Review: The 2023 Mac Mini is a serious contender with the M2 Pro

Apple’s latest silicon innovations shine in the Mac Mini. The tiny desktop computer is the latest Apple computer fitted with the M2 chipset. For $599, buyers can opt for the M2 or spend $1299 for the impressive M2 Pro, which features unique benefits.

For the last several days, my M1 Mac Mini sat on the sidelines while the new Mac Mini used the court. This machine soars. As expected, the new SoC lets the machine easily jump through applications and tasks. That said, the M1 Mac Mini released in 2020 has always worked fine. I’ve used one since launch and still find it adequate. It’s not new-phone fast anymore, though. With this M2 Pro, I feel like an F1 driver with a new set of tires and a tank full of gas. I’m ready to go for another hundred laps.

I threw everything in my daily rotation at the M2 Pro, and it never blinked. It zoomed through media encoding and heavy photo editing. It conquered benchmarks and put up with Chrome’s never-ending quest for system memory. It’s been a joy to use.

The Mac Mini has long been Apple’s most affordable computer. But, occasionally, it was left out of Intel CPU updates over the years, making the computer look unloved and forgotten. Now that Apple is making its chips, the Mac Mini is back in rotation. In 2020, the Mac Mini helped debut the M1 chip. Now in 2023, the Mac Mini, alongside the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro is debuting the M2 Pro.

Buyers have a couple of options with the M2 Mac Mini. For $599, they can select the base model that features the M2 CPU, 8GB of memory, and 256GB of storage. Spend $799 to upgrade the SSD to 512GB. The M2 Pro is available for $1,299, and for that price, buyers get 16GB of memory, and 512GB of SSD storage. Spend more to upgrade the number of cores in the CPU, and get more system memory and up to 8TB of local storage.

The differences between the M2 and M2 Pro are minor but consequential. The M2 Pro offers significant advantages for some uses. The M2 Pro has double the amount of transistors over the M2 and has twice the memory bandwidth. The M2 has an 8-core CPU with a 10-core GPU. The M2 Pro has up to a 12-core CPU and up to a 19-core GPU. The M2 Pro also has an additional Thunderbolt controller, allowing it to be equipped with 4 Thunderbolt ports instead of the two on the standard M2 Mac Mini. This also allows the M2 Pro Mac Mini to support up-to-three monitors instead of the two from the standard M2.

The M2 Pro in my tester set incredible benchmarks. For example, in Geekbench 5, the multi-core benchmark clocked in at 14,991. That’s several clicks over the performance of the M1 Max in the Mac Studio (12,336) and Intel Xeon W-3245 from late 2019 (14,674). The single-core benchmark was even more telling: the M2 Pro scored 1,932, topping the previous record of 1,900 set by the 13-inch M2-powered MacBook Pro. The M1 Mac Mini scored 1,715.

Benchmarks only tell part of the story.

Let’s look at the placing of the $2,099 M2 Pro against the stock $1,999 Studio M1 Max. Think of the Studio line like super Mac Minis. The Mac Studio with the M1 Pro and Max was released nearly a year ago, in the Winter of 2022. Apple will likely refresh it eventually, but as it sits, it offers distinct advantages over the new M2 Pro Mac Mini even though the benchmarks place the Studio behind the newer computers. The difference comes down to the beefy M1 Max. The Max designation signals the chip has additional CPU cores, video decoding pipelines, and Thunderbolt controllers. The $1,999 Studio also ships with 32GB of RAM, wherein it’s an additional $199 surcharge in the Mac Mini. The Mac Studio has a front-facing SD card slot, which I’d love to have on the Mac Mini.

Apple is keen to point out that the Mac Mini can play video games. But this isn’t a gaming computer. For the Mac Mini to perform well as a gaming computer, the games must use Metal, which means it’s coded directly for Mac OS. Unfortunately, there are very few games on the market in this format. Apple provided me with a copy of Resident Evil Village, and the graphics are the best I’ve ever seen on a Mac. They look great, and the game is smooth and responsive, but I highly doubt anyone is shopping for a Mac Mini with the primary purpose of playing games.

