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Hi friends and new readers, welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B.

Let’s get right to it.

Oh wait, one item first. Tesla earnings happened and as always a bunch of new promises and products and timelines were laid out, including a Knight Rider-inspired steering yoke in the “plaid” Model X.

Image Credits: Tesla

This stalkless yoke steering wheel is suboptimal. (yup I said it). And it’s already getting the attention of federal safety regulators.

Yes yes, you’ve seen these yokes in race cars. However, the steering ratio is vastly different between race cars and the vehicle sitting in your driveway.

I’m not the only who sees this as an awkward and potentially dangerous design choice.

Tim Stevens at CNET’s Roadshow, who has a deep background in automotive, notes that a race car needs as little as 180 degrees of rotation to turn from the left-most steering extent to the right, while the average passenger car has 900 degrees of rotation from full left to right.

That matters because daily driving requires you to change the positioning of your hands on the steering wheel while making U-turns and the like. When the steering wheel is a circle, it’s an easy task. This shape can make it awkward and prone to flubbing the maneuver.

It’s true that we don’t yet know if Tesla adjusted the steering ratio. Still, a higher steering ratio introduces other potential issues. You can read his complete thoughts here.

Lucid Motors jumped in and threw a little shade Tesla’s way with a tweet that shows a picture of the new Lucid Air steering wheel and this: “Take the wheel: The knurled metal turbines and capacitive touchbars provide intuitive control of #LucidAir DreamDrive ADAS functions. It’s also pretty nice to look at, too.”

OK, y’all onward!

Email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec

Micromobbin’

After a quiet few weeks, the micromobbin’ news floodgates opened. Perhaps, it was due to the three-day Micromobility World event that was held this past week.

First up, is Spin and the three-wheel scooter it rolled out with partners Segway-Ninebot and software startup Tortoise. (the scooter is pictured below) The scooter has the noteworthy addition of a third wheel to make it more stable and easier to ride, important features for any micromobility company hoping to appeal to a wider demographic.

The Spin S-200 scooter, as it’s call, is also equipped with repositioning software that allows remote operators thousands of miles away to move vehicles off the sidewalk and into a proper parking spot. A fleet of about 300 Spin S-200 scooters will be tested in Boise, Idaho this spring. But the goal is much grander. Spin ultimately wants to roll out remotely operated scooters to cities in North America and Europe in 2021.

Image Credits: Spin

Meanwhile, Lime is adding a whole new mode to its portfolio: electric mopeds. Lime CEO Wayne Ting first hinted late last year that a “third mode” of transport beyond scooters and bikes was in the works for the first quarter of 2021.

The addition of the mode can be viewed in two ways, depending on how bullish you are about Lime. Is this a desperate attempt to appeal to its investors and find new revenue streams? Or is this a long-planned strategy aimed at owning the spectrum of inner city travel from jaunts to the corner store to longer distance trips up to five miles?

For what it’s worth, it seems this plan has been in the works for some time, but was delayed due to COVID.

Lime plans to launch as many as 600 electric mopeds on its platform this spring in Washington D.C. The company is also working with officials to pilot the mopeds in Paris. Eventually, the mopeds will be offered in a “handful of cities” over the next several months.

Image Credits: Lime

One more interesting item …

Voi Technology, the European micromobility company, is aiming to secure a license to operate in New York City. It’s big selling point? The company said it has developed an electric scooter that can measure air quality as it travels through urban areas.

The Voiager 4 (V4) has been designed to contribute to lowering traffic congestion and fuels, as well as helping cities to collect data on the improvements, the company said. The scooter, which is coming out in spring, will have other features like antimicrobial handlebars, audible alarms to alert pedestrians and Near Field Communication technology that lets users unlock it with the tap of a smartphone or smart watch.

Deal of the week

Sila Nanotechnologies raised $590 million in capital the good old fashioned way: institutional investors and venture capital firms. (I couldn’t have a SPAC as ‘deal of the week,’ yet again.)

