The most widespread type of battery, lithium-ion, still costs around $140 per kilowatt-hour for a pack.
Instead, manufacturers have started to explore sodium-ion batteries, not as a replacement, but as a complement to lithium-ion.
To deliver that many batteries, Unigrid isn’t going to be building its own factories.
Small vehicles like these are popular in India and Southeast Asia, where the intense heat can make lithium-ion batteries prone to overheating.
To get its sodium-ion batteries into production, Unigrid has raised a $12 million Series A.
Wastewater from these plants emerges laden with sodium sulfate, a byproduct of sulfuric acid and caustic soda, two chemicals used in battery manufacturing, copper refining and other industries.
“We can totally create a circular economy around these reagent chemicals,” Bilen Akuzum, co-founder and CTO of Aepnus Technology, told TechCrunch.
The two founded Aepnus to modernize the century-old chloralkali process, which splits salts like sodium sulfate back into the acids and bases that created them.
“We don’t use any expensive catalysts in our electrolyzers,” Akuzum said.
For customers, fully recycling sodium sulfate waste should reduce disposal and material costs.
The economy remains on shaky ground in Europe, but there is some silver lining for enterprise startups: those building tools to help businesses run their finances in more steady and predictable ways are seeing a boost to their business.
“We are now poised to take the AccountsIQ product and service to the next level,” said Tony Connolly, founder and CEO of AccountsIQ, in a statement.
Thus, the prosaic accounting startup continues to get attention.
(AccountsIQ and its primary investor for this round, Axiom Equity, are not disclosing its valuation.)
In contrast, Cran says that AccountsIQ positions itself as the platform that businesses will move to as they scale up.
Is the key to autonomous cars that don’t run over pedestrians and crash into telephone poles a humanoid robot behind the wheel?
The researchers, one of whom consults for Toyota, developed and trained a “musculoskeletal humanoid” called Musashi to drive a small electric car through a test track.
With its mechanical hands, it can rotate the car’s key, pull the handbrake and switch on the turn signal.
Musashi did use the accelerator in a separate experiment, the researchers say.
Fortunately, the researchers say they’re up for the challenge, with plans to develop a next-gen robot and software.
There has been a lot of recent chaos in the world of electric vehicles, and Ford has capitalized on it to build out its secretive low-cost EV team.
It also hired around 10 employees from Lucid Motors, and a handful from Apple’s recently disbanded EV team known as Project Titan.
The company declined to respond to specific questions about how it’s building out the team, which is known internally as Ford Advanced EV.
It also noted that some of the work being done by Ford Advanced EV could be applied to other efforts across the company, not necessarily just to the low-cost EV project.
“The Ford Advanced EV team is part of a global effort to build focused technology and product development teams local to the best talent centers.
This week in AI, Apple stole the spotlight.
At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence, its long-awaited, ecosystem-wide push into generative AI.
The company promised Apple Intelligence is being built with safety at its core, along with highly personalized experiences.
Apple revealed in a blog post that it trains the AI models that power Apple Intelligence on a combination of licensed datasets and the public web.
Grab bagThis week marked the sixth anniversary of the release of GPT-1, the progenitor of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s latest flagship generative AI model.
“The predominant traveler today was born in an age where they are very comfortable with technology,” Harman Singh Narula, Canary Technologies co-founder and CEO, said.
Narula started Canary Technologies with longtime friend SJ Sawhney to provide that technology so hotels can offer better guest experiences, augmented by technology.
Today, the hotel guest management technology company’s platform digitizes the hotel guest journey from post-booking through checkout with tools that manage mobile check-in/checkout, registrations, upsells, guest messaging and digital tipping.
Canary now works with over 20,000 hoteliers globally at brands like Marriott International, Four Seasons, Choice Hotels, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Rosewood and Intercontinental Hotel Group.
Though he didn’t give a specific valuation, Narula did say the valuation has now more than doubled since the company’s $30 million Series B round in 2022.
Now rebranded as Mosaic AI, the platform has become integral to Databricks’ AI solutions.
Today, at the company’s Data + AI Summit, it is launching a number of new features for the service.
Databricks is launching five new Mosaic AI tools at its conference: Mosaic AI Agent Framework, Mosaic AI Agent Evaluation, Mosaic AI Tools Catalog, Mosaic AI Model Training, and Mosaic AI Gateway.
And we’ve also found in our internal AI applications, like the assistant applications for our platform, that this is the way to build them,” he said.
But when you really pushed people, they were using Open AI.
Two of the country’s prominent fabless AI chip startups, Rebellions and Sapeon, have agreed to merge, the companies said on Wednesday.
The merger is a strategic move by Rebellions and Sapeon aimed at leading the fabless AI chip market in South Korea to take on global rivals like Nvidia.
Indeed, the deal comes at a pivotal moment in the global chip industry.
Meanwhile, KT in 2023 incorporated Atom, Rebellions’ datacenter-focused AI chip, into its cloud-based NPU infrastructure.
Last November, the company launched a 7-nanometer AI chip, X330 NPU, for autonomous vehicles, and earlier this year, it said it would develop an on-device AI chip targeting the edge computing market.
Fresh off the success of its first mission, satellite manufacturer Apex has closed $95 million in new capital to scale its operations.
The Los Angeles-based startup successfully launched and commissioned its first spacecraft, a model called Aries, in March.
The company is on track to manufacture five Aries this year alone, Apex CEO and co-founder Ian Cinnamon told TechCrunch.
Apex was founded on the thesis that the one of the main bottlenecks facing the growth of the space industry was satellite bus manufacturing.
The company is approaching fifty people and that number is likely to double by the end of this year.
