AI big shot Andrew Ng’s AI Fund, a startup incubator that backs small teams of experts looking to solve key problems using AI, plans to raise upward of $120 million for its second effort.
A filing with the SEC shows that the AI Fund’s second fund, AI Venture Fund II, has so far amassed $69.75 million from 13 partners — leaving around $50 million to be invested. The AI Fund’s PR declined to comment.
Ng, the founder of the Google Brain deep learning project, co-founder of Coursera, and recent Amazon board appointee, was one of the most recognizable names in the AI community when he became Baidu’s chief scientist in 2014. He left Baidu in 2017 to jumpstart a number of AI ventures, including the DeepLearning.ai course and Landing AI, a startup developing AI tools targeting manufacturing companies.
Ng launched the AI Fund in 2018 with $175 million, serving as the incubator’s GP and leading its direction. (On the aforementioned SEC filing, he’s named as the “managing member of the general partner” for AI Venture Fund II.) The idea was to provide funding at the seed and Series A stages of a company’s life cycle, allowing teams to work in relative stealth until they were ready — and connecting them with Ng’s extensive professional network.
Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Sequoia Capital and SoftBank Group were among the AI Fund’s initial backers. Crunchbase lists 38 portfolio companies, including AI observability platform WhyLabs, Ng’s own Landing AI, and AI app-building tool Baseten.
At $120 million, AI Venture Fund II would be considerably smaller than the first AI Fund vehicle. Still, it’s more than double what Ng reportedly originally hoped to raise — $50 million — for the AI Fund’s follow-up.
Take it as another potential sign that the AI bubble — particularly the buzzy generative AI segment within it — may be deflating.
PitchBook recently reported that, for two consecutive quarters, generative AI dealmaking at the earliest stages has declined, plummeting 76% from its Q3 2023 peak. VC deal value for pre-seed and seed-stage deals fell in Q1 2024 to $122.9 million, down from Q3’s high of $517.7 million.
Enterprise reluctance could be to blame.
In a pair of recent surveys from Boston Consulting Group, about half of the respondents — all C-suite executives — said that they don’t expect generative AI to bring about substantial productivity gains and that they’re worried about the potential for mistakes and data compromises arising from generative AI-powered tools. As my colleague Ron Miller wrote last week, businesses are finding that generative AI is harder to implement at scale than they once assumed — and that execs are exercising caution.
Running a small business means doing more with less. AI agents can help, but building custom agents for specific workflows remains challenging, even with today’s low-code/no-code tools. The idea behind Enso — which came out of stealth by announcing a $6 million seed funding round Tuesday — is to give small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) access to a wide range of preprogrammed AI agents that can handle repetitive tasks.
Founded by Mickey Haslavsky, the co-founder of API development platform RapidAPI, Enso offers industry-specific agents that promise to help customers do anything from managing their search engine optimization efforts to engaging with their Instagram followers, tracking competitors, writing newsletters, managing invoices and optimizing their Amazon stores. Enso pretrains and customizes these agents for about 70 different industries, from accountants to car dealerships, offering more than 1,000 bots in total.
Image Credits: Enso
Haslavsky told TechCrunch that his inspiration for Enso came from his parents, who ran a small music production company and a secondary school. He pointed out that, similar to his earlier venture RapidAPI, Enso is also fundamentally centered around integrations.
“When I started getting into this AI agent space, I realized that, one, if that works, it can bridge the gap [between small and large businesses] because it can be serviceable, because it can give services to smaller businesses on top of other software, and that’s where the integrations come in,” he said. “Second, I realized it doesn’t work. Because you try AI agents today, they’re pretty broken. Three, I realized that, from a business perspective this is just huge, because most of the services that can now be automated cost — as an alternative, if you’re going to an agency — $1,000 a month.”
A lot of the bots that Enso currently offers aim to combine the predictability of traditional workflow automation services, which are dependable but need step-by-step scripting, with the creativity of large language models (LLMs). Haslavsky explained that these bots tend to follow a set sequence of tasks to run a business’ Instagram account, for example. The LLM handles the copy and design, but that workflow is predefined and there is also a traditional scheduler, for example.
