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Mobility on TechCrunch: The wheels are starting to fall off the Fisker EV bus

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TechCrunch Mobility is weekly newsletter dedicated to all matters related to transport. Sign up here – just click TechCrunch Mobility – to receive the newsletter in your inbox every weekend. Subscribe without cost.

Welcome back in TechCrunch Mobility – Your central hub for news and insights on the way forward for transport.

Before we get into startups and tech struggles, I wanted to touch on some activity on the Hill – on Capitol Hill, that’s. The Biden administration has published two latest (and separate) proposed standards – via Department of Energy (DOE) i Environmental Protection Agency — this can impact U.S. automakers and, ultimately, you. While each regulations were relaxed to reassure the automotive industry, automotive dealers and trade unions, in addition they introduced much stricter standards than previously.

The DOE issued a more lenient solution “crude oil equivalence ratio”, giving electric vehicles a rating under the government’s Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. The original proposal would have made it harder for automakers to meet CAFE standards, leading to multibillion-dollar penalties. (E&E has a pleasant explanation.)

Meanwhile, the EPA published its own exhaust pipe standards for passenger cars and light-weight trucks from 2027 to 2032, which is able to impose stricter requirements on automotive manufacturers but give them greater flexibility to meet the proposed regulations thanks to a wide range of powertrains. In other words, the standards are technology agnostic and will be met without having to convert the entire fleet to electric vehicles. It can also be much less stringent than the original proposal, which might have required electric vehicle sales to account for 67% of the total U.S. passenger vehicle market by 2032.

What does this mean for electric vehicle startups? Not much since battery electric vehicles like those made by Rivian, Tesla and Lucid meet the requirements clean automotive standard from and CO2 limit of 85 grams per mile for model 12 months 2032 (50% reduction from model 12 months 2026 standards). There are real consequences for legacy automakers who invest billions in developing, constructing and selling electric vehicles but make the most of combustion engine vehicles. If there’s one clear winner here, it is perhaps plug-in hybrids.

This week’s news also includes articles about: Rivian cooperation with Tesla, launch of electrical boats Candlefurther financial consequences at Fiskera startup trying to navigate the uncertain world of prolonged warranties and more!

Little bird

Last month a little bit bird told us Clevona, an organization that began developing autonomous delivery technology in 2018, struggled to find latest investment and was close to closure. The company’s co-founder said at the time (in an email seen by TechCrunch) that it was searching for buyers for its hardware and software, IP and AV assets, and was even hiring employees.

According to co-founder and CEO Sander Sebastian Agur, Clevon remains to be doing well. He didn’t provide many details, but said the company has been funded and “has entered into an exclusive agreement for its merger with a U.S. electric vehicle manufacturer.” The contract is scheduled to end in the first half of June.

In the meantime, the company has to make some cost cuts and roughly 17 employees are being laid off.

Offer of the week

money for the station

Uber seems to be in all places, so it might surprise you that the company has just made its first investment in an African startup. And that is something big.

Move up, an African mobility fintech company that provides vehicle financing to drivers using ride-hailing and delivery apps, has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round led by Uber. Sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, Dubai-based The Latest Ventures, AfricInvest, Palm Drive Capital, Triatlum Advisors and Future Africa also participated in the financing round. Moove is currently valued at $750 million.

Why would Uber be all for Moove? Uber is Moove’s largest vehicle financing and delivery partner. Moove, for which electric vehicles have turn out to be a very important a part of its business strategy, is an element of Uber’s commitment to create a completely zero-emission fleet by 2040.

Other deals that caught my eye this week…

AmberBay Area startup founded in early 2023, which just launched an aftermarket product with a Tesla prolonged warranty, raised $3.18 million in a seed round led jointly by Era and Primer Sazze together with Alcove Fund, Virta Ventures, Global Millennial Capital and Root & Shoot Ventures combining.

Candleelectric boat manufacturer, raised $25 million in a round led by Groupe Beneteau with participation from EQT Ventures, Ocean Zero LLC and Kan Dela AB.

Pelican mobilitya French startup developing business electric vehicle fleet management software has raised €4 million ($4.4 million) in a seed round from Pale Blue Dot, Frst, Seedcamp and others.

Stellar invested an undisclosed amount Light control, a French startup developing low-cost lidar for advanced driver assistance systems. In a separate, unrelated transaction, the automaker bought 8.3 million shares of the company Archer Aviation warehouse. Stellantis said this signals its confidence in Archer’s plans to bring electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft to market starting in 2025.

Noteworthy reading and other interesting facts

Apps

Apple was sued this week by US Department of Justice for alleged monopolistic practices. Here’s the explanation and all our coverage up to now. There is an automotive section in the lawsuit, namely the smartphone’s projection feature often called AppleCarPlay. The U.S. government claims in the lawsuit that “Apple has told automakers that the next generation of Apple CarPlay will take over all in-car screens, sensors and gauges, forcing users to have an iPhone-centric driving experience if they want.” use any features provided by CarPlay.” Some even speculate that this explains why General Motors abandoned Apple CarPlay altogether.

