In Europe, people moving from A to B use a large vehicle — like a regular car — for 84% of their trips. It represents 11% of the CO2 emissions. And yet, 98% of trips are shorter than 80 kilometers (that’s 50 miles).

That’s why it doesn’t make sense to use a car with extremely comfy seats and long-range batteries if you’re just dropping your kid at school and then heading to the office in the small city nearby. You can always rent a car for your next vacation.

But creating a new car manufacturer from scratch isn’t that easy. That’s why Kate isn’t exactly a “new company”. Thibaud Elzière invested in a French company called NOSMOKE that produces electric vehicles inspired by th Mini Moke.

Kate then straight up acquired NOSMOKE to reuse some of the company’s work on a new type of vehicle. Instead of producing a leisure car that you would park next to your beach house, Kate wants to create a mass-market vehicle.

This is what the Kate Original looks like:

On paper, Kate’s upcoming vehicle, the K1, will be an L7e vehicle — a heavy quadricycle. There will be four seats and it will reach a top speed of 90km/h (56mph). You will be able to drive it with a B1 driving license in France, which you can get at the age of 16 or later.

“With the K1, we want to have a vehicle that sits right in the no-go zone between the Citroën Ami that costs €8,000 and the Renault Zoe that costs around €25,000 to €30,000,” Goldenberg said.

Kate is targeting an entry price at around €15,000 with a battery range of 200 kilometers (124 miles). Of course, there will be models with better engines and batteries that will cost more than that.

When it comes to design, Kate wants to manufacture a car that is as modular and durable as possible. There will be some connectivity components so that the company can identify issues remotely.

But the idea is that you should be able to keep your Kate K1 for years and years. There will be hardware and software updates, but the car should remain usable for a long time even if you don’t change any component. For instance, Kate has opted for LFP batteries (with lithium, iron and phosphate) so that it offers a considerably longer cycle life.

When it comes to the entertainment system, there will be some basic software features in the car. You will be able to play some music or get some directions. But if you want better driving directions or if you want to listen to your own podcasts, you will have to rely on your smartphone.

“The smartphone has to be at the center of the experience but you should also be able to drive the car if you’re out of battery,” Goldenberg said.

Last year, NOSMOKE/Kate produced nearly 200 vehicles. This year, the company is updating NOSMOKE’s car and calling it the Kate Original. “Our goal is that we should produce four times more vehicles every year. In 5 years, we will jump from 200 vehicles per year to 200 vehicles per day,” Goldenberg said.

Kate wants to properly introduce the K1 later this year and start selling it in 2024. In other words, the company has ambitious goals and is targeting an unproven market. But given the success of the Citroën Ami in France with wealthy high schoolers in the French countryside, there could be an even bigger opportunity with tiny cars for adults.

Kate is a new car maker focused on micro-cars for everyday use by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

MENA-based buy now, pay later startup Tabby has raised $58 million, led by Sequoia Capital India and STV, at a valuation of $660 million. The investors co-led the fintech’s Series B extension round last June.

PayPal Ventures, the global corporate venture arm of PayPal, is one of the participating investors (this marks its first investment in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) but second in the MENA region after Egyptian fintech Paymob). Other investors in Tabby’s new financing round include Mubadala Investment Capital, Arbor Ventures and Endeavor Catalyst.

According to a statement shared by the Dubai-based company, the funding will be used to expand Tabby’s product line into a plethora of consumer financial services and support the company’s growing operations that now include Egypt. The fintech has raised more than $410 million in equity and debt since its 2019 launch.

Until last September, Tabby, which allows users to shop with flexible payments online and in-store from global brands, including H&M, Adidas, IKEA, noon and Bloomingdale’s, was active in Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait. Co-founder and CEO Hosam Arab, in a TechCrunch interview last June, called Egypt an attractive market with underbanked consumers looking for ways to spend online outside what is available to them easily, which is cash.

“The Egyptian consumer right now is quite used to buying in installments, which usually come with added costs in the form of interest or additional fees. So, coming in with an entirely cost-free product for the customer has been quite a differentiator, and we’ve seen a lot of strong demand there,” Arab said, providing an update on how the expansion has fared. “Having said that, the Egyptian market and the economy as a whole is in a fairly difficult spot at the moment with a constant devaluation of their currency. And so, there are clear challenges to this market, at least in short to medium term, outside of just pure consumer demands.”

Consumer demands differ across regions and noting the nuances behind each market is adequate for survival as a fintech. In developed countries where credit is traditionally accessed via credit cards, BNPL can be seen as a nice-to-have, mainly due to its installment aspect. However, for developing markets where credit penetration is low or having a credit history is asking for too much, BNPL has a more robust use case. It’s why Arab believes his startup is somewhat insulated by the troubles affecting Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna, global private and public BNPL players that have become worryingly loss-making and thus, taken hits to their valuation.

