Steve Burns, the ousted founder, chairman and CEO of bankrupt EV startup Lordstown Motors, has settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over misleading investors about demand for the company’s flagship all-electric Endurance pickup truck.
The SEC charged Lordstown Motors in February 2024 with misleading investors about the sales prospects of its Endurance electric pickup truck.
Lordstown Motors was founded in April 2019 as an offshoot of Burns’ other company, Workhorse Group.
During and after the merger, Lordstown received $780 million from investors, according to the SEC.
Lordstown Motors attracted the attention and investment of GM and even acquired the 6.2 million-square-foot assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio from the automaker.
Investors’ pledge to fight spyware undercut by past investments in US malware maker Cyber investors announced commitments to fighting spyware, but at least one firm previously invested in an exploit maker.
Now, some investors have announced that they too are committed to fighting spyware.
More recently, the government has imposed economic sanctions not only on companies, but also directly on the executive who founded Intellexa.
To hear some of these investors talk, you’d think that spyware has no place in a free and open society.
Gula Tech and Paladin’s investment in Boldend — effectively a U.S.-based exploit and hacking software maker — and the two investment firms’ commitment to not invest in spyware companies might seem at odds.
The big cloud vendors have all already lined up with other chatbot partners: Microsoft with OpenAI, Google and Amazon with Anthropic; Cohere picking up assorted others like Oracle and Salesforce.
If and when Inflection ever perfected Pi on its enormous AI infrastructure, the race looked to be already lost.
Despite close ties with OpenAI, Microsoft also has many reasons to be needing a backup for it’s all-important AI gambit.
There are so many red flags with OpenAI that Microsoft is wise to wean its dependence.
Then again, just like Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, we wonder if regulators will also have something to say about this deal.
The Carevoice, an embedded insurance solution provider that started in Shanghai and now has a footprint across 15 countries, has apparently made that math look attractive to investors in the space.
The company just raised $10 million from a Series B financing led by U.K.-based Apis Insurtech Fund I, which contributed to most of the round.
In 2023, U.S.-based digital health startups raised a total of $10.7 billion across 492 deals, the lowest amount since 2019, according to Rock Health, a health tech-focused seed fund.
That funding slowdown also hit The Carevoice, though it weathered the storm by reaching healthy cash flow.
Embedded health solution providers like The Carevoice can find themselves competing with traditional IT and consulting service companies, such as Tata’s TCS.
Astera Labs IPO will reveal how much investors want in on AI Startups with an AI angle would do well to pay attentionWhile the technology world breathlessly awaits Reddit’s public debut, another company you might never have heard of is about to go public: Astera Labs.
While Reddit’s IPO could do well from investors looking to buy a well-known social media company that has an interesting, burgeoning AI data business, Astera Labs is an AI hardware story.
So, on an annual basis, this is far from the kind of profitable company IPO experts say this harsh market requires.
In the third quarter of 2023, Astera Labs’ revenue began growing dramatically: from $10.7 million in Q2 2023 to $36.9 million in Q3, and $50.5 million in Q4.
Putting it all together: Astera Labs has caught a wave thanks to AI data center spending.
Late-stage VCs may be preventing their startups from going public in 2024 Founders might have unintentionally given their VCs too much power to block an IPOWhile some investors are loudly bemoaning that the IPO window can’t stay shut forever, other VCs themselves are actually part of the problem.
It’s a common term for late-stage investors agreeing to pay higher prices for their stake to boost a startup’s valuation.
When late-stage startups raised at sky-high valuations in 2021 they may not have realized how much power they were giving their late-stage investors if the market cooled, which it did.
“People confuse up and to the right, with a god-given right,” Hinkle said.
He added that there is always a lot more friction between investors and startups about the decision to IPO than investors would like to admit.
Arjun Sethi speaks with the confidence of someone who knows more than other people, or else who knows that sounding highly confident can shape perception.
Namely, if Termina is so good, why are Sethi and Tribe giving other investment firms a way to better compete?
Relatedly, why should other investors trust Termina, which ingests its customers’ data to improve over time?
This may prove doubly true given Termina’s ties to Tribe Capital.
Among these is Alex Chee, who cofounded MessageMe with Sethi, joined him at Social Capital, and subsequently co-founded both Tribe and Termina with him.
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The secondary market allows for that now.”Stripe’s recent secondary sale is a clear example of this.
Leung said that Sapphire deployed roughly $500 million into the secondary market in 2023, and expects to deploy the same if not more into secondary stakes in 2024.
But given the maturation of the secondary market, it doesn’t need to thaw before the market is really ready.
The secondary market “is playing a huge role,” Leung said regarding companies waiting to go public.
[LPs] are not pressuring the GPs to push out their assets, which reduces the demand for the public market.”
Phantom Auto, a remote driving startup that launched seven years ago amid the buzz of autonomous vehicle technology, is shutting down after failing to secure new funding, TechCrunch has learned.
Phantom Auto, which had cut staff last year, employed a little more than 100 people as of this week.
Phantom Auto’s demise is the latest in a long line of startups that popped up as the autonomous vehicle technology industry gained attention and investment from investors.
Phantom Auto was founded in 2017 and initially focused on applying its teleops technology to autonomous vehicles on public roadways such as robotaxis and self-driving trucks.
Phantom Auto pivoted in 2019 and started shopping its remote driving system to logistics, specifically forklifts and yard trucks that have no autonomy as well as autonomous sidewalk delivery robots.
