Fisker loses customers’ money, Robinhood releases a credit card, and Google generates travel plans

This week, TC automotive reporter Sean O’Kane revealed how electric vehicle startup Fisker temporarily lost track of multimillion-dollar customer payments because it ramped up deliveries, resulting in an internal audit that began in December and lasted months.

Elsewhere, Lorenzo reported how Facebook was spying on users’ Snapchat traffic as a part of a secret project known internally at Meta as “Project Ghostbusters.” Court documents show that the goal was to intercept and decrypt network traffic between people using the Snapchat app and its servers.

Late last week, Manish wrote in regards to the resignation of Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque. Mostaque’s departure from Stability AI – a startup known for its popular Stable Diffusion image generation tool – comes amid an ongoing struggle for stability (pun intended) at a company that was reportedly spending ~$8 million per thirty days as of October 2023 with little revenue on thing show it.

Many other things happened. We sum all of it up on this issue of WiR – but first, let’s remind you to enroll in the WiR newsletter every Saturday.

News

Fisker suspended: Fisker’s bad week continued with the startup’s stock trading halting. The New York Stock Exchange decided to delist Fisker, citing “abnormally low” inventory levels.

AI-based routes: As a part of an update to its search generation feature, Google has added the flexibility to ask users to plan a travel route in Google Search. Using artificial intelligence, the search engine will pull ideas from web sites together with reviews, photos and other details.

New Robinhood card: Nine months after acquiring credit card startup X1 for $95 million, Robinhood on Wednesday announced the launch of its recent Gold Card, powered by X1 technology, with a list of features that would make Apple Card users envious.

At AT&T, the word mom is most vital: This week, the private information of roughly 73 million AT&T customers was leaked online. However, AT&T won’t say how – despite the fact that the hack accountable for this occurred greater than three years ago.

Financing

Boom Co-pilot: Budgeting app Copilot raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Adjacent Nico Wittenborn. The app is partly benefiting from the death of Mint, Intuit’s financial management product.

Liquid assets: In an article taking a look at the broader VC-backed beverage industry, Rebecca and Christine note the recent $67 million fundraising of canned water startup Liquid Death, bringing the corporate’s total to over $267 million. Talk about liquidity.

HVAC project: Dan Laufer, a former Nextdoor executive, raised $25 million from Canvas Ventures and others for PipeDreams, a startup that takes popular HVAC and plumbing corporations and scales them with software that helps with planning and marketing.

Analysis

Is Nvidia the subsequent AWS?: Ron writes about many similarities in the event trajectories of Nvidia and AWS.

Podcasts

This week continues Right, the crew delved into Robinhood’s recent credit card, Fisker’s latest misadventures, and even Databricks’ recent artificial intelligence model, which it spent $10 million developing. They also highlighted two corporations creating startups focused on children and concluded with a have a look at a recent $100 million fund geared toward supporting progressive climate technologies.

Meanwhile, proceed FoundAllison Wolff, co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, a cloud-based planning and monitoring tool for adaptive land management, discussed why the wildfires we see today are hotter and spreading faster than we are able to contain, and ensure proper land management management will help spark smaller and slower-burning fires.

And next Chain response, Jacquelyn interviewed Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time. Space and Time goals to be a verifiable computation layer for Web3 that scales zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic motion used to prove something about a piece of information without revealing the provenance data itself.

Bonus round

Spotify is testing online learning: As a part of its ongoing effort to get its greater than 600 million users to spend more time and money on its platform, Spotify is introducing a recent line of content: e-learning. The streaming (traditionally audio) platform is starting out with a UK launch and is testing the waters for its online education offering with freemium video courses.