Gaming has never been a Mac selling point. Unfortunately, the M2 doesn’t change that, though it’s lovely to see Apple’s strides in this area.

The M2 chip brings the Mac Mini into a new world of performance. The benchmarks show a computer capable of keeping up with the fastest computers Apple has ever made — and now the performance is available at relatively low prices.

But do you need the M2 Pro? That’s my lingering question. The M1 chips can handle most daily tasks, and the M2 is built from the same secret sauce. So would I find the M2 Pro a must-have upgrade if it was my money? I don’t think so.

I doubt most users would see a difference between an M2 and M2 Pro outside of resource-heavy media editing software. The standard M2 is suited ideally for browsing the Internet and using Apple’s built-in apps. And the standard M2 would still be an impressive upgrade over existing systems. The $599 M2 Mac Mini, even with its limited local storage, seems like a killer deal.

With the M2 and M2, the Mac Mini sits among the most powerful computers Apple offers at any price point. And let’s remember one of the Mac Mini’s main selling points: it’s mini. The Mac Min is a tiny package that offers a lot of flexibility. Bundle it with one of Apple’s Studio Displays for a great iMac alternative, or use it with an inexpensive monitor for a low-cost workstation. As always, the Mac Mini is a value proposition, and it’s never looked better than it does now with the M2 and M2 Pro.

Review: The 2023 Mac Mini is a serious contender with the M2 Pro by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

Microsoft invests billions more dollars in OpenAI, extends partnership

Microsoft today announced that it’s extending its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind art- and text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and GPT-3, with a “multi-year, multi-billion-dollar” investment. OpenAI says the infusion of new capital — the exact amount of which wasn’t disclosed — will be used to continue its research and “develop AI that is increasingly safe, useful and powerful.”

OpenAI will remain a capped-profit company as a part of the deal. Under the model, backers’ returns are limited to 100 times their investment — or possibly less in the future.

In a blog post, Microsoft said that it will increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s AI research and deploy OpenAI’s AI systems across its consumer and enterprise products while “introducing new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology.” The tech giant’s Azure cloud platform will continue to be OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, powering all of the startup’s workloads across research, products and API services.

“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. “In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”

Sources previously reported that Microsoft was looking to net a 49% stake in OpenAI, valuing the company at around $29 billion. Under the terms of one rumored arrangement detailed by Semafor, Microsoft would receive three-quarters of OpenAI’s profits until it recovers its investment, with additional investors taking 49% and OpenAI retaining the remaining 2% in equity.

“The past three years of our partnership have been great,”OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a press release. “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”

Microsoft invests billions more dollars in OpenAI, extends partnership by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

No rest for Salesforce as activist investor Elliott Management takes multibillion stake in company

It’s been a tumultuous time at Salesforce recently, and it’s not getting any quieter soon. The Wall Street Journal reported last night that the company now needs to deal with activist investor Elliott Management.

Elliott confirmed that it has taken a multibillion stake in Salesforce, and shared this comment from Jesse Cohn, managing partner at the firm:

“Salesforce is one of the preeminent software companies in the world, and having followed the company for nearly two decades, we have developed a deep respect for Marc Benioff and what he has built. We look forward to working constructively with Salesforce to realize the value befitting a company of its stature,” he said in a statement.

You can take from that what you will, but Elliott typically takes a stake in a company to make changes in the way the company operates with the goal of cutting costs and increasing shareholder value. In some cases, it tries to push CEO changes or even selling the company, although that seems less likely in this case.

Elliott is not the lone activist investor, however. Starboard Value also took what was described as a significant stake in October, stating it wanted more operational discipline from the company. Elliott adds to the pressure. It’s not clear how having two activists in play at the same time will work out, or if the two firms’ strategies will align. Regardless, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff could be occupied fending off challenges to the way he runs his business.