“I would say there have been pullbacks from a demand perspective. And just as important is the pending credit crunch coming to some of these more developed markets bringing higher credit risk, which might end up hitting the bottom line of these companies,” said the CEO, making a case for Tabby’s growth in a cooling BNPL space.

“Now, the economy’s structure is different for some of the markets we [Tabby] are in today. Credit penetration in the MENA region is significantly lower than in other developed markets. From a credit risk perspective, consumers are not overstretched as they don’t have two or three credit cards. So from a demand perspective, there’s a real gap and opportunity that we are filling.”

Despite the valuation crunches and muted demand for growth companies globally, Tabby has managed to double its valuation from 18 months ago, even though it raised less capital in a subsequent round; as such, it is currently one of the most valued startups in the MENA region. Arab said that commanding this present valuation conveys Tabby’s product relevance and ability to build a sustainable business in a reasonably challenging space, including upstarts such as Saudi-based Tamara and Egypt’s Sympl and Khazna.

The relevance Arab speaks of can be seen in Tabby’s new numbers. Last March, for instance, the buy now, pay later upstart had a little over 1 million active users who shopped with more than 3,000 brands yearly. Now, Tabby says more than 3 million users shop from 10,000+ brands, including nine out of MENA’s 10 largest retail groups.

The fintech company has also issued more than 150,000 Tabby Cards only six months after launching its cards program, with in-store sales now making up over 10% of the company’s volumes. The company stated that its revenues have increased 5x over the past year.

GC Ravishankar, the managing director at Sequoia Capital India, speaking on the investment, said Tabby has the opportunity “to offer several innovative products to its consumers and improve access while creating more affordability.” About this, CEO Arab explained that Tabby recently launched a product for everyday purchases, such as groceries and food, and will allow customers that don’t have access to credit cards to make purchases and pay at the end of the month.

“There are clear gaps in the market when we look at offering consumers better financial services and products. An area that we see great opportunity in is allowing our customers to use us for their day-to-day purchases,” noted the chief executive. “We believe this a great opportunity to provide deeper engagement with our customers as they start to transact more frequently with us.”

Tabby raises $58M at $660M valuation as PayPal Ventures makes first investment in the GCC by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

The process used by millions of agents and thousands of property portals globally to reach buyers and sellers on digital channels is highly fragmented. And it’s evident that proptech, unlike other industries, has lagged in utilizing social media to make sales.

South African startup Flow wants to change how real estate agencies, developers and agents interact with their end customers. With its APIs, Flow connects to the websites of estate agencies and property developers and automates advertising for them on social media channels like Instagram and Facebook. The proptech marketing platform is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in pre-Series A funding.

The proptech intends to use the funding to include other social media platforms such as TikTok and LinkedIn and other advertising channels like out-of-home billboards. The investment will see co-founders and co-CEOs Gil Sperling and Daniel Levy drive the business’s B2B growth strategy and integrate Flow’s social media–driven real estate marketing platform into existing international property portals and CRM platforms.

Sperling and Levy founded Flow in 2017 as an app that rewards tenants for early rent payments. However, before Flow, both founders previously built an adtech and performance marketing company, Popimedia, which was the largest buyer of Facebook media inventory in Africa for some of the world’s biggest brands. While they sold the business to global communications group Publicis in 2016, it was some of the knowledge gained while running Popimedia that they drew on to pivot Flow into its current business model four years later.

“With our first adtech business, we never dealt with real estate or property as we could never really service them in this country [South Africa]. And the biggest problem was that as much as real estate is the biggest asset class in the world and very valuable vertical, it is the least innovated around because it’s just highly fragmented,” Sperling told TechCrunch on a call.

“When buying and selling homes, if you take South Africa, for example, 40,000 agents are marketing 300,000 listings at any time. Every agent is essentially a little small business because they’re commissioners, and there’s no way that they can afford to each have a marketing, data science department, and design department like big businesses can, and that is one reason why we couldn’t conduct ads or performance marketing for many of them.”

With Flow, the founders want real estate agencies and property developers they couldn’t reach with their former startup to connect with customers on digital channels. The proptech startup automates the marketing for real estate agents for developers and works hand-in-hand with real estate websites such as Property24 and Private Property to pull listings and automatically create ads on Facebook, Instagram and other digital channels.

According to Flow, its proptech marketing platform improves revenue for agents and experiences for property buyers and sellers. On the other hand, Levy points out that the startup makes money when these agents use its SaaS platform and via a percentage cut from their marketing spend. He added that revenue has been growing 20% month-on-month within the past year.

