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.
It’s been described as “the largest merger in African e-commerce” by both companies.
When the planned merger was first announced, the B2B e-commerce players were active in eight countries.
These recent moves suggest the new entity will likely serve fewer than the 450,000 retailers quoted during the merger announcement.
As the merger nears completion, the CEOs from both companies will continue as full-time executives but function in different roles.
“Regarding our merger with MaxAB, it is important to state that this is progressing as expected and in accordance with the initial terms.
Only a few years ago, one of the hottest topics in enterprise software was ‘robotic process automation’ (RPA).
The rise of generative AI, however, may just be the missing key to building these kinds of systems.
“Last year, generative AI happened and I realized that it unlocks some software scenarios that were impossible before,” Surpatanu said.
You have to combine it with more traditional software if you want to squeeze the best out of it,” he said.
Generative AI, Surpatanu argues, can bring a degree of adaptability to context and an understanding of the user’s intent to these systems that wasn’t really possible before and something that RPA often struggles with.
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The Space Force has contracted out its next “responsive space” mission, and this one is a doozy.
The two awardees, Rocket Lab and startup True Anomaly, will each build and launch spacecraft that will conduct rendezvous and proximity operations on orbit.
Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post.
Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday.
Cruise has not announced when or where it will resume driverless operations.
The company’s main operations were historically based in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its permits to operate there following the accident.
Cruise began expanding its paid service area in the Phoenix area in August 2023.
Mobile gadget and bag maker Targus says it is experiencing a “temporary interruption” to its business operations following a cyberattack on Friday.
In a notice with regulators on Monday, Targus’ parent company, B. Riley Financial, said it discovered “a threat actor gained unauthorized access to certain of Targus’ file systems,” and shut down much of its network to isolate the incident.
“The incident has been contained and Targus systems recovery efforts are in process,” the statement said.
B. Riley acquired Targus in a 2022 deal worth approximately $250 million.
When reached by email, a spokesperson for B. Riley did not immediately comment.
Berlin’s Razor Group has acquired U.S.-based Perch, and on top of this it has raised just over $100 million led by Presight Capital with other undisclosed investors participating.
The news is the latest development in a wider consolidation and reordering taking place in the world of e-commerce aggregation.
Perch, we have heard from multiple sources, had been looking for a buyer for the better part of a year.
Perch and Razor do happen to have some investors in common, such as Victory Park Capital, which may well have been central to the negotiations between the two.
He claims that this deal solidifies Razor as the “market leader”, and that it is on track for $1 billion in revenues in the next four to eight quarters.
Motional, the autonomous vehicle company borne out of a joint venture between Hyundai Moor Group and Aptiv, told employees Wednesday it will cut about 5% of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.
The autonomous vehicle company last had layoffs in December 2022, when it cut about 10% of its workforce.
Motional operates an autonomous vehicle taxi service in Las Vegas (still with human safety operators behind the wheel) on Uber, Lyft and Via platforms.
A production-ready autonomous vehicle, equipped with the kind of redundancies designed for safe operations without a human driver, is a critical milestone required for commercial operations.
During CES 2024, the company announced plans to work with Kia on a next-generation vehicle that will enter commercial operations later this decade.
Waymo’s application to expand its robotaxi service in Los Angeles and San Mateo counties has been suspended for 120 days by the California Public Utilities Commission’s Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division.
The decision doesn’t change Waymo’s ability to commercially operate driverless vehicles in San Francisco.
However, it does put an abrupt halt to the company’s aspirations to expand where it can operate — at least until June 2024.
The CPED said on its website that the application has been suspended for further staff review.
San Mateo County Board of Supervisors Vice President David J. Canepa issued a statement following the ruling.
The husband-and-wife duo departed World View in 2018; the following year, they started another balloon company, Space Perspective, this time squarely focused on ultra-high-altitude tourism.
Space Perspective, which aims to commence commercial service as soon as the end of this year, is entering a nascent market: its closest competitors are Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, which offer rides to suborbital space.
There’s duration: a flight on New Shepard takes 11 minutes from lift-off to landing; Space Perspective’s will last six hours.
Simultaneously, Space Perspective is working with the U.S. Coast Guard, which maintains regulatory authority over space-related activities that occur in water.
One notable difference is development costs: Space Perspective has raised $77 million from investors since 2019, while Virgin Galactic has spent more than $1 billion developing its system.