Sila Nanotechnologies is a Silicon Valley battery materials company that has spent the better part of a decade developing technology designed to pack more energy into a cell at a lower cost.

With demand for batteries climbing, automakers are looking for the next-generation tech that will give them a competitive edge. Sila Nano might just be the product automakers are looking for. The company, co-founded by Tesla alum Gene Berdichevsky, has already locked in partnerships with Amperex Technology Limited as well as automakers BMW and Daimler. 

Sila Nano, which has a post-money valuation of $3.3 billion, plans to use the funds to hire another 100 people this year and begin to buildout a factory in North America capable of producing 100 gigawatt-hours of silicon-based anode material, which is used in batteries for the smartphone and automotive industries. Sila Nano said it plans to start production at the factory in 2024. Materials produced at the plant will be in electric vehicles by 2025, according to the company, which has yet to reveal the location of the factory.

The Series F funding round was led by Coatue with significant participation by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. Existing investors 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated in the round.

Other deals that got my attention …

AUTO1, a used car trading platform based in German, set the share price for its initial per offering between 32 and 38 euros with an aim to raise at least 1.5 billion euros ($1.83 billion), Reuters reported.

Faraday Future, the electric vehicle startup that has come close to imploding numerous times in its short history, has found money where everyone else has: public markets via a SPAC. The company said it has reached an agreement to merge with Property Solutions Acquisition Corp in a deal valuing the combined entity at $3.4 billion. Bloomberg’s article included a quote from Jordan Vogel, chairman and c-CEO of Property Solutions, that answered one of my questions.

“There are no skeletons in the closet,” he said. “We have spent an exorbitant amount of time examining the history.”

Freewire Technologies, the electric vehicle charging and power solutions company, raised $50 million in a Series C funding round led by Riverstone Holdings with participation from current shareholders bp ventures, Energy Innovation Capital, TRIREC and Alumni Ventures Group. The company said the funds will be used to boost production of its Boost Charger product and speed up its expansion into international markets.

Starship Technologies, the autonomous delivery robot startup, has raised $17 million. Despite some struggles, the company has expanded its fleet five-fold since COVID-19 swept through the European and North American markets that it operates in. Starship now has 1,000 autonomous delivery bots in its fleet.

One item that I didn’t uncover until after publication: the company’s CEO Lex Bayer, a former sales leader from Airbnb, who took over the top spot at Starship in 2018, has left the company. Ahti Heinla, Starship Technologies’ co-founder and CTO, is serving as interim CEO while the company “conducts a thorough search for the best person to lead the company into the future,” a spokesperson told me.

Wheels Up, the jet charter company, is in talks to go public through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Aspirational Consumer Lifestyle Corp, Reuters reported.

Wingcopter, the German drone technology startup, raised $22 million in a Series A round led by Silicon Valley VC Xplorer Capital, as well as German growth fund Futury Regio Growth. As TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington notes, the company has come a long way since its founding in 2017. In the past four year, Wingcopter has developed, built and flown its heavy-lift cargo delivery drone, which offers all the benefits of vertical take-off and landing with the advantages of fixed-wing aircraft for longer-distance horizontal flight.

Zadar Labs, an early stage startup that is developing high-resolution, low-cost imaging radars for autonomous systems raised $5.6 million in seed funding led by Tim Kentley Klay — yes the Tim Kentley Klay, who co-founded Zoox, was ousted as CEO by the board and has since gone on to found a new AV startup called HYPR. Other investors include Leslie Ventures, Jeff Rothschild, Plug and Play, and Mentors Fund.

GM charts its EV future

GM is hardly the first company to pledge to become carbon neutral by [insert some distant date]. But GM’s announcement this past week is different than other sustainability promises and platitudes.

I’m actually surprised it didn’t receive more attention. I guess Robinhood and Gamestop were too intriguing.