“Our route to market, for the most bit, has been going door-to-door from franchisor to franchisee to different offices within that group. And over the last couple of months, we’ve identified the enterprise channel, as we call it, which is more associated with strapping on our technology to portals,” stated the co-CEO. “So our next phase of traction and growth will come from those relationships, which are significant in our world. And that’s why we’ve just gone through this capital raise to experiment with that essentially.”

Flow currently has over 300+ clients using its platform — a client being a real estate agency or developer where each office has about 15 to 20 smaller agents. So more broadly, Flow is used by nearly 6,000 agents across South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mauritius and Australia. It is in talks with partners, mainly property portals and CRM platforms, to expand into Europe (France, Germany, Belgium and the U.K.) where it’ll face stiffer competition — which the co-founders hope Flow will edge out with its technology and attention to design — but a more extensive market base.

Futuregrowth Asset Management led Flow’s pre-Series A round with $2 million. Endeavor Harvest Fund and serial entrepreneur Steven Heilbron participated, while existing investors Kalon Venture Partners, Vunani Fintech Fund and Buffet Investments also doubled down.

“We’ve keenly followed Flow’s progress in South Africa and Australia and integration into the B2B side of the global property industry as the next natural step in the company’s evolution,” says Futuregrowth Asset Management head of Private Equity and Venture Capital, Amrish Narrandes, on the investment. “We share Daniel and Gil’s vision to bring the property industry into the 21st century and know they have the expertise and experience to make it happen — and we’re pleased to be able to be part of a South African company taking bold steps that will bring much-needed change to an essential global industry.”

South Africa’s Flow gets funding to automate social media advertising for real estate agencies by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman sat down for a wide-ranging interview with this editor late last week, answering questions about some of his most ambitious personal investments, as well as about the future of OpenAI.

There was much to discuss. The now eight-year-old outfit has dominated the national conversation in the two months since it released ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers questions like a person. OpenAI’s products haven’t just astonished users; the company is reportedly in talks to oversee the sale of existing shares to new investors at a $29 billion valuation despite its comparatively nominal revenue.

Altman declined to talk about the company’s current business dealings, firing a bit of a warning shot when asked a related question during our sit-down.

He did reveal a bit about the company’s plans going forward, however. For one thing, in addition to ChatGPT and the outfit’s popular digital art generator, DALL-E, Altman confirmed that a video model is also coming, though he said that he “wouldn’t want to make a competent prediction about when,” adding that “it could be pretty soon; it’s a legitimate research project. It could take a while.”

Altman made clear that OpenAI’s evolving partnership with Microsoft — which first invested in OpenA in 2019 and earlier today confirmed it plans to incorporate AI tools like ChatGPT into all of its products — is not an exclusive pact.

Further, Altman confirmed that OpenAI can build its own software products and services, in addition to licensing its technology to other companies. That’s notable to industry watchers who’ve wondered whether OpenAI might one day compete directly with Google via its own search engine. (Asked about this scenario, Altman said: “Whenever someone talks about a technology being the end of some other giant company, it’s usually wrong. People forget they get to make a counter move here, and they’re pretty smart, pretty competent.”)

As for when OpenAI plans to release the fourth version of the GPT, the sophisticated language model off which ChatGPT is based, Altman would only say that the hotly anticipated product will “come out at some point when we are confident that we can [release] it safely and responsibly.” He also tried to temper expectations regarding GPT-4, saying that “we don’t have an actual AGI,” meaning artificial general intelligence, or a technology with its own emergent intelligence, versus OpenAI’S current deep learning models that solve problems and identify patterns through trial and error.

“I think [AGI] is sort of what is expected of us” and GPT-4 is “going to disappoint” people with that expectation, he said.

In the meantime, asked about when Altman expects to see artificial general intelligence, he posited that it’s closer than one might imagine but also that the shift to “AGI” will not be as abrupt as some expect. “The closer we get [to AGI], the harder time I have answering because I think that it’s going to be much blurrier and much more of a gradual transition than people think,” he said.

Naturally, before we wrapped things up, we spent time talking about safety, including whether society has enough guardrails in place for the technology that OpenAI has already released into the world. Plenty of critics believe we do not, including worried educators who are increasingly blocking access to ChatGPT owing to fears that students will use it to cheat. (Google, very notably, has reportedly been reluctant to release its own AI chatbot, LaMDA over concerns about its “reputational risk.)

Altman said here that OpenAI does have “an internal process where we kind of try to break things and study impacts. We use external auditors. We have external red teamers. We work with other labs and have safety organizations look at stuff.”

At the same time, he said, the tech is coming — from OpenAI and elsewhere — and people need to start figuring out how to live with it, he suggested. “There are societal changes that ChatGPT is going to cause or is causing. A big one going on now is about its impact on education and academic integrity, all of that.” Still, he argued, “starting these [product releases] now [makes sense], where the stakes are still relatively low, rather than just put out what the whole industry will have in a few years with no time for society to update.”