Image Credits: Enso
Often, that involves calling on multiple services. Enso offers a podcast agent, for example, that can automatically script podcasts and that then uses ElevenLabs for the text-to-speech part, a music service for the intro and outro, as well as a video service for creating a visual version.
One thing that’s different here is that Enso is taking an à la carte approach where access to every agent costs somewhere between $29 to $79 per month. Haslavsky told me that he decided on this model because most SMBs are constrained on budget and because he wanted to make it extremely easy to buy for them.
The question, of course, is how well those bots work in a real-world scenario — and whether businesses are even willing to turn over some of these functions to AI agents. Typically, there is a human in the loop for things like the podcast and newsletter agents, for example, but if the results are just middling and involve a lot of work to polish them into a product that a business owner would be willing to publish, then a $59+/month subscription (or even multiple subscriptions) may be hard to justify. It might be an easier sell for agents that create reports or manage the SEO voodoo that helps businesses rank better on Google — nobody expects authenticity from those, after all.
In the future, Enso may also offer a marketplace for third-party agents. The team is currently working on low-code/no-code visual tools for building those — but for now they are still focused on the foundational integrations to make that happen.
The company’s $6 million seed round was led by NFX, with participation from a number of angel investors, including Yossi Matias, the head of Google Research, and Shmil Levy, a former GP at Sequoia Capital.
“Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, yet they have passed by the AI revolution,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss, partner at NFX Ventures. “While larger businesses speed by leveraging AI to maximize productivity gains, small businesses struggle to perform the most basic of administrative tasks. Enso is one of the first companies recognizing this need and putting enterprise-grade AI in the hands of emerging companies, democratizing AI by providing access and scalability. We are thrilled to support Enso as it transforms the business landscape and empowers traditional businesses to thrive.”
Zapp Electric Vehicles wants to turn its London-based electric two-wheeler brand into a global EV company. And India will be one of its launchpads, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The company will launch its first product — an urban electric two-wheeler called the i300 — in the U.K. as early as next month, followed by Thailand. The company is now adding India into the mix, a massive market that will provide a true test to its international global expansion strategy, Zapp founder and CEO Swin Chatsuwan told TechCrunch in an interview.
The Nasdaq-listed company advanced its plans for India after Chatsuwan noted the country’s potential. The world’s most populous country not only witnesses millions of two-wheeler sales annually, but it’s also the second-biggest two-wheeler manufacturer worldwide after China.
“We thought India would be phase two for us when we did our research a few years ago, but we made a decision earlier this year that it can’t wait,” Chatsuwan said.
Zapp has named Indian electric two-wheeler maker Bounce Electric 1 as its contract manufacturer to produce and sell the i300 locally in the country. After completing the homologation process, sales are expected to begin in 2025. The British company aims to have a minimum capacity of 5,000 units per year in India as part of its broader global goal of 25,000 units by 2026.
Of the 17 million two-wheelers sold in India last year, Chatsuwan told TechCrunch that 2.8 million were high-speed vehicles and 36% of those high-speed vehicles were heavy-weight cruiser motorcycles from the Chennai-based brand Royal Enfield. Zapp wants to duplicate Royal Enfield’s success with its step-through model, which was unveiled first in 2018.
“We’re not trying to conquer the world. We’re not trying to take half Royal Enfield’s market share and sell 500,000 bikes in India. We’re not. We would see that our quality and performance peer is BMW, particularly their CE 02 and CE 04 step-through electric scooters,” the executive told TechCrunch.
The India launch of Zapp’s i300 will help the company expand its total addressable market (TAM) of 60 million units annually by 25%. By adding India to the map, the TAM of its first phase of market debut has reached 30 million annually, the company said.
The early launch in India will help Zapp understand the “breadth, depth and quality” of the country’s supply chain, Chatsuwan stated. This may help export vehicles from India to global markets over time.
