Oda, the Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup, has confirmed layoffs of 150 jobs as it drastically scales back its expansion ambitions to focus on just two markets, its homebase and Sweden, the homebase of Mathem, an online grocery that Oda merged with last year.
Online grocery is hard — complex orders with perishable items and a multi-temperature supply chain in a highly price sensitive category,” Oda’s CEO, Chris Poad, wrote on LinkedIn last week (before the layoffs were announced).
Prior to the pandemic, Oda – founded in 2013 – carved out a place for itself as one of the strong regional players in online grocery delivery in Europe.
But by late 2022 Oda was raising $151 million at a valuation of $353 million.
Local publication e24 says Kinnevik and other existing backers Summa Equity and Verdane are expected to provide the bulk of the NOK600 million ($57 million) Oda is reportedly raising.
But e-bike subscription startup Whizz sees it as an opportunity.
The lack of disruption in the e-bike subscription arena could mean that Whizz is in a perfect position to get a first-mover advantage.
Or it could mean that the e-bike subscription model is difficult to get right.
Other consumer-facing micromobility subscriptions in NYC have come and gone, like Beyond’s e-scooter rental offering and charging infrastructure company Revel’s attempt at an e-bike subscription.
His co-founders — Alex Mironov, Ksenia Proka, and Artem Serbovka — built and sold an e-bike subscription platform, Moy Device, to a private equity firm in Russia.
Inversion Space is aptly named.
Inversion has developed a pathfinder vehicle, called Ray, that’s a technical precursor to a larger platform that will debut in 2026.
Impressively, the company has designed and built almost all of the Ray vehicle in-house, from the propulsion system to the structure to the parachutes.
“The purpose of our Ray vehicle is to develop technology for our next-gen vehicle.
As such, we’ve built basically the entire vehicle in-house,” Fiaschetti said.
One of Tesla’s delivery workers who was cut this week and spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity said their location was “short staffed” but still lost multiple employees.
The decision to end discounts across its lineup in the United States, including the Model 3, Model Y, Model S and Model X is a bit of a whiplash moment for Tesla.
And in the first quarter of 2024, Tesla’s delivery numbers fell year-over-year.
It’s not clear how removing discounts on Tesla vehicles fits into the automaker’s new strategy to streamline sales and delivery.
But beyond the initial purchase, Tesla has almost always been making changes to its sales and delivery strategy.
Lucid Motors delivered more EVs in the first quarter of 2024 than it has in any other quarter, though it set the record by a very slim margin.
The Saudi-backed, California-based electric vehicle company said Tuesday morning that it shipped 1,967 luxury sedans in the quarter.
That’s just a few more than it shipped in the fourth quarter of 2022, when it set its previous record of 1,932 deliveries.
Lucid’s new delivery record comes as the company is struggling to find consistent demand for its pricey luxury sedan, the Air.
But it has not specified how many Air sedans have made it to the Kingdom to date.
Bay Area/Colombia-based delivery robotics firm Kiwibot this week announced that it has acquired Auto Mobility Solutions.
The Taipei firm produces chips specifically for the world of robotics and autonomous driving.
Kiwi founder and CEO Felipe Chávez Cortés does, however, tell TechCrunch that rising tensions between the U.S. and China are a key motivator for the purchase.
Prior to this, the U.S. government had set its sights on various Chinese tech giants, including Huawei and DJI.
Taiwan’s tenuous geopolitical situation, coupled with its vastly outsized share of the semiconductor market, has placed it at the center of the conflict.
Amazon has been fined in Poland for misleading consumers about the conclusion of sales contracts on its online marketplace.
For Amazon, the conclusion of a sales contract only occurs once it has sent information about the actual shipment.
“Thus, Amazon misleads consumers as to the moment of conclusion of the sales contract,” the authority wrote [in Polish; this is a machine translation].
It also found the e-commerce giant failed to provide information about the “Delivery Guarantee” in the purchase confirmation sent to shoppers.
Amazon was contacted for comment on the sanction but at the time of writing it had not responded.
DoorDash is expanding its partnership with Alphabet’s Wing to bring its drone delivery pilot to the U.S., the company announced on Thursday.
DoorDash first launched its drone delivery pilot program in Australia in 2022, where it is now operating drone deliveries with over 60 merchants.
Once they select the drone option, their order will be prepared and delivered via a Wing drone within 30 minutes.
Most of Wendy’s items will qualify for drone delivery, but certain items be not be eligible if they exceed volume and weight restrictions.
If the order contains more than what one drone can carry, DoorDash will deploy up to three drones to deliver the order.
Among the many stress points in e-commerce machine, delivery has long been seen as one of the more painful ones.
“Delivery is the biggest unsolved puzzle is delivery part,” Piotr Zaleski, Ingrid’s co-founder and CEO said in an interview.
And in case you are at all curious: Ingrid the business was not named to ensure coverage in TechCrunch by me, Ingrid.
Ingrid has identified a very obvious problem that most certainly can use fixing, but it also faces a few challenges.
“The only way is to build a hell of a platform that retailers want to use to take a volume position,” Zaleski said.
DoorDash hopes to reduce verbally abusive and inappropriate interactions between consumers and delivery people with its new AI-powered feature that automatically detects offensive language.
Dubbed “SafeChat+,” DoorDash is leveraging AI technology to review in-app conversations and determine if a customer or Dasher is being harassed.
The feature is an upgrade from SafeChat, where DoorDash’s Trust & Safety team manually screens chats for verbal abuse.
The company tells TechCrunch that SafeChat+ is “the same concept [as SafeChat] but backed by even better, even more sophisticated technology.
It can understand subtle nuances and threats that don’t match any specific keywords.”“We know that verbal abuse or harassment represents the largest type of safety incident on our platform.