Firms like Elliott and Starboard are typically looking for belt tightening, something that Salesforce has undertaken on its own. CFO Amy Weaver outlined a goal of more efficient operating margins of 25% by FY2026, per CNBC. One step the company has already taken is laying off 10% of its employees at the beginning of the month. It’s possible that these firms could demand deeper cuts, adding to the uncertainty that already exists at the company.

It’s been a rough time for the CRM leader with a slew of bad news. Prior to the layoffs, it announced that key executives including co-CEO Bret Taylor was leaving the company at the end of this month. Soon after, Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO at Slack, the company Salesforce acquired for $28 billion at the end of 2020, announced that he too was stepping down.

The company reported revenue of over $7.8 billion, up 14%, and 19% in constant currency, which takes into account the strong dollar for revenue reported from overseas. Still, that was down from 27% growth the prior year, but at a time where all software companies are struggling in an uncertain economic environment.

TechCrunch requested a comment from Salesforce, but had yet to hear back prior to publication. If that changes, we will update the article.

No rest for Salesforce as activist investor Elliott Management takes multibillion stake in company by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Failures are valuable IP: Protect your startup’s negative trade secrets

Tech companies and startups are familiar with protecting their inventions with patents, and their secret formulas, source code and algorithms as trade secrets.

But they may not be aware of another powerful form of IP protection in California: “Negative trade secrets” are intended to protect a company’s secret know-how gained from extensive research investment about what does not work.

Consider Thomas Edison’s quote about his lightbulb experiments: “I haven’t failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Imagine that Edison’s assistant quit and was hired by a competitor. The former assistant’s “negative know-how” from Edison’s 10,000 failed attempts would allow his new employer to start on attempt 10,001.

But while a trade secret is a company’s intellectual property, an employee’s general knowledge, skill and experience acquired in his or her former employment is not. Where does one draw this line? Does Edison’s former assistant really have to retry all 10,000 prior failures that he knows won’t work?

In a high-profile intellectual property case regarding self-driving technology (Waymo v. Uber), Judge William Alsup asked rhetorically, “Is an engineer really supposed to get a frontal lobotomy before they go to the next job?”

The answer to this question is obviously no, but companies have other ways to protect this information. Companies and employees should bear in mind some general best practices when protecting and navigating around negative trade secrets.

Define the breadth of negative trade secrets clearly

Courts sometimes scrutinize the breadth of alleged negative trade secrets to determine if they prevent others from competing in a particular field altogether. The broader the effect of the trade secret is and the greater its preemptive effect, the more likely a court will refuse to recognize that secret.

In one case, a court found that “Plaintiff’s designation of ‘technical know-how’ regarding what does and does not work in [ … ] digital media management software is simply too nebulous a category of information to qualify for trade secret protection.” The court criticized the plaintiff for failing to “identify any specific design routes,” and instead seeking to prevent the defendants from designing any software at all.

“Is an engineer really supposed to get a frontal lobotomy before they go to the next job?”

Any company seeking to protect this type of IP should sufficiently narrow the negative trade secret’s breadth so it doesn’t overlap with an entire field or industry.

Documentation can be used protectively

Negative trade secret claims most often succeed when a company can identify specific documents or data that included negative knowledge and were taken.

Such specificity is likely what allowed Genentech’s claims to go forward in a recent pharmaceutical case against JHL. Genentech included specific allegations that the defendants “downloaded and provided to JHL hundreds of confidential Genentech documents filled with proprietary negative know-how.”

JHL argued that its protocols differed from Genentech’s, but the court said this did not foreclose JHL’s possible use of Genentech’s negative trade secrets. This negative know-how “would confer JHL the benefit of steering clear of fruitless development pathways, thereby saving precious time and resources.”

So if a pharmaceutical manufacturer can identify data that was taken, which contained failed formulas, those failed formulas could be protectable negative trade secrets.

For software companies, claims for negative know-how misappropriation may require specific examples of the failed code that was taken.

Negative trade secrets can be the flip side of positive secrets

Companies should bear in mind that courts sometimes enforce a negative trade secret as the flip side of a positive trade secret.