Unlike electric two-wheelers by key Indian manufacturers Ola Electric, TVS Motor and Ather Energy that sell between $1,000 and $1,800, Zapp’s i300 will be a pricey option. The two-wheeler will debut in Europe with a base price of $7,590, excluding taxes.
The India pricing is yet to be decided, though Chatsuwan said it wouldn’t be “more than a million rupees, but I doubt it will be lower than 500,000 rupees.”
The i300 is hitting the streets soon
Zapp unveiled the i300 as its first two-wheeler in 2018. The vehicle comes with an aerospace-grade alloy load-bearing exoskeleton and a chrome-moly steel underbone design. It also carries an air-cooled electric motor with a peak power of 14kW and packs two portable batteries, each with 720Wh capacity.
The company started taking pre-orders for the i300 soon after its unveiling, charging a reservation fee of 100 euros. It promised to begin deliveries in the fourth quarter of 2019. However, the COVID-19 pandemic halted production and deliveries.
Image Credits: Zapp EV
Nonetheless, Zapp is set to start delivering the i300 in the U.K. in the next few weeks. It also plans to begin selling in Thailand this year through a facility in Bangkok.
Zapp set to become “complete motorcycle company”
“We’re not a one-hit wonder. We want to show the world that we’re a complete motorcycle company, but let’s begin with executing the first product first,” Chatsuwan told TechCrunch when asked whether Zapp looks to expand its product lineup.
The company also plans to stack up the i300 with “loads of” personalization options and accessories. It already offers the two-wheeler in four distinct versions and lets consumers customize its color and wheel design based on their preference and add accessories, including a hidden storage and fast charger.
Zapp plans to expand its market by entering Spain, Italy, Vietnam and Indonesia in phase two and expand to countries in the Middle East and South America over time.
“We want to be the 21st-century version of Triumph and Royal Enfield and Norton,” Chatsuwan said.
Image Credits: Stoke Space (opens in a new window)
Stoke Space is nothing if not ambitious. The five-year-old launch startup has generated a lot of hype due to its bold plans to develop the first fully reusable rocket, with both the booster and second stage vertically returning to Earth.
Those plans got a major boost a year ago, when the U.S. Space Force awarded Stoke and three other startups valuable launch pad real estate at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Stoke plans on redeveloping the historic Launch Complex 14, which was home to John Glenn’s historic mission and other NASA programs, in time for its first launch in 2025.
At the center of Stoke’s plans is Nova, a two-stage rocket that is designed so that both the booster and the second stage return to Earth and land vertically. The only other rocket under development that is aiming for full reuse is SpaceX’s Starship. According to Stoke, their reusable upper stage will unlock incredible possibilities, like the ability to return cargo from orbit, land anywhere on Earth, and drive launch prices down by an order of magnitude.
Before any of this can take place, the Space Force must complete its “environmental assessment” of the company’s plans at LC-14, in order to evaluate how repeat launches will affect local flora and fauna. These assessments are mandatory under federal law, and they can often take months — but the upside is that they provide a closer look at a company’s operational plans.
Stoke’s goals are audacious, but the draft environmental assessment for Stoke’s launch pad shows that it would be an error to expect a test of returning even the booster on the first flight. Indeed, the environmental assessment does not consider reusable operations at all, but only missions with the 132-foot-tall Nova flying in a fully expendable configuration. The document, released last month, calls this Stoke’s “phased program approach.” Phase 1 involves operating a totally expendable vehicle at a relatively low launch cadence. Phase 2, which would require a supplemental environmental analysis and is not considered in this draft document, would involve the fully reusable rocket.
Image Credits: Stoke Space
To start, Stoke is seeking authorization to conduct around two launches next year — the first year of operation — and then told regulators that it anticipates a maximum launch cadence of 10 launches per year. Stoke told the regulators that Nova will be capable of carrying up to 7,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, the maximum payload capacity of the rocket when it will not be reused.
A person familiar with Stoke’s plans said that the company has no intention of pursuing the reusable aspects of Nova until it has successfully demonstrated the ability to regularly deploy payloads to planned orbits, and that this phased approach was always part of the internal roadmap.
A phased approach isn’t uncommon: SpaceX, which is the global kingpin of launch, launched its Falcon 9 rocket for the first time in 2010, but only returned the booster back to Earth in 2015. Stoke is clearly seeking to take a similar path, though the draft document does not propose any dates by which the company might start testing its reusable tech.
While it’s too soon to say when reusable flights might start at the Cape, Stoke has been busy conducting its own “hop” campaigns of its second stage at its facilities in Washington State. Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa said in a recent podcast appearance that the company started developing Nova’s second stage first because there was no playbook on second-stage reuse; but because rocket stage design is so tightly coupled, they had to understand the second-stage parameters in order to begin to design the booster.
“The whole vehicle, from a technical side, has to be designed with the end state in mind,” he said. “It has to be architected for that. Everything we’ve done from founding to today is take that end state and build for that end state architecture.”
Once the reusable technology is fully developed, the Space Force will need to conduct a supplemental environmental analysis. At that point, the supplemental EA will consider the environmental impacts of landing at a landing zone near the launch pad, landing on a barge offshore, or at some other location. Depending on the complexity of the changes to the original analysis, this process could take six months or more.
But Stoke will be ready to shift into that second phase, Lapsa said on the podcast: “The millisecond we reach orbit, our focus shifts entirely on, okay, now let’s show that we can get back down. Once we show that we can get back down […] then the millisecond after that, we start focusing on reuse.”
Fabric Cryptography, a hardware startup by MIT and Stanford dropouts (and married couple) Michael Gao and Tina Ju, wants to make modern cryptographic techniques like zero-knowledge proof (which lets you prove things without giving up exactly what you know) and fully homomorphic encryption (which enables you to work with encrypted data without decrypting it) ubiquitous. This, the co-founders argue, will ease what they see as a fundamental tension between trust and privacy in an age where companies gather increasing amounts of data about consumers, yet are also increasingly unable to safeguard this data.
To prove this out, the team has developed a custom RISC-V-based chip that is optimized to run the algorithms necessary to establish zero-knowledge proofs and enable fully homomorphic encryption. Fabric calls this a “verifiable processing unit” (VPU). Existing hardware, the team says, is simply too slow to make things like fully homomorphic encryption ubiquitous, so it takes custom chips to make this happen.
A number of VCs are now also backing its idea, with Blockchain Capital and 1kx leading the company’s $33 million Series A round. Offchain Labs, Polygon and Matter Labs also participated. It follows a $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet with participation from the likes of Inflection and Liquid2 Ventures.
Image Credits: Fabric
The fact that there are several crypto investors here investing in cryptography is no coincidence. “We could not be more thrilled to partner with Fabric on their mission to accelerate all cryptographic operations with the world’s first VPU to help bring about a world where privacy and verifiability are non-negotiable components of all digital systems,” said Yuan Han Li, an investor at Blockchain Capital.
While Fabric has its sights set on enterprises, the market with the most immediate need for its solution is the blockchain space, which is also why its first-generation chip will focus on zero-knowledge proofs.
“With zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption, it’s really starting to look like AI in the 2010s, with exponentially increasing compute demand,” Gao told me. “You can tell that although not everyone understands what it is, it’s increasing in ubiquity already within the crypto space. And we think that it goes beyond crypto. It goes to pervasive cryptography in the enterprise. And so we realized that this is really a mainstream moment, and hardware could be the final accelerant that pushes it over the edge and allows cryptographers to make their dreams come true. That’s why Tina and I teamed up and started this company.”
Fabric says it already received “tens of millions of dollars in preorders.”
Enterprises don’t want to deal with “the toxic sludge of user data,” either, Ju noted, because for the most part, it’s a liability. So if they can keep that data encrypted, even while in use, or not even have to get it and instead exchange only what’s necessary through zero-knowledge proofs, that’s a massive win for them.
Gao is no stranger to ambitious hardware startups. He previously co-founded photonic AI startup Luminous Computing. He then also co-founded the Bitcoin mining chip startup Katana in 2021 and stepped in as CEO in 2022. Katana rebranded as Fabric Systems. Fabric Systems is now defunct, but some of its DNA seems to live on in Fabric Cryptography.
The couple’s experience at Luminous, though, may have been somewhat of a wake-up call. “We were both disillusioned that, despite my personal excitement about large language models, and despite the vast potential of AI in general … the most practical go-to-market for photonic computing seemed to be giant AI machines for targeted ads on social media — a use case that hardly got me out of bed in the morning,” Gao said.
Fabric is about to tape out its first chips, and the company plans to use these new funds to develop the next generation of its chips and scale its software and cryptography teams. In the long run, Fabric hopes to get its chips into enterprise data centers and maybe even sell to the hyperscale clouds.
Image Credits: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg / Getty Images
The family of powerhouse venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, one of the investors behind the hoped-for California Forever utopian city in Solano County, California, is planning a substantial community development in the area, TechCrunch has learned.
Andreessen is married to Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, whose Silicon Valley real estate mogul father bought land in Solano County decades before his death in 2022, according to county records obtained by TechCrunch. An LLC operated by Arrillaga-Andreessen’s brother that’s known as A&P Children Investments, has begun the planning process for a mixed-use development with more than 1,000 homes.
This area is on the edge of the city of Vacaville, 10 miles away from the proposed California Forever development, according to property records, planning documents, and business registry information viewed by TechCrunch. A representative for A&P said at a community meeting in March that A&P plans to ultimately sell the property for the benefit of Arrillaga-Andreessen and her brother, John Arrillaga Jr.
Andreessen, Arrillaga-Andreessen and Arrillaga Jr. did not respond to requests for comment.
Two other parcels of land owned by the LLC that are not part of the proposed Vacaville development are even closer to California Forever. This land — roughly 600 acres — is across the highway and down several miles from where California Forever hopes to build its solar farm.
All told, the Arrillaga family co-owns at least these three parcels totaling around 730 acres in the area. These were originally bought by their billionaire real estate developer father, John Arrillaga Sr., and his business partner, Richard Peery, in 1985, records show. The sale of any of the properties would likely also benefit Peery’s children, as he is listed as a co-director of A&P in state paperwork. A spokesperson for Peery Arrillaga, the real estate company founded by the two men, declined to comment.
California Forever is a proposed master-planned community, to be carved from over 60,000 acres of land that several members of Silicon Valley’s elite have quietly been buying in Solano County since 2017. Investors in this land include Andreessen, as well as Mike Moritz, Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs, who have collectively sunk nearly $1 billion in pursuit of one goal: to build a new utopian city free of the ills that plague places like San Francisco, according to the New York Times.
The project leaders of California Forever didn’t know of Andreessen’s wife and brother-in-law’s connection to A&P Children Investments when they began land acquisitions in 2017 and “never made an offer” on the LLC’s land, a spokesperson says.
“We were not aware that the Arrillaga and Peery families owned any land in Solano County until about two years ago, when we were already five years into the project,” the spokesperson said, adding that there was “nothing dramatic” about how the project found out. “We were looking at who owned parcels near ours and saw A&P. We looked up A&P and saw it was owned by the Arrillaga and Peery families.”
Erin Morris, Vacaville’s community development director overseeing the East of Leisure Town Road Specific Plan, which includes the A&P Children Investments property, has never spoken to A&P’s owners. “I don’t think anyone on staff has either,” she said.
She added that the plans to develop this land had been in the works “before we ever heard about California Forever,” clarifying later that the beginnings of the A&P Children development can be traced back to 2015 — two years before California Forever’s founding.
Building a housing project is likely to be more lucrative for Arrillaga-Andreessen and her brother than selling the vacant land would have been — especially if interest in the area increases from the plans for a nearby, high-profile project like California Forever.
The A&P-owned properties are situated near the California Forever project. View larger.Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch/OpenStreetMap
“It’s time to build”
For years, Andreessen’s motto “it’s time to build” has become a rallying cry as he has pushed for more housing across the country (except in his own neighborhood).
