Bankrupt commercial EV startup Arrival has sold some of its assets, including advanced manufacturing equipment to Canoo, another struggling startup trying to build and sell electric vehicles.
Canoo said the purchased assets, packed into more than 20 container ships, will be sent to the company’s facility in Oklahoma.
The company previously acquired all of the new, and “like-new” assets owned by Arrival’s business unit in the United States.
Arrival announced in January that it planned to sell off assets and IP from its U.K. division after filing for bankruptcy protection in the U.K.
Arrival never produced any commercial vehicles at scale and its market valuation is now around $7.7 million.
Meta has dropped its lawsuit against an Israeli web scraping company Bright Data, after losing a key claim in its case a few weeks ago.
Beyond being just another case of web scraping, what made this case particularly interesting was that Meta was a Bright Data customer at one time.
However, when Bright Data scraped Meta’s own data, the company sued.
“This concession by Meta is a pivotal moment for Bright Data and the web scraping community.
“Bright Data remains committed to keeping public web data freely accessible to everyone.
Solana Mobile still has a long way to go until it hits breakeven Solana Labs co-founder teases possibility of third mobile deviceLast month, Solana Mobile’s flagship web3 smartphone, the Saga, sold out.
Last week the Solana Labs’ subsidiary launched its second phone and got over 40,000 preorders in less than a week.
“After Saga sold out, it felt like there’s an opportunity and the timing in the market was right,” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
“The timing [for the new phone] worked out right around that moment.”And if the second device is a success, there will be a third phone launched later on, Yakovenko hinted.
“I think crypto was going through a hard bear market, and the Solana ecosystem was feeling the worst of it,” Yakovenko said.
Allianz Direct, a digital-first German subsidiary of the insurance giant, has acquired the French home insurance business of ailing insurtech Luko for €4.3 million (around $4.65 million).
This was both expected and unexpected: The two companies were hoping to get the green light on a deal in November.
After all, Luko ambitioned to become a European insurtech unicorn on its own, and maybe it’s now paying the price for it.
But there’s also relief for some in knowing that the company won’t be sold for parts after all — and the business unit that will live on is arguably what it should have stuck to all along.
Along the way, things became more complicated and debt mounted as it expanded in other markets and made acquisitions: German startup Coya and fellow French startup Unkle, both in 2022.
Solana Mobile still has a long way to go until it hits breakeven Solana Labs co-founder teases possibility of third mobile deviceLast month, Solana Mobile’s flagship web3 smartphone, the Saga, sold out.
Last week the Solana Labs’ subsidiary launched its second phone and got over 40,000 preorders in less than a week.
“After Saga sold out, it felt like there’s an opportunity and the timing in the market was right,” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
“The timing [for the new phone] worked out right around that moment.”And if the second device is a success, there will be a third phone launched later on, Yakovenko hinted.
“I think crypto was going through a hard bear market, and the Solana ecosystem was feeling the worst of it,” Yakovenko said.
ZestMoney, the Goldman Sachs-backed Indian fintech startup once valued at $450 million, has sold itself to financial services firm DMI Group, the two said late Wednesday, in a fire sale that caps 12 tumultuous months for the once-hot new age lender.
In a statement, DMI Group said the deal grants it with the exclusive right to the use of all Zest brands and make the NBFC arm DMI Finance a preferred lender on the Zest platform.
“DMI will also bring its customer base, balance-sheet strength and significant risk-management experience to drive growth across Zest’s online and offline merchant network,” DMI said in a statement.
ZestMoney founders quit the startup in May last year after acquisition talks with fintech giant PhonePe didn’t materialize.
We firmly believe that this acquisition will be an important step in our journey to provide digital financial inclusion at scale across India.”
Ten of TuSimple’s autonomous big rigs are set to be auctioned off later this month, just a few weeks after the self-driving trucking startup that went public in 2021 announced it was exiting the U.S. market.
The trucks, along with a slew of research and development equipment and office supplies, will be sold off in two online auctions.
A spokesperson for the auction company confirmed 10 trucks will “initially” be sold.
The company went public in 2021 and was swiftly scrutinized by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States over its Chinese shareholders.
In December, the company said it would exit the U.S. altogether and laid off more than 150 workers as a result.
Lucid Motors delivered only 6,001 of the 8,428 cars it built last year, as it continues to struggle to generate demand for its luxury electric sedans.
Lucid also said in late 2023 that it had shipped 800 cars to Saudi Arabia to be assembled at a new facility in the Kingdom.
In total, Lucid’s 2023 production and sales figures were only marginally better than they were in 2022, where it built 7,180 cars and delivered 4,369 of them.
The disappointing sales figures cap a tough year for Lucid.
This story has been updated to note that Lucid Motors declined to comment on whether the 800 cars in Saudi Arabia were included in the delivery figures.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has banned the data broker X-Mode Social from sharing or selling users’ sensitive location data, the federal regulator said Tuesday.
The settlement will also require the data broker to delete or destroy all the location data it previously collected, along with any products produced from this data, unless the company obtains consumer consent or ensures the data has been de-identified.
X-Mode buys and sells access to the location data collected from ordinary phone apps.
While just one of many organizations in the multibillion-dollar data broker industry, X-Mode faced scrutiny for selling access to the commercial location data of Americans’ past movements to the U.S. government and military contractors.
Since its inception, X-Mode has imposed strict contractual terms on all data customers prohibiting them from associating its data with sensitive locations such as healthcare facilities.
A couple years ago, when the pandemic was still in full swing, Raj Kapoor and Josh Felser started making some investments in climate tech startups.
Things must have gone well, because now they’re jumping in: The firm today said it has closed a $65 million inaugural fund, using it to back founders who are starting climate tech software companies.
Felser founded Spinner in 1997 (sold to AOL) and Crackle in 2004 (sold to Sony).
He also started the #Climate nonprofit in 2014 and a public-private COVID task force during the pandemic.
Those experiences, coupled with a growing concern for the state of the Earth’s climate, led the two to form Climactic.