Failures are valuable IP: Protect your startup’s negative trade secrets by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Zenfi takes in new funding to bring Mexicans some financial peace

Luis Rubén Chávez, founder and CEO of Zenfi, says consumer finance in Mexico and across Latin America “is basically broken.”

“Achieving basic financial health in Mexico for around 50 to 60 million people is really hard,” he told TechCrunch. “Two out of three Mexicans have a subprime credit score with basically no tools to improve.”

Financial technology has exploded in Mexico and Latin America over the last couple of years, driven by startups and venture capitalists, in part because founders like Chávez, whose background is in consumer financing, think there has to be an easier way to help people get financing without charging over a 100% annual percentage rate on credit card and personal costs. To put that in perspective, an average APR in the U.S. is around 19%.

So seven years ago, Chávez started building the free super app Zenfi, a financial health platform that he describes as “if Credit Karma, SoFi, Marcus and Copilot Money had a kid, it would be us.”

A top feature of the platform is what he touts as the lowest interest rate in Mexico, an average of 19% APR. Zenfi also offers free credit tracking and integrates with open banking. It also plugs into the country’s tax system so that users can access tax returns and filing tools.

One of the newest features is a personal finance manager. App users answer some questions, input their financial data sources and get long-term personal financial planning, Chávez said.

Seven years after creating Zenfi, the company has more than 3 million users, many who use the platform to consolidate and pay off their debt from another bank, he added. It has distributed over $100 million in loans, has a 3.4% default rate and $10 million in annual recurring revenue generated from interest rates, small fees associated with credit score checks and commissions from the investment products.

Not only has the company been able to show profitability with that business model, but it also achieved that having previously raised less than $3 million.

Having reached profitability is how Chávez said the company is able to take a new round of funding, this time $8.5 million in new capital led via Magma Partners. Cometa, Redwood Ventures, Polígono, Conny & Co. and an AngelList syndicate led by Peter Livingston participated as well.

Chávez intends to deploy the new funds into dozens of features in the pipeline, including debit and credit products. He is also eyeing three countries in Latin America where he feels Zenfi’s business model will do well. In addition, Chávez will hire more people to add to Zenfi’s 60-person team.

“Right now, we have the biggest fintech lending licenses and personal loan company in Mexico and a benchmark for volume and portfolio quality,” he added. “We are trying to make a dent in the Mexican financial system and want to go from $100 million in loans to $2 billion, so we will build the internal capabilities around the team and infrastructure.”

Zenfi takes in new funding to bring Mexicans some financial peace by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Spotify cuts 6% of its workforce, impacting 600 people

Music streaming service Spotify has announced that it will be conducting a round of layoffs that will impact around 6% of its global workforce. In its most recent earnings release, the company said that there were 9,808 full-time employees working for Spotify. Today’s move will impact around 600 employees.

“Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us,” Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek said in a note sent to its employees.

“In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6% across the company. I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today,” he added.

Daniel Ek’s letter is quite long compared to other internal memos announcing layoffs. In addition to this difficult announcement, he says that Spotify isn’t efficient enough to ensure the company’s long-term success.

“We still spend far too much time syncing on slightly different strategies, which slows us down. And in a challenging economic environment, efficiency takes on greater importance,” he said.

There are some adjustments at the helm of the company as well. Dawn Ostroff, the chief content and advertising business officer, will leave the company. Alex Norström will become the only person in charge of business as Spotify’s new chief business officer — he used to be the chief freemium business officer.

Gustav Söderström, who has been the chief product officer for more than a decade, is staying at the company and overseeing most engineering and product work. So it sounds like there isn’t much change on this front.

According to Daniel Ek, the company had to conduct layoffs because Spotify’s current trajectory was unsustainable over the long run. “To offer some perspective on why we are making this decision, in 2022, the growth of Spotify’s [operating expenses] outpaced our revenue growth by 2X […] As you are well aware, over the last few months we’ve made a considerable effort to rein-in costs, but it simply hasn’t been enough,” Ek wrote.

Spotify employees who are impacted will be invited to one-on-one conversations over the next few hours. They will receive a severance pay that will vary depending on local notice period requirements and employee tenure. On average, employees will receive five months of severance.

Accrued and unused vacation will be paid out and healthcare coverage will continue during the severance period. Spotify will also offer immigration and career support.

Over the past year, Spotify shares have dropped by 50% to $97.91 a share. Shares are currently trading at $104 in pre-market trading, up 6.22% compared to Friday’s closing price.

Last week, Microsoft announced that it was laying off 10,000 people while Google’s parent company said it would cut 12,000 jobs. Amazon, Meta, Salesforce and many other smaller companies have all announced their own round of layoffs in recent weeks. Today, Spotify is joining this unfortunate trend.

Spotify cuts 6% of its workforce, impacting 600 people by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

India central bank orders SBM local unit to stop outward remittance transactions

India’s central bank has directed SBM Bank India to stop all outward remittance transactions in a blow to the bank and many of its fintech partners that offer services allowing users to invest in foreign services.

The Reserve Bank of India said in a brief statement Monday that it has ordered SBM Bank India to stop all transactions under Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) till further orders. LRS is a set of guidelines by the RBI that enable Indian residents to remit capital overseas.

“Certain material supervisory concerns” at the bank prompted the central bank to reach the decision, RBI said.

SBM Bank India is one of the most fintech friendly startups and has tie ups with dozens of young firms. A number of startups have tie-ups with the bank to offer their customers the ability to purchase foreign stocks, for instance.

SBM Bank India was in talks late last year to raise between $50 million to $75 million at a pre-money valuation of about $200 million, TechCrunch reported earlier.

India central bank orders SBM local unit to stop outward remittance transactions by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Zeekr goes on a hiring spree, Tesla kicks off a price war and Hesai files for an IPO

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. 

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. 

Before I jump into our regular news roundup, I wanted to bring your attention to Zeekr, the premium electric car brand owned by China’s Geely Holdings. You might recall that about a month ago, Zeekr filed confidentially for an initial public offering in the United States. Zeekr, which will spin out of Geely, reportedly aims to raise more than $1 billion and is seeking a valuation of more than $10 billion, according to initial reports by Reuters.

As the IPO process creeps forward, Zeekr is busy scaling up. And in a big way. Zeekr already employs some 4,500 people, according to the company. Now it’s aiming to add two-thirds more workers to its roster.

The company posted on Wechat this week that it is hiring 3,000 new workers at more than 30 cities around the world, including its R&D center in Ningbo and Shanghai in China and in Gothenburg, Sweden. It’s also opening an office in Silicon Valley, although it should be noted an exact location has yet to be decided.

Most of these posts are for R&D and engineering in areas like software, battery management, thermal management, electric/electronic architecture. A few hundreds are for sales network, according to the company.

Zeekr is not even two years old yet. Prepare to start hearing a lot more from this brand.

Last week, you may recall I wrote about how Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk had entered into a pressure cooker, of sorts.

That pressure continues to build as we get new insight into an infamous 2016 “Painted In Black” video that promoted Tesla’s claimed “self-driving” technology. A senior engineer testified that the video was faked and apparently Musk oversaw the direction of the video, even dictating the words that pop up at the start of the video saying the car is driving itself. The video has been criticized for years now, so for many this will come as no surprise and validates their stance.

Question is, can consumers or shareholders argue (in a court perhaps) that they were defrauded by a video that convinced them Tesla’s self-driving technology was more capable than it actually was?

Meanwhile, Tesla slashing its prices earlier this month appears to have kicked off a price war with rivals like China’s Xpeng reducing the cost of its EVs. Tesla has one weapon that other automakers lack: one of the highest profit margins in the biz.

Tesla earned $15,653 in gross profit per vehicle in the third quarter of 2022; that’s more than twice as much as Volkswagen Group, four times the comparable figure at Toyota and five times more than Ford Motor, according to a Reuters analysis.

Price wars don’t always work out. But high profit margins buy Tesla some time.