In fact, educators — and perhaps parents, too — should understand there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. While Altman said that OpenAI and other AI outfits “will experiment” with watermarking technologies and other verification techniques to help assess whether students are trying to pass off AI-generated copy as their own, he also hinted that focusing too much on this particular scenario is futile.

“There may be ways we can help teachers be a bit more likely to detect output of a GPT-like system, but honestly, a determined person is going to get around them, and I don’t think it’ll be something society can or should rely on long term.”

It won’t be the first time that people have successfully adjusted to major shifts, he added. Observing that calculators “changed what we test for in math classes” and Google rendered the need to memorize facts far less important, Altman said that deep learning models represent “a more extreme version” of both developments. But he argued the “benefits are more extreme as well. We hear from teachers who are understandably very nervous about the impact of this on homework. We also hear a lot from teachers who are like, ‘Wow, this is an unbelievable personal tutor for each kid.’”

For the full conversation about OpenAI and Altman’s evolving views on the commodification of AI, regulations, and why AI is going in “exactly the opposite direction” that many imagined it would five to seven years ago, it’s worth checking out the clip below.

You’ll also hear Altman address best- and worst-case scenarios when it comes to the promise and perils of AI. The short version? “The good case is just so unbelievably good that you sound like a really crazy person to start talking about it,” he’d said. “And the bad case — and I think this is important to say — is, like, lights out for all of us.”

That Microsoft deal isn’t exclusive, video is coming, and more from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

Gogoro, the Taiwanese paladin for two-wheeler battery swapping, is working with the Indian state of Maharashtra to establish state-wide battery charging and swapping infrastructure. The initiative will be driven by a “50-50” partnership between Gogoro and Belrise Industries, an automotive systems manufacturer based in India, that will form an infrastructure company to own the batteries and swapping stations in Maharashtra, according to Gogoro’s CEO and co-founder Horace Luke.

Additional infrastructure-related investors will participate down the line in the joint venture, which aims to invest up to $2.5 billion over eight years in Maharashtra, according to a non-binding MOU signed by the state, Gogoro and Belrise at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“Like most infrastructure deployments, the partnership company will raise funding for the smart battery swapping buildout,” Luke told TechCrunch in response to a question on whether Gogoro would use its free cash flow to fund the initiative.

Additionally, Gogoro will also form an India-based company that will run the battery swapping network, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Per the MOU, Gogoro and Belrise will start installing swapping stations in the top 10 cities of Maharashtra, starting with Mumbai in the next few months, and expand beyond that in the future.

Maharashtra is one of India’s largest commercial and industrial centers. As a result, the state has some of the best installed electricity generation capacity in India, with around a quarter of its power mix coming from wind and solar capacity. Gogoro says Maharashtra has an energy surplus, making it a good launch point for a connected network.

The joint venture is one of the latest of such initiatives to be announced in Maharashtra. In September, Mumbai-based battery swapping startup VoltUp partnered with Adani Electricity and Hero Electric to set up 500 electric mobility stations in Mumbai over the next two years. Last June, Sun Mobility, a provider of energy infrastructure and services for EVs, announced the launch of its own battery-swapping network for EVs in Mumbai in collaboration with Amazon India. Sun plans to deploy more than 2,000 battery swapping stations across the region by 2025.

Gogoro didn’t disclose how many swapping stations it aims to build over the next eight years, but Luke said based on the population of Maharashtra (about 120 million), the network there will be about four times the size of Gogoro’s network in Taiwan. To date, Gogoro has 12,200 battery swapping stations in Taiwan, with more than 1.1 million smart batteries in circulation throughout its network. We can therefore infer that Gogoro plans to build somewhere in the ballpark of 50,000 stations in the region.

Taiwan’s total build-out has cost Gogoro $640 million over the last seven years, a spokesperson told TechCrunch, so $2.5 billion will bring about unprecedented scale.

“Battery swapping is a new category creation and we will build out the network infrastructure to induce demand,” said Luke.

A big part of Gogoro’s formula for inducing demand is to provide vehicles that are built with its own battery swapping technology. In Taiwan, Gogoro’s battery swapping network powered 90% of all electric scooters in 2023, including five out of the top six electric vehicle makers. Gogoro won’t be bringing its own brand of scooters to India, but the company is working with Hero MotoCorp, a popular two-wheeled vehicle maker in India, to launch electric two-wheelers based on Gogoro’s technology under the Hero brand.

That partnership was announced two years ago, but no vehicles have shipped yet. Which makes sense for Gogoro’s business model. The company wants people to use its swapping stations, so installing the publicly available swapping infrastructure before widespread rollout of electric two-wheelers is a signal that Gogoro is marking its territory.

Gogoro, Belrise JV to spend $2.5B on battery swapping network in Indian state by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch