And it started an all-Tesla, all-employee ride-hail service, in part so its charging infrastructure would see guaranteed utilization.
The move comes after Revel successfully piloted the model in late February with 100 Revel drivers and has since brought on 100 more.
The question of flexibility has been at the heart of the debate over whether ride-hail drivers should be classified as gig workers or employees.
That said, Rubinson says Revel’s ride-hail portion of the business recently hit gross margin positivity and was tracking to be EBITDA positive by the end of the year.
In 2022, Frank Reig, Revel’s CEO, told TechCrunch that over 90% of its charging hub utilization came from Revel’s own ride-hail fleet.
With the launch of TC’s AI newsletter, we’re sunsetting This Week in AI, the semiregular column previously known as Perceptron.
But you’ll find all the analysis we brought to This Week in AI and more, including a spotlight on noteworthy new AI models, right here.
The group published an open letter on Tuesday calling for leading AI companies, including OpenAI, to establish greater transparency and more protections for whistleblowers.
(Reward models are specialized models to evaluate the outputs of AI models, in this case math-related outputs from GPT-4.)
Should generative AI replace most knowledge workers within three years (which seems unrealistic to me given AI’s many unsolved technical problems), economic collapse could well ensue.
Tesla’s layoffs and executive departures took a bite out its share price this week.
The well-known electric vehicle company shed around 10% of its staff, impacting an estimated 14,000 staff or more.
It missed delivery estimates for the first quarter, has reportedly reduced hours for the production-line of its Cybertruck, and is seeing rivals in China stack market share with low-priced EVs.
Tesla, in other words, helped foster the global electric vehicle market, but is losing some of its primacy in that same market.
In human terms, for every dollar of car that Tesla sells, it generates far more company worth than its rivals.
At the upcoming TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 event taking place in Boston on April 25, one session will stand out for early-stage companies seeking to navigate the turbulent waters of tech and staffing strategies.
Titled “How to Evolve Your Tech and Staff Strategies for Future Rounds,” the session will be led by Brad Stanton, the managing director of business development at Sand Technologies.
His session at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 will offer invaluable guidance for startups aiming to chart a course toward sustainable growth and success in an ever-changing landscape.
Then book your ticket to TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 right now before prices increase at the door.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024?
Agility Robotics on Thursday confirmed that it has laid off a “small number” of employees.
The well-funded Oregon-based firm says the job loss is part of a company-wide focus on commercialization efforts.
Ultimately, however, those efforts were placed on the back burner, as the company shifted focus to understaffed warehouses.
Two years ago this month, the company announced a $150 million Series B. Amazon notably participated in the round by way of its Industrial Innovation Fund.
Last month at Modex, Agility showcased updates to Digit’s end effectors designed specifically for automotive manufacturing workflows.
ChowNow snaps up YC-backed POS platform Cuboh and is laying off staffChowNow, the online ordering platform and marketing service for local restaurants, acquired Cuboh, a Y Combinator-backed point-of-sale (POS) platform that consolidates all orders from delivery apps into one place.
This marks ChowNow’s first acquisition, which will help strengthen its POS integration solution and help restaurants tackle orders across multiple services.
Meanwhile, Cuboh’s entire 30-person team — including marketing, sales, product and engineering — is transitioning to ChowNow.
Starting next week, restaurant owners can access a newly launched bundle, “ChowNow + Cuboh,” for $275 per month.
“It’s getting back to the longer-term product vision of what we’re building, of being the only platform restaurants need for their entire takeout business,” Webb said.
Banking-as-a-service startup (BaaS) Synctera has conducted a restructuring that has resulted in a staff reduction, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
While Synctera did not share how many employees were impacted, a report in Fintech Business Weekly pegs the number to be about 17 people, or about 15% of the company.
Synctera built a platform designed to bring together fintech companies and sponsor banks.
Treasury Prime slashed half its 100-person staff in February, a year after it announced a $40 million Series C raise.
Meanwhile, Piermont Bank reportedly cut ties with startup Unit, FinTech Business reported.
Yet another AI-powered fraud detection software provider is laying off staff.
Inscribe, whose platform works to detect fraud in areas like business underwriting, tenant screening, and onboarding, has cut just under 40% of its staff, which equates to dozens of employees.
San Francisco-based Inscribe.ai confirmed the headcount reduction to TechCrunch, noting that the AI advances in the financial services industry necessitated a pivot to a new product and direction for the company.
“2023 was a year of change for our customers and Inscribe,” explained Inscribe CEO and co-founder, Ronan Burke.
At the time, the company forecast it would double its then 50-person workforce over the coming 12 to 18 months.
Turnitin laid off staff earlier this year, after CEO forecast AI would allow it to cut headcountPeople worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but rarely does a company’s CEO openly admit that AI will help to reduce their headcount.
TechCrunch learned that Turnitin laid off around 15 people earlier this year, as part of broader organizational changes.
Klarna recently announced that its AI Assistant can do the job of 700 workers, shocking the industry.
(Klarna later clarified that the customer service workers the AI was replacing were hired from outsourcing firms, not direct employees.)
Turnitin confirmed its layoffs in a statement to TechCrunch, but not the headcount:
Fisker is laying off 15% of staff and says it needs more cash ahead of a “difficult year”Electric vehicle startup Fisker is planning to lay off 15% of its workforce and says it likely does not have enough cash on hand to survive the next 12 months.
“[W]e have put a plan in place to streamline the company as we prepare for another difficult year,” founder and CEO Henrik Fisker said in a statement.
Fisker said Thursday that it finished 2023 with $396 million in cash, though $70 million of that is restricted.
The company says it is talking with one of its lenders about making “an additional investment” in the company.
Fisker has also been dealing with a number of problems with its Ocean SUV, its only model so far, as TechCrunch reported earlier this month.