In short: GM pledged to be carbon neutral by 2040, a goal it will achieve by removing emissions from all of its products and global operations as well as offsetting those emissions through carbon credits or carbon capture.

The company also committed to produce only electric vehicles by 2035 — just 14 years away. In automaker years, thats just two, maybe three design cycles. In other words: that’s short.

To be clear, when I spoke to GM, I heard words like “hope” and “aspire to.” But when pressed, the company said ‘yes, this a real goal.’

Moving its portfolio, which today is dominated by internal combustion engine vehicles, will be a transition, a GM spokesperson told TechCrunch, adding that the main priority is to bring employees along in that shift.

A “transition” doesn’t adequately articulate what will need to happen to pull off a goal of this size and scope. Yes, there are new EVs coming in the pipeline. And GM has committed to spend $27 billion over the next five years on the development of electric vehicles and automated technology, a 35% increase that exceeds the automaker’s investment in gas and diesel.

But a look across its current portfolio and there’s no denying that GM is a maker of gas and diesel vehicles.

Will these vehicle models cease to exist or will they be “electrified?” How quickly will GM be able to transition its numerous factories to reflect its “only electric” mission? How will its workforce respond?

My questions abound. I am confident to make this prediction: the next decade at GM is going to be a wild ride.

AutoX’s next big move in China

I was just thinking to myself, ‘what is AutoX up to?’ when I saw their latest announcement. The Chinese autonomous vehicle company, which has also been developing and testing its tech in the U.S., opened its robotaxi pilot program to the public in Shenzhen. These robotaxis can be hailed and do not have a human safety operator behind the wheel.

It’s a milestone for the company and the country. AutoX said this is the first time that the general public will be able to book a completely autonomous robotaxi without accompanying safety drivers in China. Once a person registers, they can book rides through AutoNavi, the mapping and transportation-booking app owned by Alibaba, one of the startup’s investors.

You might recall that inAutoX opened in April 2020, an 80,000-square-foot Shanghai Robotaxi Operations Center, following a 2019 agreement with municipal authorities to deploy 100 autonomous vehicles in the Jiading District. The vehicles in the fleet were assembled at a factory about 93 miles outside of Shanghai.

The Shanghai operations center marked an escalation of AutoX’s ambitions that have expanded over the past year.

AutoX has now set up a robotaxi operations center in Shenzhen to support this new driverless program. The company says this new facility is more advanced than the previous operations centers it built in Shanghai.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/the-station-autox-meets-a-robotaxi-milestone-spin-adds-a-third-wheel-and-lime-embraces-mopeds/

Popular, highly-scrutinized trading app Robinhood has raised $2.4 billion to its balance sheet from shareholders, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and then confirmed by the company. The private startup raised $1 billion on Friday, meaning that it has raised $3.4 billion in a handful of days as it seeks to support a flood of retail investors looking to invest in individual stocks on its app – spurred by Redditors investing in GameStop in a effort to frustrate short sellers, in part. 

Per Robinhood, the new funds were “led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from existing investors including ICONIQ, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Index Ventures, and NEA with terms being finalized.” It’s somewhat unconventional to announce a raise that is still being sorted, but Robinhood wants to calm nerves, so shouting about the capital ahead of the paperwork being fully smoothed makes some sense.

The new capital comes at a challenging time for the unicorn, which could pursue an IPO this year – but also a time when it’s enjoying considerable public attention, likely introducing it to many potential new users. 

Last week, Robinhood found itself overwhelmed by the demand of new investors looking to invest in meme-stocks such as GameStop and AMC. Robinhood had to temporarily ban trading on these stocks due to stiff financial requirements. As of right now, Robinhood users are limited to buying just a few shares of GameStop and other stocks despite the company haven taken on more capital since the GameStop run began.

TechCrunch emailed Robinhood asking for details of the $2.4 billion infusion, curious if it was raised as primary capital, convertible debt that could convert at the time of a public offering, or other mechanism. Update: Robinhood declined to comment on the record. Sources familiar, however, tell TechCrunch that the funds were raised in the form of a convertible note. Forbes initially broke the news that the financing was raised as a convertible note.