Oh and against that backdrop, a trial is underway in San Francisco to answer the question of whether Musk is a fraud or is just too careless with his words. Under the microscope was Musk’s notorious 2018 tweet that stated funding was “secured” to take Tesla private at a potential value of $420 per share. Tesla shareholders who traded the company’s stock in the days after Musk’s tweet are suing the executive for billions of dollars in damages.

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Micromobbin’

The folks over at Micromobility Industries held their online Micromobility World event this week, with top speakers including Kara Swisher, Gabe Klein and Matthew Yglesias. I listened to Yglesias discuss how important land use reform is for micromobility adoption. 

As communities grow and new housing is added, more cars will inevitably join the roads, which will exacerbate current traffic problems. Yglesias says new housing policy has to go hand in hand with transportation initiatives to offer solutions and make it easier for residents to bike or scoot to where they need to go. 

“That just means taking geometry seriously and so, if everybody all the time is carting empty space with them wherever they go, we don’t fit and we become this very sort of pessimistic, zero-sum, oh-my-god-don’t-let-them-build kind of people, which is a bummer,” said Yglesias.

In other news…

Beyond (formerly Brooklyness), the Brooklyn-based e-scooter subscription and retail company, is shutting down. “We had a fantastic run, but ultimately, delays in the supply chain and the overall macroeconomic climate made it impossible for us to secure more funding to grow the business,” wrote founder Manuel Saez in an email blast. 

Gogoro is working with the Indian state of Maharashtra to establish state-wide battery charging and swapping infrastructure as part of a deal valued at $2.5 billion.

Helbiz is leaving unprofitable markets by spring 2023, but is also actively seeking new markets to enter that might be more sustainable. 

Didn’t know this was a thing, but apparently in Japan, e-scooter riders in Japan needed a driver’s license to ride the vehicles. Starting this July, riders on stand up e-scooters that have a max speed of 20 kph will no longer need a license, but they’ll need to comply with the same rules as cyclists. 

Check out this podcast from The New Republic on the high cost of cheap e-bikes, where they discuss the fires caused by poorly made lithium batteries, the populations most at risk, the challenges of regulating e-bikes and the consequences of our on-demand culture.

Parisians are voting this weekend on whether they want to ban free-floating e-scooters or not. At stake in the short-term is the renewal of permits for Lime, Dott and Tier. But in the long-term, Paris’s decision might affect how other cities deal with shared e-scooters.

Ride1Up launched the Revv1 e-bike, a moped-style bike that can reach 20 mph on throttle or pedal assist. The bike starts at $1,899 for the front suspension version and $2,399 for the full-suspension model.

A Washington, D.C. council member has proposed a $400+ rebate for e-bikes. 

Deal of the week

This didn’t a lot of press attention in the United States, but it should have. Hesai, a Chinese lidar company widely considered a lead supplier of the sensor, filed for a $100 million IPO and plans to list on the Nasdaq exchange.

Hesai has attracted a lot of venture capital in its lifetime, raising more than $500 million to date from strategic backers like Baidu, Xiaomi on-demand services giant Meituan and CPE, the private equity platform of Citic as well as VC firms GL Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Qiming Venture Partners.

I wrote about Hesai as part of a larger piece on the lidar industry and how there are still TOO MANY companies. The upshot? A lot of lidar companies will be sifted out in 2023; the following year will be a ‘make it or break it’ moment for those that remain.

While Hesai is in a leadership position today, that doesn’t mean it will remain there. And it’s not yet profitable. It should be noted that unlike many other lidar companies out there, Hesai is actually producing and shipping sensors and generates revenue. The company reported in a securities filing that it brought in $112 million in revenue in the first nine months of the year and had a net loss of $23 million during the same period.

Other deals that got my attention …

Black Sesame Technologies, a developer of AI chips and systems for vehicles, is considering a Hong Kong initial public offering, Bloomberg reported.

MacroFab, a cloud manufacturing platform for building electronics from prototype to high-scale production, raised $42 million in a round led by Foundry and joined by BMW i Ventures, as well as existing investors Edison Partners and ATX Venture Partners.

