Image Credits: Haje Kamps (opens in a new window) / TechCrunch (opens in a new window)
A year ago, at CES, I broke out the snark-hammer at 444, a startup that was trying to make a “smart” pepper spray device. I came across the same company again at CES this year. To my surprise, it had landed a significant partnership, co-development and co-branding deal with Mace, one of the biggest names in the sprayable self-defense sector.
444‘s agreement with Mace is “a preliminary exclusivity agreement for purposes of jointly developing and bringing to market a smart pepper spray device that is GPS and Bluetooth enabled and which sends out current location to emergency contacts when deployed.”
“We were here at CES last year, starting with a rough-looking 3D print and an example PCBA board. We made a lot of connections, and we got some news articles from TechCrunch and many others,” says Logan Nash, co-founder at 444. “The wind just kind of took the idea out there in the self-defense industry. A few months after CES, Mace reached out to us, and we’ve built a great relationship with them and finalized our partnership.”
The samples 444 had at its booth were pre-production samples that looked stellar: Great design, well-made and almost ready to go into production. The team tells me they hope to start spinning up production in the next few months.
“We did a lot of customer discovery to figure out exactly what the consumer wants, and what they need. One of the things we kept hearing was that the users want a sleek, aesthetically appealing device. So that’s what we have here. A great-looking device with great colors and high quality, it’s very strong. It has a metal frame to really keep everything together,” Nash explains. “But we also wanted longevity for the device. If the user does deploy their pepper spray, they can unscrew the back, and replace the canister so it’s ready for another use.”
The replaceable-cannister model is novel; most pepper sprays are cheap, single-use devices, but 444’s offering is a premium product that will cost significantly more than the $14-for-two devices you can order on Amazon. Its price tag is likely to be in the $75-100 range, the team tells TechCrunch, so being able to reuse the device and the electronics is crucial.
You can open the back of the 444 device and replace the Mace cannister if the device has been deployed. Image Credits: TechCrunch / Haje Kamps
The company hastens to share that even if you forget to charge the device, the Mace part still works — that’s fully mechanical — although obviously the GPS alert system to your support circle wouldn’t be activated.
“When you deploy the device, pepper spray comes out. It also sends a signal to your phone, which will send your current — and live — location to nominated emergency contact, whether that’s mom, dad, brother, sister, you name it,” says Nash. “That part is free. For an additional subscription, the app will connect you to a 24-hour emergency hotline which will then direct you to local authorities, whether that’s police dispatchers or campus security.”
As a company, Mace has had a rough couple of years. From a peak market cap of $46 million in April 2021, today, the company is worth less than $2.5 million. It stands to reason that the company is turning to young innovators to bolster its relevance in the market.
“Mace Brand is very excited about this first-of-its-kind smart product for Mace. The spray is the most advanced of its kind and we believe the most significant release in the industry in decades,” Sanjay Singh, chairman and CEO of Mace Brand wrote in a press statement. “This product is perfect for those who value personal safety while looking for the most technologically advanced product. The product’s high-end design should appeal to consumers on the move and at home.”
I’ll have the humble pie for one, please, sir
Let me be the first to say that I really didn’t see that coming; I was genuinely surprised to be reminded of the company at all, and doubly baffled they were still around. I missed something — and it’s a little refreshing to be reminded of that in such a person-to-person way as running into the founders at the very same trade show a year later.
I often end up seeing startups at CES that seem completely pointless (this year, my eyes did backflips over Direction 9. If they get acquired by Samsung by next year, I guess I really have to reevaluate my role as an analyst), and after many years of seeing startups do dumb things, I do find myself a little jaded.
This serves as a great great reminder that, for true entrepreneurs, it takes more than a snarky post from an opinionated blogger to encourage them to throw in the towel. Consider this my “Hey, I’m wrong at least 20% of the time” confession, and I’m curious to see where 444 goes from here.
Lamini, a Palo Alto-based startup building a platform to help enterprises deploy generative AI tech, has raised $25 million from investors, including Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng.
Lamini, co-founded several years ago by Sharon Zhou and Greg Diamos, has an interesting sales pitch.
Many generative AI platforms are far too general purpose, Zhou and Diamos argue, and don’t have solutions and infrastructure geared to meet the needs of corporations. In contrast, Lamini was built from the ground up with enterprises in mind and is focused on delivering high generative AI accuracy and scalability.
“The top priority of nearly every CEO, CIO and CTO is to take advantage of generative AI within their organization with maximal ROI,” Zhou, Lamini’s CEO, told TechCrunch. “But while it’s easy to get a working demo on a laptop for an individual developer, the path to production is strewn with failures left and right.”
To Zhou’s point, many companies have expressed frustration with the hurdles to meaningfully embracing generative AI across their business functions.
According to a March poll from MIT Insights, only 9% of organizations have widely adopted generative AI despite 75% having experimented with it. Top hurdles run the gamut from a lack of IT infrastructure and capabilities to poor governance structures, insufficient skills and high implementation costs. Security is a major factor, too — in a recent survey by Insight Enterprises, 38% of companies said security was impacting their ability to leverage generative AI tech.
So what’s Lamini’s answer?
Zhou says that “every piece” of Lamini’s tech stack has been optimized for enterprise-scale generative AI workloads, from the hardware to the software, including the engines used to support model orchestration, fine-tuning, running and training. “Optimized” is a vague word, granted, but Lamini is pioneering one step that Zhou calls “memory tuning,” which is a technique to train a model on data such that it recalls parts of that data exactly.
Memory tuning can potentially reduce hallucinations, Zhou claims, or instances when a model makes up facts in response to a request.
“Memory tuning is a training paradigm — as efficient as fine-tuning, but goes beyond it — to train a model on proprietary data that includes key facts, numbers and figures so that the model has high precision,” Nina Wei, an AI designer at Lamini, told me via email, “and can memorize and recall the exact match of any key information instead of generalizing or hallucinating.”
I’m not sure I buy that. “Memory tuning” appears to be more a marketing term than an academic one; there aren’t any research papers about it — none that I managed to turn up, at least. I’ll leave Lamini to show evidence that its “memory tuning” is better than the other hallucination-reducing techniques that are being/have been attempted.
Fortunately for Lamini, memory tuning isn’t its only differentiator.