“[A]mid this week’s extraordinary circumstances in the market, we made a tough decision today to temporarily limit buying for certain securities. As a brokerage firm, we have many financial requirements, including SEC net capital obligations and clearinghouse deposits. Some of these requirements fluctuate based on volatility in the markets and can be substantial in the current environment. These requirements exist to protect investors and the markets and we take our responsibilities to comply with them seriously, including through the measures we have taken today,” the company wrote in a post.

In other words: Robinhood ran low on capital, which meant it had to limit the frenzy of activity on its app. While the reasons behind Robinhood’s limits were technical, investors largely saw the constriction as a slap in the face in favor of hedge funds. Late Friday, Robinhood released yet another blog post detailing what happened during what some see as a pivotal week in the company’s trajectory. 

“Our goal is to enable purchasing for all securities on our platform. This is a dynamic, volatile market, and we have and may continue to take action to make sure we meet our requirements as a broker so we can continue to serve our customers for the long term,” the statement read. 

Today’s new capital will likely help Robinhood add some much needed buffer room, to the delight of its customers and investors. 

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/robinhoods-long-weekend-brings-a-total-of-3-4-billion-to-its-balance-sheet/

Weights & Biases, a startup building tools for machine learning practitioners, is announcing that it’s raised $45 million in Series B funding.

The company was founded by Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis — Biewald and Van Pelt previously founded CrowdFlower/Figure Eight (acquired by Appen). Weights & Biases says it now has more than 70,000 users at more than 200 enterprises.

Biewald (who I’ve known since college) argued that while machine learning practitioners are often compared to software developers, “they’re more like scientists in some ways than engineers.” It’s a process that involves numerous experiments, and Weights & Biases’ core product allows practitioners to track those experiments, while the company also offers tools around dataset versioning, model evaluation and pipeline management.

“If you have a model that’s controlling a self-driving car and the car crashes you really want to know what happened,” Biewald said. “If you built that model year ago and you’ve run all these experiments since then, it can be hard to systematically trace through what happened” unless you’re using experiment tracking.

He described the startup as “an early leader” in this market, and as competing tools emerge, eh said it’s also differentiated by “completely focused on the ML practitioner” rather than top-down enterprise sales. Similarly, he said that as machine learning has been adopted by more widely, Weights & Biases is occasionally confronted by a “high-class problem.”

Image Credits: Weights & Biases

“We’re not interested in selling to companies that are doing machine learning for machine learning’s sake,” Biewald said. “With some companies, there’s a mandate from the CEO to sprinkle some machine learning in the company. That’s just really depressing to me, to not have any impact. But I would actually say the vast majority of companies that we talk to really do something useful.”

For example, he said agriculture giant John Deere is using the startup’s platform to continually improve the way it uses robotics to spray fertilizer, rather than pesticide, to kill weeds and pests. And there are pharmaceutical companies using the platform as how they model how different molecules will behave.

Weights & Biases previously raised $20 million in funding. The new round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from Coatue, Trinity Ventures and Bloomberg Beta. Insight’s George Mathew is joining the board of directors.

“I’ve never seen a MLOps category leader with such a high NPS and deep customer focus as Weights and Biases,” Mathew said George Mathew said in a statement.“It’s an honor to make my first investment at Insight to serve an ML practitioner user-base that grew 60x these last two years.”

The startup says it will use the funding to continue hiring in engineering, growth, sales and customer success.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/weights-and-biases-series-b/

Millions of Ford and Lincoln-branded vehicles will be powered by Android operating system beginning in 2023 as part of a six-year partnership announced Monday that will bring embedded Google apps and services to drivers.