We’re a little bit skeptical here. First, automakers can select the screen on which Apple CarPlay shall be displayed, similar to what happens with competing Android Auto. Car manufacturers still have their very own native software, which, incidentally, increasingly comes from Google.

Electric vehicles, charging and batteries

Cowboy has launched an off-road electric bike to attract cyclists from outside European city centers.

Fisher financial health is deteriorating – and rapidly. The company said it had just $121 million in money and money equivalents as of March 15, of which $32 million was restricted or unavailable immediately. The company has suspended production of its Ocean electric SUV for six weeks because it needs a money injection.

India has impressive statistics. The variety of startups in India’s electric two-wheeler market has surged to over 150, up from 54 in 2021, thanks to government incentives geared toward promoting clean vehicles and curbing oil imports, reports TechCruncher Manish Singh.

Rivian customers can now request an adapter to connect to Tesla’s extensive network of supercharger stations across North America, making it the second automaker after Ford to achieve this.

Steve Burnsousted founder, chairman and CEO of failed EV startup Lordstown Enginesreached a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading investors about demand for Endurance’s flagship all-electric pickup truck.

TechCrunch associate Emma Hall he took it Honda CR-V e:FCEV 2025 — a hydrogen fuel cell version of the popular crossover — takes its first drive and wonders why the hell this automaker would release a automotive where there is sort of no infrastructure. Oh, and she or he discovered this vehicle has a little bit of a plug-in hybrid.

Flight

DoorDash expanded cooperation with Alphabet’s Wing bring an autonomous drone transport pilot to the United States. This is sort of limited for now; select users in Christiansburg, VA will find a way to order eligible menu items from their local Wendy’s restaurant.

Joby Aviationstartup developing electric air taxis, said it’s going to deliver two planes to MacDill Air Force Base in 2025 as a part of eVTOL’s AFWERX Agility Prime contract with the U.S. Air Force.

The United States Department of Transportation plans to conduct the first industry-wide review of the data security and privacy policies of the largest U.S. airlines. The agency says it’s going to investigate whether U.S. airline giants are properly protecting their customers’ personal data and whether the airlines are “unfairly or fraudulently monetizing this data or sharing it with third parties.”

Technology in the automotive

Nvidia last week it held its annual GTC developer conference. You can read all of our coverage of GTC here, including some surprises about the co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang keynote. Automotive News discusses how Nvidia’s computing architecture is getting used by firms corresponding to Cerence, SoundHound and Wayve to design user interfaces including generative artificial intelligence in the automotive.

This week’s wheels

Subaru Solterra EV 2024

Image credits: Kirsten Korosec

I spent a while in 2024 Subaru Solterra, a battery-electric crossover in-built a joint project with Toyota, to see what has modified or improved since the vehicle was launched a 12 months earlier. And there have been changes!

The most blatant is the steering wheel, which isn’t any longer round and now has a more square shape. This change was introduced following consumer feedback. You’ll notice that the instrument cluster actually sits above the steering wheel, which takes some getting used to. The latest shape helps improve visibility.

Two other things price noting once I connected the Subaru Solterra app to the vehicle: The infotainment system was effective. There are some bugs and there is no such thing as a intuitive or easy way to move between Apple CarPlay and the native software system with a single swipe or click. It wasn’t my best experience with automotive software, however it actually wasn’t my worst either.

In terms of advanced driver assistance systems, Subaru has added a Traffic Jam Assist feature that gives hands-free steering in traffic jams at low hurries up to 40 km/h. This is a really specific use case that many drivers may never need due to speed limits. Thanks to traffic in Phoenix, I used to be able to check it out. Lane Change Assist – one other latest feature that can mechanically change lanes if the driver hits a turn signal – I didn’t know when exactly I could use it. (This feature only works between 55 and 85 mph.)

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Wiz acquires Dazz for $450 million to expand cybersecurity platform

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Wizardone of the talked about names within the cybersecurity world, is making a major acquisition to expand its reach of cloud security products, especially amongst developers. This is buying Dazzlespecialist in solving security problems and risk management. Sources say the deal is valued at $450 million, which incorporates money and stock.

This is a leap within the startup’s latest round of funding. In July, we reported that Dazz had raised $50 million at a post-money valuation of just below $400 million.

Remediation and posture management – two areas of focus for Dazz – are key services within the cybersecurity market that Wiz hasn’t sorted in addition to it wanted.

“Dazz is a leader in this market, with the best talent and the best customers, which fits perfectly into the company culture,” Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Wiz, said in an interview.