Zhou says the platform can operate in highly secured environments, including air-gapped ones. Lamini lets companies run, fine-tune, and train models on a range of configurations, from on-premises data centers to public and private clouds. And it scales workloads “elastically,” reaching over 1,000 GPUs if the application or use case demands it, Zhou says.
“Incentives are currently misaligned in the market with closed source models,” Zhou said. “We aim to put control back into the hands of more people, not just a few, starting with enterprises who care most about control and have the most to lose from their proprietary data owned by someone else.”
For what it’s worth, Lamini’s co-founders are quite accomplished in the AI space. They’ve also separately brushed shoulders with Ng, which no doubt explains his investment.
Zhou was previously faculty at Stanford, where she headed a group that was researching generative AI. Prior to receiving her doctorate in computer science under Ng, she was a machine learning product manager at Google Cloud.
Diamos, for his part, co-founded MLCommons, the engineering consortium dedicated to creating standard benchmarks for AI models and hardware, as well as the MLCommons benchmarking suite, MLPerf. He also led AI research at Baidu, where he worked with Ng while the latter was chief scientist there. Diamos was also a software architect on Nvidia’s CUDA team.
The co-founders’ industry connections appear to have given Lamini a leg up on the fundraising front. In addition to Ng, Figma CEO Dylan Field, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, and — strangely enough — Bernard Arnault, the CEO of luxury goods giant LVMH, have all invested in Lamini.
AMD Ventures is also an investor (a bit ironic considering Diamos’ Nvidia roots), as are First Round Capital and Amplify Partners. AMD got involved early, supplying Lamini with data center hardware, and today, Lamini runs many of its models on AMD Instinct GPUs, bucking the industry trend.
Lamini makes the lofty claim that its model training and running performance is on par with Nvidia equivalent GPUs, depending on the workload. Since we’re not equipped to test that claim, we’ll leave it to third parties.
To date, Lamini has raised $25 million across seed and Series A rounds (Amplify led the Series A). Zhou says the money is being put toward tripling the company’s 10-person team, expanding its compute infrastructure, and kicking off development into “deeper technical optimizations.”
There are a number of enterprise-oriented, generative AI vendors that could compete with aspects of Lamini’s platform, including tech giants like Google, AWS and Microsoft (via its OpenAI partnership). Google, AWS and OpenAI, in particular, have been aggressively courting the enterprise in recent months, introducing features like streamlined fine-tuning, private fine-tuning on private data, and more.
I asked Zhou about Lamini’s customers, revenue and overall go-to-market momentum. She wasn’t willing to reveal much at this somewhat early juncture but said that AMD (via the AMD Ventures tie-in), AngelList and NordicTrack are among Lamini’s early (paying) users, along with several undisclosed government agencies.
“We’re growing quickly,” she added. “The number one challenge is serving customers. We’ve only handled inbound demand because we’ve been inundated. Given the interest in generative AI, we’re not representative in the overall tech slowdown — unlike our peers in the hyped AI world, we have gross margins and burn that look more like a regular tech company.”
Amplify general partner Mike Dauber said, “We believe there’s a massive opportunity for generative AI in enterprises. While there are a number of AI infrastructure companies, Lamini is the first one I’ve seen that is taking the problems of the enterprise seriously and creating a solution that helps enterprises unlock the tremendous value of their private data while satisfying even the most stringent compliance and security requirements.”
Eric Lefkofsky knows the public listing rodeo well and is about to enter it for a fourth time. The serial entrepreneur, whose net worth is estimated at nearly $4 billion, has already taken three businesses he’s founded public.
Today he’s the founder of Tempus, a genomic testing and data analysis company preparing to IPO. But he’s best known as the co-founder of daily deals pioneer Groupon, which went public at a valuation of nearly $13 billion in 2011, in one of that year’s most high-profile debuts.
Groupon’s IPO and post-IPO years were infamously troubled, though the public listings of his other two companies — InnerWorkings in 2006 and Echo Global Logistics in 2009 — didn’t raise significant flags for investors and did well for Lefkofsky. InnerWorkings, a supply chain startup he founded in 2001, sold to private equity in 2021 for a fraction of its IPO market cap.
Meanwhile, the stock of Echo Global Logistics appreciated steadily during its 11-year public life history before also being sold to private equity at a 50% premium over its last trading price in 2021.
Some of the controversies with Groupon involved a report that Lefkofsky pocketed over $300 million from Groupon’s pre-IPO round, leaving little working capital for the company, and cutting its reported revenue in about half in revised S-1 filings after regulators scrutinized the financials in its initial S-1. That unorthodox decision has also brought to light another deal from his past. He sold his dot-com-era company Starbelly.com in 2000 to a 50-year-old company; a year later, that company filed for bankruptcy, according to some reports.
All of this has given Lefkofsky the reputation of having somewhat of a golden touch, at least for himself, but maybe not for long-term investors of his companies.
With Tempus, Lefkofsky is taking another shot at creating a long-lasting, valuable company. It was reportedly his wife’s successful breast cancer treatment that led him to found Tempus in 2015.
“I was perplexed at how little data was a part of her care,” he told Forbes last year. “I became fixated with this idea that there was all this technology that had been created for other industries that could be applied to cancer care and help physicians make data-driven decisions.”
He stepped down from Groupon’s CEO role in 2015, when the company’s value had fallen to $2.6 billion. (Groupon’s market cap today is around $600 million.) At that time, Lefkofsky focused his attention on an early-stage venture firm, Lightbank.
Interestingly, the Tempus S-1 filing says that he’s taken no salary for the past two years (the S-1 didn’t provide more than two years’ worth of executive compensation for any named officer). However, the filing also said that he’s due to be paid $800,000 and an $800,000 bonus starting in 2025. And, although he wasn’t drawing a salary, he was paid a $5.3 million dividend from company stock this year, the prospectus shows. The filing also showed that Tempus has also covered the cost of $7.5 million worth of preferred shares issued to him and has paid $200,000 for his private plane expenses.
Tempus’ revenues were $531 million in 2023, a 66% growth from $321 million in 2022. But the company is still hemorrhaging a lot of cash, with net losses of $265 million (in 2023) and $196 million (in 2022). Although, the silver lining in its financials is that operating loss margin has shrunk from 83% in 2022 to 37% in 2023, according to the S-1 filing.
Additionally, Tempus has an agreement with Pathos AI, another company Lefkofsky founded. Pathos AI is a drug discovery platform founded in 2020 that uses AI and data. Pathos pays Tempus for a right to license its data. Meanwhile, Tempus’ COO, Ryan Fukushima, serves as Pathos CEO and splits his time between the two companies.
There are other indications that Lefkofsky is exercising more power at Tempus than is customary.
While Tempus has not yet filled out its principal stockholder’s chart, revealing only that Lefkofsky is among them and owns at least 5% of the company, the billionaire clearly wants to preserve full control of the company after it goes public. Tempus has granted his shares a whopping 30 votes per share. Super voting shares are not unusual, but 10 votes per share is more common, with 20 votes considered high. So this is an unusually high shareholder influence for a CEO of a healthcare company, and we’ll have to see if it is reduced in future S-1s, indicating if prospective investors have balked at it.
Yet, Tempus’s S-1 may not be exaggerating how essential Lefkofsky is to the future of the company. A healthcare VC investing in companies in genomics and data analysis has told TechCrunch that Tempus would not have grown to its size nor garnered so much capital without Lefkofsky’s marketing and fundraising skills.
Tempus raised $1.42 billion in funding from investors, including his firm Lightbank, NEA, Revolution Growth, T. Rowe Price, Novo Holdings, Franklin Templeton and Baillie Gifford. The company was last valued at $8.1 billion in Oct. 2022. Tempus’ S1 filing also revealed that it recently received $200 million from SoftBank.
Regardless of how much capital Tempus raises in its IPO, the company’s prospectus made it clear that it’s still far from break-even and will need “to raise additional capital in the future.” While most unprofitable companies generally include this detail in their prospectuses, it still likely means that investors should expect Tempus to have a follow-on public offering at some point, which could be a drag on their share price.
Tempus is also trying to position itself as an AI company even though AI revenue accounted for only $5.5 million, approximately 1% of total revenue in 2023.
“I see Tempus gambling on their growth and ripe timing for AI across life sciences, but I don’t think the company has proven that yet with their current offering,” the healthcare investor said.
The company said in its S1 filing that while its “AI product line is nascent, it plans to embed AI, including generative AI, in every aspect of its diagnostic tools. Tempus declined to comment beyond what is listed in the S-1.
Last month, one of the Bay Area’s better-known early-stage venture capital firms, Uncork Capital, marked its 20th anniversary with a party in a renovated church in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, where 420 guests showed up to help the firm to celebrate, trade tips, and share war stories.
There’s no question the venture scene has changed meaningfully since Uncork got its start. When firm founder Jeff Clavier launched the firm, he was mostly using his savings to write six-figure checks to founders. Now Clavier and his contemporaries, including Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital and Aydin Senkut of Felicis, collectively oversee billions of dollars in assets. Zooming out, the whole industry has gotten a whole lot bigger. In 2004, venture firms plugged roughly $20 billion into startups. In 2021, that amount reached a comparatively jaw-dropping $350 billion.
As the industry’s scale has changed, numerous rules of the road have changed, too — some for better, some for worse, and some because the original rules didn’t make a lot of sense in the first place. On the eve of Uncork’s anniversary, we talked with Clavier and his managing partner of many years, Andy McLoughlin, about some of those shifts.
At some point, it became completely acceptable for full-time VCs to publicly invest their own money in startups. Previously, institutions funding venture firms wanted partners to focus solely on investing for the firm. Do you recall when things changed?
JC: Firms typically have policies to let partners invest in things that aren’t competitive or that overlap with the firm’s strategy. Let’s say you have a friend who starts a company and needs cash; if ever the firm decides to invest in future rounds, then two things: there is a disclosure necessary to [the firm’s limited partner advisory committee] saying ‘FYI, I was an investor in this company, I’m not the lead, I did not price the deal, there is no funny business where I’m marking myself up here.’ Also, some firms may [force] you to sell investment into the round, so you don’t have a conflict of interest.
Okay then, when did it become acceptable to back competing companies? I realize this still isn’t widely accepted, but it’s more okay than it once was. I talked this week with an investor that has led later-stage deals in pretty direct HR competitors. Both companies say it’s fine, but I can’t help thinking there’s something wrong with this picture.
AM: They’re probably acting like it’s fine and they’ll continue to act that way until it’s not, and then it’s going to be a big problem. This is something we take very seriously. If we feel like there’s any potential conflict, we want to get ahead of it. We’ll typically say to our own portfolio company, ‘Hey, look, we’re looking at this thing. Do you see this as competitive?’ We actually had this come up this week. We think it’s actually [a] very different [type of company], but we wanted to go through the steps and make everybody feel very comfortable.
Frankly, too, if we had a company going out to raise their Series A, I would never have them chat with a firm that has a competing investment. I just think the risk of information leakage is too great.
Maybe this particular situation speaks to how little control founders have right now. Maybe VCs can get away with backing competing investments right now, whereas at another moment in time, they couldn’t.
AM: There’s not a lot of late-stage deals getting done, so it could just be that the founder had to swallow it because the deal was too good to pass up. There are always so many dynamics at play, it’s hard to know what’s going on behind the scenes, but it’s the kind of thing that makes me personally very uncomfortable.
Another change centers on board seats, which were long viewed as a way to underscore a firm’s value – or investment – in a startup. But some VCs have become very vocal advocates of not taking them, arguing that investors can gain better visibility into companies in between the board meetings.
JC: It’s your fiduciary duty to actually pay attention and help, so I find that statement ridiculous. I’m sorry. That is our job, to help companies. If you have a large stake in the business, it’s your job and your responsibility [to be active on the board].
AM: A bad board member can be a dead weight on the business. But we’ve been lucky enough to work with really amazing board members who joined at the Series A and B and C, and we just see the incredible impact they can have. For us, if we create a board at the seed stage, we’ll take the board seat if needed and we’ll be on through Series B and we’ll roll off at that point to give our seat to somebody else, because the value we can provide provide upfront from that zero-to-one phase is very different from what a company needs when it’s going to $10 million to $50 million to $100 million [in annual revenue].
With the exit market somewhat stuck, are you finding you’re on boards longer, and does that limit your ability to get involved in other companies?
AM: It’s probably less to do with the exits and just more to do with later-stage rounds. If the companies aren’t raising Series Bs and Cs, then yeah, we’re gonna be on those boards for longer. It’s a consequence of the funding markets being what they are, but we are seeing things to begin to pick up again.
The other thing that happened was during the crazy times [of recent years], we’d find these late-stage crossover funds would be leading a Series B or maybe even a Series A, but they’d say, ‘Look, we don’t take board seats.’ So as the seed investor, we were having to stay on longer. Now that those same firms aren’t doing those deals and more traditional firms are backing Series A and B rounds, they’re taking those seats again.
Andy, we talked last summer, when there was still a lot of money sloshing around seed rounds. At the time, you predicted a contraction in 2024. Has that happened?
AM: There are still a lot of seed funds out there, but a lot of them are beginning to get toward the end of their fund’s cycle, and they’re going to be thinking about fundraising. I think the rude awakening that a lot [of them] are in for is the sources of capital that had been very willing to give them cash in 2021 or even 2022 – a lot of that has gone away. If you were raising primarily from high-net worth individuals – kind of non-institutional LPs – it’s just going to be really tough. So I do think the number of active seed funds in North America is going to go from, let’s call it 2,500 today, to 1,500. I bet we lose 1,000 over the next few years.
Even with the market booming?
AM: The market can be doing well, but what people aren’t seeing is a lot of liquidity, and even high net worths have a finite amount of cash that they can put to work. Until we start seeing real cash coming back – beyond the highlights here and there – it’s just going to be hard.
How are you feeling about this AI wave and whether prices are rational?
JC: There’s a lot of overpricing happening, and [investing giant amounts] is not what we do at Uncork. A large seed round for us is like $5 million or $6 million. We could stretch ourselves to $10 million, but that would be the maximum. So everybody’s trying to figure out what is the investment that makes sense, and how thick of a layer of functionality and proprietary data do you have to avoid being crushed by the next generation of [large language model that OpenAI or another rival releases].
AM: People have been losing their minds around what AI means and almost forgetting that we’re ultimately still investing in businesses that, long term, need to be large and profitable. It’s easy to say, ‘Look, we’re gonna hedge this and maybe we can find a place to sell this business into,’ but honestly, a lot of enterprise AI budgets are still small. Companies are dipping their toe in the water. They might spend $100,000 here or there on a [proof of concept], but it’s very unclear today how much they’re going to spend, so we have to look for businesses that we think can be durable.The fundamentals of the job that we’re doing haven’t changed.
Hydrogen has always been presented by automakers and politicians as an alternate clean-energy option for electric vehicles, but it’s never really caught on. Don’t tell anyone at CES 2024, though, as this year’s show floor was littered with vehicles of all sizes that are hydrogen-powered.
There has been so much focus on battery-powered electric vehicles over the last few years that it seemed like hydrogen might be left in the proverbial dust. So is hydrogen power about to experience a comeback? Or is it yet another example of companies making promises at CES that they won’t be able to keep?
Let’s start by looking at what was at the show this year.
Perhaps no company is more married to hydrogen power than Nikola. The trucking startup was founded around the idea of a big rig with a fuel cell, and its former CEO Trevor Milton went to great lengths — to the point of criminal fraud charges — to promote it.
Nikola has spent the last few years trying to build itself anew with Milton in the rear view. In order to do that, the startup put off the hydrogen truck in favor of an all-electric version, which it started shipping in 2021.
At CES, Nikola finally showed off one of its first U.S.-built hydrogen trucks that it’s starting to ship to customers. If there’s a future where a reimagined Nikola helped usher in the proliferation of hydrogen-powered trucks, this is where that begins.
Another startup at the Vegas trade show, Croft Motors, is developing “rugged” hydrogen-powered vehicles. The firm is starting with a three-row, prototype SUV with an “anticipated 1,000 miles of driving range,” co-founder Isaac Holeman told TechCrunch.
Holeman believes the recent slowdown in battery-electric vehicle adoption has made it the “right time to reignite that conversation” about hydrogen’s potential. Croft is also developing a refrigerator-sized device that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen (a process called electrolysis). Holeman argued that “distributed fueling products” such as Croft’s will enable “rapid” hydrogen vehicle adoption.
Far on the other end of the spectrum, well-established automaker Hyundai also appears to be embracing hydrogen in a new way.
The Korean automaker has spent decades working on hydrogen-powered vehicles, and says the tech will play a “prominent role” in the Hyundai Group’s attempt to become a carbon-neutral company by 2050.
What that looks like involves not just an attempt at popularizing cars and SUVs that run on hydrogen, but doing the same for all of the heavy-duty vehicles it makes. Hyundai says these construction vehicles are too big and require too much energy to run on battery power. Instead, the firm argues hydrogen makes more sense as a clean energy source. It’s worth noting that HD Hyundai, a construction equipment, refinery and shipping conglomerate that spun out of the parent company in 2002, had one of the larger displays at CES 2024.
“Our goal is build up [an] entire hydrogen energy ecosystem across the whole of the earth, from ocean to land,” Dongwook Lee, president of HD Hyundai, said during a press conference. He said Hyundai wants to incorporate hydrogen power into everything it makes, from shipbuilding to construction machinery, and that it wants to create production and storage solutions, too.
“It’s already part of our short-term roadmap to commercialize alternative clean-hydrogen production methods,” said Chang Hwan Kim, who oversees fuel cell and battery development at Hyundai. The executive said Hyundai is working to turn “sewage sludge and other forms of organic waste” into clean hydrogen.
Suppliers are invested, too. Bosch, which already makes hydrogen fuel cells (like the one Nikola uses in its truck), announced it will make an engine that can combust hydrogen, skipping the process where that energy gets converted to electricity and stored in a battery. Truck-builder PACCAR was also at the show with two of its newest hydrogen-powered trucks, one under the Kenworth brand, and one Peterbilt. The company said this week it has received “more than 150 paid deposits” for hydrogen trucks across those two brands, and that it expects to ship them next year.
Image credits: Natalie Christman for TechCrunch
Channeling Vegas more than the others, South Korean energy and manufacturing giant SK Group attempted to hype its hydrogen and AI business via a theme park of sorts at CES. The rides included a small train “capable of being powered by hydrogen energy” and an “AI fortune teller.”
Why now?
There’s political will, and money. Federal investments in green hydrogen and refueling infrastructure — two big obstacles to widespread adoption — are giving HFCVs a boost. That’s crucial, since nearly all hydrogen fuel is produced with fossil fuels today, and there’s currently little infrastructure to keep HFCVs running, whether they’re passenger cars or heavy-duty trucks.
For one, the 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law put $9.5 billion toward “clean hydrogen initiatives” to create hydrogen production “hubs” across the U.S. Some of these hubs will create green hydrogen via renewable energy and electrolysis.
Hydrogen transport is also getting a lift from the same legislation that incentivizes battery-electric vehicle sales. Alongside the EV tax credit, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) created a hydrogen production credit, which offers producers as much as $3 per kilogram to offset the higher cost associated with clean hydrogen production.
As part of the IRA, the Federal Highway Administration announced during (though not at) CES hundreds of millions of dollars for new charging and fueling infrastructure — with a huge chunk of it going to hydrogen.
There’s also corporate interest from the fossil fuel industry, which put tens of millions of dollars toward hydrogen lobbying efforts in the first three quarters of 2023. For example, Shell, BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil are all members of a lobbying group called the Clean Hydrogen Future Coalition. Despite its tidy name, the group argues that fossil fuels such as natural gas should play a role in the “clean hydrogen ecosystem” when paired with carbon-capture tech. The trouble is, methane chronically leaks along the supply chain, and though the gas doesn’t stick around long in the atmosphere, it’s “80 times more potent at warming than carbon dioxide,” per the United Nations.
While there’s corporate and political interest, hydrogen-powered vehicles remain relatively scarce. The reasons are complex, but the lack of infrastructure is a critical one.
For one, the U.S. energy grid already exists. Though it’s ancient, it’s the backbone supporting tens of thousands of EV stations across the country. Hydrogen refueling stations, on the other hand, are a lot harder to come by.
Another reason is waste; Light-duty hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are generally less efficient than battery-electric vehicles, according to Gregory Keoleian, who co-directs Sustainable Systems and MI Hydrogen at the University of Michigan. Around 30% of the energy required for electrolysis is lost, and further losses come from transporting, compressing and converting hydrogen back into electricity via a fuel cell. “So, if you have limited renewable electricity, putting it into battery electric vehicles is going to be much more effective to decarbonize,” Keoleian said in a call with TechCrunch.
And yet, as Hyundai, Nikola and other hydrogen-focused firms argue, the advantages of battery-electric vehicles aren’t as pronounced in some areas. Keoleian explained, “For medium and heavy duty trucks, aviation, and ships, hydrogen can play a decarbonization role, especially where battery electric vehicles are problematic due to heavy loads, range, and fueling time requirements.”
To his point, EV batteries are many times heavier than fuel cells, and they take hours to fully recharge. Refueling a hydrogen-powered vehicle, on the other hand, is about as time consuming as filling up a conventional gas tank. The catch is, companies need to actually make the fuel affordable and accessible, without prolonging our dependence on fossil fuels.
Production and distribution remains one of the biggest bottlenecks, according to Niklas Wahlberg, head of Partnerships and System Solutions at Volvo. But he says interest in the energy source is growing. “Hydrogen is becoming more and more of a tangible alternative,” Wahlberg says.
And while Nikola became something of a bad poster child for hydrogen power over the last few years, Wahlberg says he doesn’t think that really set the industry back. “Of course there will be companies who have difficulties,” he says. “Things are progressing very well. And this is an area that we and others are very, very keen on developing.”
Updated January 12, 2024 with additional context from Gregory Keoleian.
Image Credits: Haje Kamps (opens in a new window) / TechCrunch (opens in a new window)
A year ago, at CES, I broke out the snark-hammer at 444, a startup that was trying to make a “smart” pepper spray device. I came across the same company again at CES this year. To my surprise, it had landed a significant partnership, co-development and co-branding deal with Mace, one of the biggest names in the sprayable self-defense sector.
444‘s agreement with Mace is “a preliminary exclusivity agreement for purposes of jointly developing and bringing to market a smart pepper spray device that is GPS and Bluetooth enabled and which sends out current location to emergency contacts when deployed.”
“We were here at CES last year, starting with a rough-looking 3D print and an example PCBA board. We made a lot of connections, and we got some news articles from TechCrunch and many others,” says Logan Nash, co-founder at 444. “The wind just kind of took the idea out there in the self-defense industry. A few months after CES, Mace reached out to us, and we’ve built a great relationship with them and finalized our partnership.”
The samples 444 had at its booth were pre-production samples that looked stellar: Great design, well-made and almost ready to go into production. The team tells me they hope to start spinning up production in the next few months.
“We did a lot of customer discovery to figure out exactly what the consumer wants, and what they need. One of the things we kept hearing was that the users want a sleek, aesthetically appealing device. So that’s what we have here. A great-looking device with great colors and high quality, it’s very strong. It has a metal frame to really keep everything together,” Nash explains. “But we also wanted longevity for the device. If the user does deploy their pepper spray, they can unscrew the back, and replace the canister so it’s ready for another use.”
The replaceable-cannister model is novel; most pepper sprays are cheap, single-use devices, but 444’s offering is a premium product that will cost significantly more than the $14-for-two devices you can order on Amazon. Its price tag is likely to be in the $75-100 range, the team tells TechCrunch, so being able to reuse the device and the electronics is crucial.
You can open the back of the 444 device and replace the Mace cannister if the device has been deployed. Image Credits: TechCrunch / Haje Kamps
The company hastens to share that even if you forget to charge the device, the Mace part still works — that’s fully mechanical — although obviously the GPS alert system to your support circle wouldn’t be activated.
“When you deploy the device, pepper spray comes out. It also sends a signal to your phone, which will send your current — and live — location to nominated emergency contact, whether that’s mom, dad, brother, sister, you name it,” says Nash. “That part is free. For an additional subscription, the app will connect you to a 24-hour emergency hotline which will then direct you to local authorities, whether that’s police dispatchers or campus security.”
As a company, Mace has had a rough couple of years. From a peak market cap of $46 million in April 2021, today, the company is worth less than $2.5 million. It stands to reason that the company is turning to young innovators to bolster its relevance in the market.
“Mace Brand is very excited about this first-of-its-kind smart product for Mace. The spray is the most advanced of its kind and we believe the most significant release in the industry in decades,” Sanjay Singh, chairman and CEO of Mace Brand wrote in a press statement. “This product is perfect for those who value personal safety while looking for the most technologically advanced product. The product’s high-end design should appeal to consumers on the move and at home.”
I’ll have the humble pie for one, please, sir
Let me be the first to say that I really didn’t see that coming; I was genuinely surprised to be reminded of the company at all, and doubly baffled they were still around. I missed something — and it’s a little refreshing to be reminded of that in such a person-to-person way as running into the founders at the very same trade show a year later.
I often end up seeing startups at CES that seem completely pointless (this year, my eyes did backflips over Direction 9. If they get acquired by Samsung by next year, I guess I really have to reevaluate my role as an analyst), and after many years of seeing startups do dumb things, I do find myself a little jaded.
This serves as a great great reminder that, for true entrepreneurs, it takes more than a snarky post from an opinionated blogger to encourage them to throw in the towel. Consider this my “Hey, I’m wrong at least 20% of the time” confession, and I’m curious to see where 444 goes from here.
As winter continues to grip much of the world, here’s some hot news for entrepreneurs to thaw the chill: TechCrunch Disrupt will be back in San Francisco from October 28–30. Even better, tickets are now available at a special 2-for-1 rate, offering a ray of financial sunshine in these cold months!
Plan ahead for Disrupt 2024 and save big
Early birds, rejoice! Secure your 2-for-1 pass now and unlock savings of over $1,000 on select passes. Act fast, as this offer expires on Friday, February 23 at 11:59 p.m. PT.
What awaits you at TechCrunch Disrupt?
Join over 10,000 founders, investors, and industry leaders across three dynamic days to delve into the latest startup innovations, trends, and products, while also gaining insights into navigating the challenges and possibilities of an ever-changing tech landscape.
Under the theme “Innovation for Every Stage,” this year’s event promises sessions covering diverse topics for every moment of your journey. You’ll learn more about scaling teams and mastering sales techniques, as well as find invaluable networking opportunities and join roundtable discussions with industry investors and leaders — and much, much more. Disrupt 2024 is going to be like no Disrupt ever before.
TechCrunch Disrupt will continue our goal of covering the latest pioneering founders, CEOs, and venture capitalists who will share their invaluable perspectives and wisdom. It’s an unparalleled opportunity for entrepreneurs at all stages to glean wisdom from the best in the business. Here are just a few of the esteemed speakers who graced our stage last year:
Shaquille O’Neal, NBA superstar and philanthropist, entrepreneurKatie Haun, founder and CEO, Haun VenturesReed Jobs, investor, YosemiteJB Straubel, founder and CEO, Redwood MaterialsKyle Vogt, founder and CEO, Cruise
Expand your knowledge and network
Take full advantage of hands-on learning opportunities at the Builders Stage, where expert-led sessions cover essential topics like fundraising strategies, product iteration, bootstrapping, and scaling your business.
We’re thrilled to introduce our latest initiative, the “Scale-up Startups Exhibitor Program,” offering founders in Series A or B funding the chance to showcase their ventures on the expo floor.
Select from myriad breakout sessions and roundtable discussions featuring interactive presentations, engaging discussions, and Q&A sessions with subject matter experts spanning the startup ecosystem.
In addition to our core entrepreneurship and business-scaling themes, this year’s industry tracks are SaaS, fintech, AI, and space.
Don’t miss out on the Startup Battlefield, where over 200 companies will exhibit their groundbreaking innovations, along with the exhilarating Startup Battlefield pitch competition.
Whether you leverage the event app to schedule 1:1 meetings, participate in receptions or side events, or strike up impromptu conversations, you’re certain to forge meaningful connections that can propel your business forward.
Secure your 2-for-1 pass today and seize the opportunity to elevate your future and bolster your bottom line.
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On the fringes of MWC, the world’s biggest mobile phone show, TechCrunch is getting a demo of a new kind of AI device. The small black box sitting in front of us on a table in a hotel lobby in Barcelona is designed to tap into the generative AI boom — making it another example of how the wheel of innovation is spinning up again in mobile.
Its maker — Jolla, a born-again startup with the combined forces of around 40 seasoned staff behind this new push — is building what’s being tentatively described at this early product design stage as a private and secure “blackbox for your life”.
The device is intended as a private-cloud-cum-AI-router that makes the user’s data accessible for running AI queries. So this device-in-the-making is akin to the personal server concept that’s been kicking around in privacy circles for years — but reconfigured for the generative AI age.
Here at MWC 2024 we’re hearing a lot of chatter about “next-generation” smart assistants, with telco talk rife with predictions that the end of apps as we’ve known and tapped on them is nigh as generative AI models rewrite the user interface rules. Jolla is jockeying to insert itself into this buzzy conversation by putting the focus squarely on privacy and security — since the assistive data processing will take place on the AI device itself.
“We don’t believe it’s a good model to put AI run locally here in the phone. It’s not secure,” argues co-founder Antti Saarnio. “You can never make smartphones secure enough for that. We believe that in this AI era privacy becomes much more important.”
The machine learning databases Jolla is architecting to host the user’s personal information inside the AI device are being designed to intelligently respond to natural language querying and/or proactively surface insights — drawing on trusted access to the user’s mobile data and digital services.
Jolla is building on open source AI large language models, including Meta’s LLaMA 2, for the foundational layer of generative AI smarts. Saarnio says the role for the team is basically architecting the user interface and function design — rather than needing lots of AI engineers itself, as they’re able to draw on powerful open source general purpose AIs.
A private data hub for AI
Discussing the vision for the product, Saarnio argues that amped up AI models, such as large language and multimodal models, and the powerful data mining and inferences associated with generative AI, change the game when it comes to processing personal information — whether it’s emails, calendar, contact lists or obviously sensitive stuff like health data — bringing both the potential for AI-powered insights to create huge value and utility for individuals; but also deep risk if the user has to offer up intimate access to their information in order to tap into these services.
This trade-off is the problem Jolla wants to fix by designing a way for users to gain the superpower of advanced AI without having to let data-hungry third parties gobble their privacy.
“This device will hold all your private information,” he says, laying a hand on the small rectangular box we’re discussing. “It runs its AI here. All your data will be here and nobody else will have access to it — only you.”
AI is increasing data concentration and leading to the development of rich databases of personal information that can be “dangerous” if exported, he suggests. So what if people could just own their own safe and secure hub where all that processing happens?
Assuming Jolla’s product is as safe and private as they claim it will be, the level of data protection a user might gain would depend on how much AI processing they’re willing (or able) to route via the device. But if they practice good privacy hygiene generally such a product could help people limit their privacy risk when using generative AI.
“If people use different email clients, and so on, we need to connect to those applications via our API,” Saarnio notes. “But the key here… is we’re saying that your concentrated data is in safe place.”