Ford and Google said as part of the partnership they will establish a new collaborative group called Team Upshift that will be used to develop new consumer experiences and services powered by the Android Automotive operating system. The team might create services that will change how customers buy a vehicle, for instance. The companies are also working together to create new business models with data. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted that could mean using data to send consumers real-time notices or handle maintenance requests.

The two companies also announced that Ford has chosen Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider.

The partnership marks a reversal for Ford, which has for years attempted to avoid third-party companies like Google and Apple, and instead pushed its open source platform. In 2017, Ford and Toyota Motor even formed a consortium known as SmartDeviceLink Consortium — a reference to an open source software version of Ford’s AppLink. The aim, at the time, was to speed up the deployment of the open source software to give consumers more options in how they connect and control their smartphone apps.

Android Automotive OS shouldn’t be confused with Android Auto, which is a secondary interface that lies on top of an operating system and relies on the user’s smartphone. Android Automotive OS is modeled after its open-source mobile operating system that runs on Linux. But instead of running smartphones and tablets, Google modified it so it could be used in cars.

Ford isn’t the only company with plans to incorporate a version of its Android operating system into its vehicles, although David McClelland, Ford Vice President of Strategy and Partnerships emphasized that the services and offerings would be unique.

For instance, Volvo announced in 2017 that it would use the Android OS and a year later said it would embed voice-controlled Google Assistant, Google Play Store, Google Maps and other Google services into its next-generation Sensus infotainment system. lvo. Polestar, the electric vehicle brand under Volvo, also uses Android Automotive OS to power the infotainment system for its newest vehicle, the Polestar 2.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/ford-vehicles-will-be-powered-by-googles-android-operating-system/

Google and Ford today announced a new partnership around bringing Android Automotive to Ford’s Ford- and Lincoln-branded cars, starting in 2023. But at the same time, the two companies also announced that Ford has chosen Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider.

“With Google Cloud, Ford will digitally transform from the front office to the car to the manufacturing plant floor,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a press conference today. “And there are a number of different applications, including modernizing product development, improving manufacturing and supply chain management, using computer vision AI for employee training, inspection of equipment on the assembly line and other applications.”

Kurian also noted that Google and Ford are working to find new ways to monetize Ford’s data through features like maintenance requests and trade-in alerts.

“At Ford, we’ve got world-class in-house data insights and analytics teams,”  David McClelland, Ford’s VP for strategy and partnerships, said. “We’ve recruited significant software expertise and we’re making great progress in this area. And we’re moving rapidly towards commercializing our new self-driving business. And with this news that Thomas [Kurian] and I are announcing today, we’re turbocharging all of that.”

McClelland stressed that Google “brought the entire company to the table for us across cloud, Android, Maps and much more.” It’s maybe also no surprise, given Google’s expertise in this area, that for is looking to leverage Google Cloud’s AI tools as well. This work will go beyond the actual driving experience, too, and include work on modernizing Ford’s product development, manufacturing and supply chain, as well as predictive maintenance in Ford’s plants.

Like other car manufacturers, Ford is also looking to find ways to use the data it collects to create a connection to its drivers that goes beyond the buying experience and (maybe) the occasional maintenance visit to a dealership. For this to work, it needs to be able to understand its customers and offer personalized experiences.

Today’s announcement marks a bit of a turnaround for Ford, which had previously banded together with a group of other car manufacturers with the explicit goal of keeping Google’s role in the automotive industry to a minimum. Now, only a few years later, the two are coming together in one of the deeper partnerships in the industry.

It’s also worth mentioning, that not too long ago, Ford had a deep partnership with Microsoft, which provided the basis of Ford’s Sync technology.

“From the first moving assembly line to the latest driver-assist technology, Ford has set the pace of innovation for the automotive industry for nearly 120 years,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. “We’re proud to partner to apply the best of Google’s AI, data analytics, compute and cloud
platforms to help transform Ford’s business and build automotive technologies that keep people safe and connected on the road.”

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Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/ford-bets-on-google-cloud-for-its-digital-transformation/