Remediation, which refers to helping you understand and resolve vulnerabilities, shapes how an enterprise actually handles the various vulnerability alerts it could receive from the network. Posture management is a more preventive product: it allows a company to higher understand the scale, shape and performance of its network from a perspective, allowing it to construct higher security services around it.

Dazz will proceed to operate as a separate entity while it’s integrated into the larger Wiz stack. Wiz has made a reputation for itself as a “one-stop shop,” and Rappaport said the integrated offering will proceed to be a core a part of it.

He believes this contrasts with what number of other SaaS corporations are built. In the safety industry, there are, Rappaport said, “a lot of Frankenstein mashups where companies prioritize revenue over building a single technology stack that actually works as a platform.” It could be assumed that integration is much more necessary in cybersecurity than in other areas of enterprise IT.

Wiz and Dazz already had an in depth relationship before this deal. Merat Bahat — the CEO who co-founded Dazz with Tomer Schwartz and Yuval Ofir (CTO and VP of R&D, respectively) — worked closely with Assaf Rappaport at Microsoft, which acquired his previous startup Adallom.

After Rappaport left to found Wiz together with his former Adallom co-founders, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP of Product Yinon Costica and VP of R&D Roy Reznik, Bahat was one in all the primary investors. Similarly, when Bahat founded Dazz, Assaf was a small investor in it.

The connection goes deeper than work colleagues. Bahat and Rappaport are also close friends, and she or he was the second family of Mickey, Rappaport’s beloved dog, referred to as Chief Dog Officer Wiz (together with LinkedIn profile). Once the deal was done, the 2 faced two very sad events: each Bahat and Mika’s mother died.

“We hope for a new chapter of positivity,” Bahat said. The cycle of life does indeed proceed.

Rumors of this takeover began to appear earlier this month; Rappaport confirmed that they then began talking seriously.

But that is not the one M&A conversation Wiz has gotten involved in. Earlier this 12 months, Google tried to buy Wiz itself for $23 billion to construct a major cybersecurity business. Wiz walked away from the deal, which might have been the biggest in Google’s history, partly because Rappaport believed Wiz could turn into a fair larger company by itself terms. And that is what this agreement goals to do.

This acquisition is a test for Wiz, which earlier this 12 months filled its coffers with $1 billion solely for M&A purposes (it has raised almost $2 billion in total, and we hear the subsequent round will close in just a few weeks). . Other offers included purchasing Gem security for $350 million, but Dazz is its largest acquisition ever.

More mergers and acquisitions could also be coming. “We believe next year will be an acquisition year for us,” Rappaport said.

In an interview with TC, Luttwak said that one in all Wiz’s priorities now’s to create more tools for developers that have in mind what they need to do their jobs.

Enterprises have made significant investments in cloud services to speed up operations and make their IT more agile, but this shift has include a significantly modified security profile for these organizations: network and data architectures are more complex and attack surfaces are larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to to hack into these systems. Artificial intelligence makes all of this far more difficult when it comes to malicious attackers. (It’s also a chance: the brand new generation of tools for our defense relies on artificial intelligence.)

Wiz’s unique selling point is its all-in-one approach. Drawing data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data and network processes for security risk aspects and provides its users with a series of detailed views to understand where these threats occur, offering over a dozen products covering the areas, corresponding to code security, container environment security, and provide chain security, in addition to quite a few partner integrations for those working with other vendors (or to enable features that Wiz doesn’t offer directly).

Indeed, Wiz offered some extent of repair to help prioritize and fix problems, but as Luttwak said, the Dazz product is solely higher.

“We now have a platform that actually provides a 360-degree view of risk across infrastructure and applications,” he said. “Dazz is a leader in attack surface management, the ability to collect vulnerability signals from the application layer across the entire stack and build the most incredible context that allows you to trace the situation back to engineers to help with remediation.”

For Dazz’s part, once I interviewed Bahat in July 2024, when Dazz raised $50 million at a $350 million valuation, she extolled the virtues of constructing strong solutions and this week said the third quarter was “amazing.”

“But market dynamics are what trigger these types of transactions,” she said. She confirmed that Dazz had also received takeover offers from other corporations. “If you think about the customers and joint customers that we have with Wiz, it makes sense for them to have it on one platform.”

And a few of Dazz’s competitors are still going it alone: ​​Cyera, like Dazz, an authority in attack surface management, just yesterday announced a rise of $300 million at a valuation of $5 billion (which confirms our information). But what’s going to he do with this money? Make acquisitions, after all.

Wiz says it currently has annual recurring revenue of $500 million (it has a goal of $1 billion ARR next 12 months) and has greater than 45% of its Fortune 100 customers. Dazz said ARR is within the tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars and currently growing 500% on a customer base of roughly 100 organizations.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Department of Justice: Google must sell Chrome to end its monopoly

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Google corporate logo hangs outside the Google Germany offices

The U.S. Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should sell its Chrome browser as part of a countermeasure to break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search, according to a filing with the Justice Department. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If the answer proposed by the Department of Justice is approved, Google won’t have the option to re-enter the search marketplace for five years.