Outrider, a Golden, Colorado startup developing autonomous electric yard trucks, closed a $73 million Series C round led by FM Capital and attracted new investors Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and NVIDIA’s venture capital group, NVentures. Other new investors included B37 Ventures, Lineage Ventures, Presidio Ventures, the venture arm of Sumitomo Corporation and ROBO Global Ventures. Existing backers Koch Disruptive Technologies and New Enterprise Associates also participated.

Volta, the EV charging network operator, will be acquired by a U.S.-based subsidiary of oil company Shell for $169 million.

Waabi, the Toronto-based self-driving trucks startup, landed Volvo Group Venture Capital AB as a strategic investor. The companies didn’t disclose the amount invested, nor many other details about the deal. Waabi contends that having Volvo on board will both provide it with access to the automaker’s extensive industry network and help it explore opportunities for large-scale commercialization.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Autonomous vehicles

Aurora put out its forecast for the AV industry and among its top takeaways (this coming from the CFO) is this nugget: “Independent AV companies will be positioned to advance more quickly toward product deployment and profitability.”

Electric vehicles, charging & batteries

Blink Charging announced an exclusive agreement with Mitsubishi Motors North America to provide Bling chargers and installation service for all of the manufacturer’s dealerships. 

Chevrolet unveiled its 2024 Corvette E-Ray, the first semi-electric version of the iconic sports car. The E-Ray has a small 6.2L V8 and an electric motor. It charges the battery through regenerative braking and when the vehicle is coasting. 

EVgo launched EVgo ReNew, a maintenance program designed to make sure that when you finally find that public charging station you so desperately need, you’re not met with multiple broken charge ports. 

Hertz is launching a public-private partnership initiative, Hertz Electrifies, in Denver to bring 5,200 rental EVs to the city, increase charging capacity at the airport and Hertz locations, support the installation of public EV chargers and more. The company is hoping to mirror this partnership model with other cities in the future.

Kate is a new micro EV car company that clearly was inspired by the mini Moke.

Revel is adding five new EV fast charging hubs to New York City, adding a total of 136 public charging stalls to the city’s landscape. 

People

Joby Aviation appointed Lt. Gen. (ret) Scott Howell, former Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), to the company’s Advisory Board.

Kodiak Robotics has named former USA Truck CEO James Reed as its chief operating officer.

TuSimple appointed independent board members James Lu and Wendy Hayes were appointed to serve on its government security committee after receiving a non-objection from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

Wisk Aero CEO Gary Gysin is retiring from his position. He is also leaving the board effective February 1, 2023. Dr. Brian Yutko will be the new CEO. Yutko was most recently vice president and chief engineer of sustainability and future mobility at Boeing.

Ride-hail

Didi has gotten approval from China to re-launch its ride-hailing service after an 18-month probe from the country’s cyberspace watchdog. The Cybersecurity Review Office was investigating whether Did’s cross-border data practices were secure before going public in the U.S. 

Authorities in Tanzania have increased the fee that ride-hail companies like Uber and Bolt can charge drivers from 15% to 25%. Nice for the companies’ earnings, but bad news for the earnings of the drivers. 

Uber has expanded an agreement with Hertz to get up to 25,000 EVs to ride-hail drivers in European capital cities by 2025. Separately, in its race to electrify, the company is also in talks with automakers to build EVs that sacrifice speed, and even a wheel or two, to drive down sticker price.

Zeekr goes on a hiring spree, Tesla kicks off a price war and Hesai files for an IPO by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Microsoft to invest more in ChatGPT company OpenAI

Microsoft Corp said on Monday it would invest more in OpenAI, staking its future on the startup and tech behind the chatbot sensation ChatGPT, as well as setting the stage for more competition with its rival Alphabet Inc’s Google. Recently touting a revolution in artificial intelligence (AI), Microsoft is building on a bet it made nearly four years ago on OpenAI. In 2019 it dedicated $1 billion for the startup co-founded by Elon Musk and investor Sam Altman, and has since built a supercomputer to power OpenAI’s technology, among other forms of support.

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