“Surprisingly, we haven’t seen anyone who is really focusing on data privacy and keeping the data secure,” he adds. “I think it’s a good place for us to play.”
The Finnish mobile phone startup tried very hard to disrupt the traditional mobile smartphone business a decade+ ago, with their alternative, Linux-based Sailfish OS platform. It’s that same familiar brand name stamped in tiny letters on the 3D-printed prototype. But the product represents a leap in a new direction for the mobile also-ran.
Saarnio, an original Jolla co-founder, has returned to what his LinkedIn account simply refers to as “New Jolla” — reenergised and raring to go after winning a long legal battle to reclaim the business and its assets from majority Russian owner, Rostelecom. The mission: Rebuild Jolla anew by building new AI products. “I think we can completely rebuild this. But we need to do new things,” he tells TechCrunch.
The Jolla brand name still has value, as Saarnio tells it. He talks in terms of co-designing the product with the community of Sailfish users and Jolla enthusiasts still excited about what alternative tech can do. But — to be crystal clear — the AI device won’t need special mobile hardware to function. The goal is for this to piggyback on top of mainstream mobile platforms.
Adding a layer of security and privacy to platforms and apps is exactly the point. The broad ambition, if Jolla can pull in the users and build momentum, is to develop the product into a platform of its own — further extending the embedded AI assistant’s utility by attracting other developers to build apps that operate through its protective wrapper of privacy and security.
“That’s our only playfield,” admits Saarnio of the focus on privacy and security. “Obviously, big companies will do similar things… [But] we can become an open application platform as well for others who are focusing on [AI innovation] so we don’t need to do the lifting only ourselves.”
He also predicts big changes incoming for mobile apps over the next few years, driven by AI. “It will become almost like a protocol level,” he suggests, describing a scenario where mobile apps are pushed into the background as generative AI interfaces take over. “You [won’t] really go and open apps anymore. So this whole visible UI level is layer is disappearing.”
“I don’t know what it means. Basically, nobody probably yet knows, but it’s a major change,” he adds, arguing Jolla is well positioned to take advantage of the shift give its expertise in operating system development. “An operating system player like us, we have a good role there. Because our job is to integrate with different applications. Even the app runtime that we have is quite good for that. It gives us access to integrate into different applications, their APIs and so on.”
Jolla Mind²
The prototype sitting on the table currently bears the name Jolla Mind² — a play on the idea of AI providing humans with a ‘second brain’. Jolla also described the system as an “adaptive digital assistant”.
The main target customer looks likely to be Android smartphone users as it could offer them a way to tap into the utility of advanced AI without having to expose all their personal data to Google (or other non-trusted third parties) — with all the associated risks. (Google remains an attention-mining advertising company, after all. While Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, has its own digital advertising business. And Facebook-owner and LLaMA developer Meta’s business model is still pure surveillance advertising.)
On the flip side, Apple already offers its own privacy promises and on-device AI processing. It also has its own generative AI products in the works. So value certainly looks harder to build on iOS (where this kind of functionality is likely to be natively embedded). But what Apple will do is not giving Jolla pause. Android remains the dominant mobile platform, with billions of users worldwide, so there’s more than enough of a potential addressable market to target — especially if advances in AI trigger a rise in privacy concern.
“Very large companies nowadays are very tempted to use our information for AI training — because that’s the name of the game at the moment. So I wouldn’t trust any company [not to use my data for AI] training,” says Saarnio. “If the future would be similar to the past — only a couple of massively big companies were able to take the whole market with AI — then I think it’s not very good news for us human beings.
“In this past mobile era, we were the data product, basically. But if we let AI steer us we become digital robots, basically — the manipulative capability of AI is so big that we don’t have a chance. So that’s why I think we need digital clarity. And that’s our role.”
“Basically, you need AI. But you need to be mastering the AI so that the AI is not mastering us,” he adds.
Saarnio himself built the first product mock ups, after spending the last 1.5 years learning to program — upskilling from his former finance-focused background to close in on the AI opportunity.
He describes Meta’s decision to open source LLaMA as the “break point” for this new wave of AI innovation. And is — necessarily — hopeful there won’t just be a repeat of the last mobile cycle where Big Tech took most of the spoils. “I think it will be difficult for big players to own this agenda,” he predicts of generative AI.
During a brief demo of the JollaMind² prototype — the first time it was shown to press, we’re told — we saw Jolla’s AI assistant software running on a mobile phone which was interfacing with AI systems and databases running on the prototype hardware. The developer running the demo posed a couple of natural language questions and received contextually relevant responses back, voiced by a rather deep-throated robot voice, which added to the spooky thrills (so Jolla’s app is doing speech generation too).
In one of the demo examples, the developer asked the software “who is Natasha?”. Jolla’s AI assistant responded by parroting my TechCrunch biog — without needing to be provided with additional context since the AI has access to calendar info, emails etc where it could infer the subject of the enquiry from just a first name.
In another demonstration, the developer asked the AI “what tasks do I have for Tuesday?” — and got a read out of their calendar items with observations about the priority of different items.
Both examples are fairly utilitarian, in terms of what AI assistance features can do, but the point is the user of JollaMind² can rest assured their information remains safe from prying third parties.
Another envisaged use-case Saarnio sketches is email triage: Where the AI assistant could keep tabs on incoming emails and surface priority messages, including knowing whether to override a ‘do not disturb’ setting to make sure something important isn’t missed.
While such AI-powered email parsing functions do already exist (and can even be baked in by email providers themselves, as Google does with Gmail ‘smart’ features), you have to be comfortable providing a cloud-based entity with access to your inbox to tap into such smarts — which is a privacy and security trade-off.
Jolla also sees potential for business users — such as a smart minutes type feature. Saarnio gave the example of lawyers meeting with clients who could ask them if they could record the meeting to make it “memorable” — meaning it would be captured by the device and a searchable record of when (and what) was said retained to aid productivity but with all the sensitive data remaining on the private cloud device.
In instances where a user might actively want to go outside Jolla’s system in order to make use of a specific third party AI, the product could pop up a permissions screen for them to approve sharing their data — so the user could manually accept extra risk on a case-by-case basis. The device could also let users configure which kind of questions they only want processing locally (health queries, say) and which ones they’re happy for the device to cast a wider net out to third party AIs.