Ultimately, it’ll be District Court Judge Amit Mehta who will determine what the ultimate punishment for Google might be. This decision could fundamentally change one of the most important firms on the planet and alter the structure of the Internet as we understand it. This phase of the method is anticipated to begin sometime in 2025.

In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google constituted an illegal monopoly since it abused its power within the search industry. The judge also questioned Google’s control over various web gateways and the corporate’s payments to third parties to maintain its status because the default search engine.

The Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome, that are key distribution channels for its search business, poses a “significant challenge” to remediation to ensure a competitive search market.

The Justice Department has proposed other remedies to address the search engine giant’s monopoly, including Google spinning off its Android mobile operating system. The filing indicated that Google and other partners may oppose the spin-off and suggested stringent countermeasures, including ending the use of Android to the detriment of search engine competitors. The Department of Justice has suggested that if Google doesn’t impose restrictions on Android, it must be forced to sell it.

Prosecutors also argued that the corporate must be barred from stepping into exclusionary third-party agreements with browser or phone firms, resembling Google’s agreement with Apple to be the default search engine on all Apple products.

The Justice Department also argued that Google should license its search data, together with ad click data, to competitors.

Additionally, the Department of Justice also set conditions prohibiting Google from re-entering the browser market five years after the spin-off of Chrome. Additionally, it also proposed that after the sale of Chrome, Google mustn’t acquire or own any competing ad text search engine, query-based AI product, or ad technology. Moreover, the document identifies provisions that allow publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train artificial intelligence models.

If the court accepts these measures, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic in AI technology.

Google’s answer

In response, Google said the Department of Justice’s latest filing constitutes a “radical interventionist program” that may harm U.S. residents and the country’s technological prowess on the planet.

“The Department of Justice’s wildly overblown proposal goes far beyond the Court’s decision. “It would destroy the entire range of Google products – even beyond search – that people love and find useful in their everyday lives,” said Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker. blog post.

Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would threaten user security and privacy, degrade the standard of the Chrome and Android browsers, and harm services resembling Mozilla Firefox, which depends upon Google’s search engine.

He added that if the proposal is adopted, it could make it tougher for people to access Google search. Moreover, it could hurt the corporate’s prospects within the AI ​​race.

“The Justice Department’s approach would lead to unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers and small businesses and threaten America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment when it is needed most,” he said.

The company is to submit a response to the above request next month.

Wednesday’s filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering getting Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the U.S. browser market. According to to the StatCounter web traffic service.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Snowflake acquires data management company Datavolo

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The Snowflake Inc logo, which represents the American cloud computing-based data company that offers cloud-based storage and analytics services, is being displayed on their pavilion at the Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Spain, on February 28, 2024.

Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to take over Datavoloa company managing the data pipeline, for an undisclosed amount.

Snowflake announced the deal on Wednesday after the market bell closed, while reporting its third-quarter 2025 earnings. The purchase has not yet closed and is subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted wa release.

Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously a vp at Cloudera, and Roquet was Cloudera’s chief marketing officer and, before that, director of business development at AWS.

Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source data processing project developed by the NSA, to power a platform to automate data flow between disparate enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, cleanse, transform and enrich data, including for generative use of artificial intelligence.

With Datavolo having raised $21 million in enterprise capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more comprehensive data pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says Datavolo can enable users to interchange single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that allow them to maneuver data from cloud and on-premises sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.

“By bringing Datavolo to Snowflake, we are increasing the amount of data captured by Snowflake over the lifecycle, providing our customers with both simplicity and cost savings, without sacrificing data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a press release. “We are thrilled to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate the best platform for enterprise data – unstructured and structured, batch and streaming – and committed to the success of the open source community.”

Witt says Snowflake will support and help manage the Apache NiFi project after the acquisition closes. “Data engineering at scale can be extremely expensive and complex, and our goal has always been to simplify our customers’ experiences so they can realize value faster,” he added within the press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can deliver the massive scale and radical simplicity of the Snowflake platform to our customers, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”

Thanks partly to artificial intelligence, demand for data management technologies has increased. Fortune’s business insights estimates that the worldwide enterprise data management market could possibly be price $224.87 billion by 2032.

However, data management has been a challenge for enterprises long before the substitute intelligence boom. According to in a 2022 survey by Great Hopetions, a data quality platform, 91% of organizations said data quality issues impact their performance.

Against this backdrop, it isn’t surprising that firms like Datavolo are gaining prominence.

Today was a giant day for Snowflake who reported better-than-expected earnings sent the company’s shares up 19%. In addition to the acquisition of Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the startup’s AI models into Snowflake’s Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Analyst products.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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