The sneak peak we’re getting is just that: A glimpse of what’s coming down the pipe. The final form-factor, features and specs — even, for example, such as whether it might have a screen, built-in speaker, its own battery or keyboard, or stay as a minimal black rectangle — remain tbc. So much of the product design and detail — and even core utility features — is yet to be nailed down. But Saarnio does say the device will be priced below €300.
He also points out the hardware can act as an upgrade for a user’s existing mobile phone, saying it can bring advanced AI processing capabilities to even mid-tier mobiles. So an old smartphone you have lying around in a drawer could get a second lease of life with Jolla’s AI layer bolted on top.
Whatever form the device finally takes, Jolla is envisaging it as something generally static — rather than a second mobile device you have to carry with you. So the likely scenario is it gets stored safety by the user at their home or office. But it’s available to be queried remotely through the user’s own mobile device (with, likely, a layer of biometric security looped in to ensure the dynamic database of their life it contains remains safe).
Back to the future
So what happened to old Jolla? Wind back the clock to August 2021 and the company as it then was had just turned profitable after a decade of hard slog selling its alternative OS and app support platform. Then, in spring 2022, disaster struck as Russia invaded Ukraine, putting Jolla’s non-Russian shareholders in a bind and desperate to cut ties with Russia.
Saarnio says company shareholders tried for a long time to negotiate with Rostelecom directly to buy back its majority share. However the Russian telco would not budge. So, in the end, they changed tack to litigation — and a court adjudicated corporate restructuring process in Finland enabled them to buy back the old assets. The court decision on that restructuring came around October last year — handing the team a clean slate to take a fresh swing at mobile innovation, now with AI front and center.
The new incarnation of Jolla will be fully focused on AI devices. But the legacy story doesn’t end entirely. Separate “independently fundable” business entities are being established — one to look after Jolla’s tech focused on in-car systems and app support for car makers, and another for Sailfish mobile devices for businesses, per Saarnio. But he and his team will be fully focused on rebuilding Jolla as a new, and they hope smarter and more agile, AI startup.
Mark your calendar: May 20 will be the official announcement of Jolla’s first AI product. The date has been picked as it’s a decade on from the “Jolla Love Day” announcement of May 20, 2013, when the Sailfish maker revealed its first ever mobile phone. Which is a neat way to underscore the cyclical nature of technology.
In just under three months’ time the exact shape, specs and feature set of the AI device will be clearly defined and a pre-ordering campaign will likely kick off at that point too. As for shipping, Saarnio is confident they can get the JollaMind² to market later this year. Expect Jolla’s new baby to arrive in Q4.
Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The outage came as Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and Threads all went down this morning. YouTube has also confirmed that its service is having issues this morning too, and that it’s working on a fix.
“This incident has been resolved,” Discord’s status page reads. “We are reviewing the updated rate limiting that triggered the initial session start issues, as well as the scaling targets for the internal service which limited guild loading during initial recovery.”
Discord says it is monitoring the recovery of multiple systems.
According to third-party monitoring website DownDetector, the issues began at around 10:50 a.m. ET. Users reported that they were unable to load messages, while others say said they were unable to access the service at all.
The outages across the multiple services come on Super Tuesday, a day when people across a number of U.S. states are voting in the primary. The outages, mainly on Facebook and Instagram, may make it harder for candidates to continue their outreach and remind people to head to the polls on an important day.
Update 03/05/2024 11:45 a.m. ET: The article has been updated to reflect that Discord has solved the issue and is back online.
Facebook, Instagram and Threads were all down in massive Meta outage on Super Tuesday
Image Credits: Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance / Getty Images
General Motors’ Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post. The catch? The cars will be in “manual mode,” so they won’t be driving themselves.
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. The GM subsidiary already had a presence in Phoenix before it pulled its entire U.S.-based fleet last year following an incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi.
Prior to that incident, Cruise had been announcing launches in new cities — including Dallas, Houston and Miami — at a startling pace. Critics accused the company of expanding too fast and cutting corners on safety.
Today, we’re taking an important next step in returning to our mission: we're reintroducing a small fleet of human-driven vehicles in select cities – starting in Phoenix. These vehicles will create maps and gather road information, a critical step for validating future…
— cruise (@Cruise) April 9, 2024
Now Cruise appears to be going back to basics, a sharp pivot away from the aggressive growth strategy the company has been pursuing for the last few years. In 2022, former Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt — who stepped down amid last year’s controversy — told investors that Cruise had “de-risked the technical approach” by applying what worked well in San Francisco to similar ride-share markets.
In a blog post published Tuesday that reads like it could have been written in 2018, Cruise explains how it needs to first identify high-fidelity location data for road features and map information like speed limits and lane paint so that the AV can understand where it is in relation to its environment. The post then goes on to chart out how Cruise will eventually make it back to fully autonomous operations: slowly, supervised by humans, and with continuous validation of the technology.
All of these steps are part and parcel of building and expanding a self-driving car business, which leaves us wondering if Cruise is spelling out the obvious for the public’s benefit, or if its new safety team is scrapping its old technology and starting over?
A Cruise spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s strategy.
The October incident wasn’t the first time Cruise’s technology has caused problems. Even as Cruise expanded to new cities in the second half of 2023, its robotaxis were routinely malfunctioning in cities like San Francisco and Austin, disrupting the flow of traffic, public transit and first responders.
Technological issues aside, what really put Cruise in hot water late last year was its response to the incident. Regulators accused the company of withholding information about the crash, only sharing that a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian who had been flung into its path after first being struck by a human-driven vehicle. An internal report conducted by law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and released in January confirmed that Cruise employees weren’t forthcoming with what happened after the Cruise vehicle ran over the pedestrian, only sharing days later that the robotaxi’s pullover maneuver resulted in the pedestrian being dragged for 20 feet.
The mishandling of the information resulted in parent company GM slashing spending and taking greater control of Cruise.
A big part of Cruise’s strategy moving forward, as outlined in Tuesday’s blog post, involves reforming and establishing updated incident response and crisis management protocols to ensure more efficient and transparent responses in the future. The company says it will also work on improved engagement with first responders to facilitate trainings in each precinct it plans to operate in.
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. Alphabet’s Waymo — Cruise’s main competitor that’s still active in San Francisco — has operated a paid, driverless robotaxi service in the area since 2020 and last year doubled its service area in downtown Phoenix and launched driverless rides to the airport.