California Forever, located about 60 miles away from San Francisco, could be considered one type of answer to that call. But the project hit a major setback last month when it had to postpone a crucial ballot measure by two years, citing a lack of local trust and support.
Whether or not that planned community can gain the zoning and approvals it needs to proceed as envisioned, Solano County is a hotbed for lucrative development. The demand for housing has grown so high that “anything you build in Vacaville is going to be sold,” said Curtis Stocking, a Vacaville-based real estate agent who had several clients sell land to California Forever.
The A&P Children Investments LLC has certainly taken a different approach in gaining approvals for its proposed development than California Forever.
California Forever CEO Jan Sramek, tasked with buying up large swaths of the county, has reportedly faced a barrage of criticism from local politicians and residents, many of whom publicly lambasted him for dropping into the county with grand plans and few details.
Meanwhile, A&P Children’s Vacaville development is making progress. At a city council meeting in April, Greg Brun, a representative for A&P Children, called the proposed development plans “visionary.”
“What we’re looking to do here is something that’s unique to Solano County and actually to most of California,” he said. He emphasized that this was their chance to plan a large development that “doesn’t have the issues you’ve had in the past.”
The A&P Children proposal to the city of Vacaville.Image Credits: City of Vacaville
Morris, who works for Vacaville, echoed this. She explained that, normally, developers create the plan for the land and then submit it to the city for review. But A&P Children, along with the owners of adjacent parcels that are being developed, are “essentially giving the city the money” to oversee the preparation of the plan and hire its own environmental and land-planning consultants.
While it is still very early in the process, A&P has shown city officials a rough outline of a master-planned community that includes duplexes, townhomes and micro-lot single-family detached homes “along a spectrum of affordability.” These will all “fit seamlessly into existing residential neighborhoods to the north and south of the project and support walkability,” the group wrote in April. The community would potentially include a 3.9-acre commercial mixed use area, two 1.5-acre parks, and 4.9 acres of additional park and open space with trails.
Brun emphasized that the owners were not a “fly-by-night investor” but a family that has owned the land for decades, according to meeting records.
Real estate records prove those statements to be true, although Arrillaga Sr. wasn’t exactly a local who had spent years living alongside residents. Rather, he was a real estate developer who made his fortune by quietly buying up the land in the Bay Area in the years before Silicon Valley boomed and tech conglomerates built massive campuses there. He and Peery held on to the vacant Solano County parcels for their children’s inheritance.
“It was a long-term investment for their kids,” Brun said.
Lessons from a real estate tycoon father-in-law
In the 1960s, Arrillaga Sr. foresaw a Silicon Valley that didn’t yet exist. Back then, the Bay Area was mostly orchards and farmlands. But Arrillaga Sr., a Stanford University graduate, saw the burgeoning semiconductor industry and made a prescient bet: He teamed up with Peery to buy up thousands of acres of cheap land and immediately erected a series of empty concrete office buildings. Together, they built the bones of Silicon Valley and waited for the actual businesses to catch up.
By the 1980s, their wait was over. Companies like Oracle and Cisco ballooned in size and were desperate for more space, which Arrillaga Sr. and Peery were happy to supply, according to Fortune. The duo were quickly anointed real estate kingmakers, building offices for LinkedIn, Apple and Google. They became billionaires in the process.
In 1985, the pair’s focus drifted northward, according to property records obtained by TechCrunch. They scooped up the 730 acres in Solano County, split across three mostly rectangular blocks of agricultural land, and transferred the land to Arrillaga Sr.’s children in 1998. In 2006, Arrillaga Sr. and the children transferred ownership of the land a final time to A&P Children Investments, which, according to filings with the California secretary of state, is operated by Peery and Arrillaga Jr.
About a decade later, Andreessen fell into the footsteps of his father-in-law by investing in a city that didn’t yet exist — a city to be built a few miles from parcels Arrillaga Sr. bought 30 years prior. Andreessen told Fortune in 2014 that he often sought advice from Arrillaga Sr. He currently serves as the chief financial officer of Arrillaga Sr.’s Arrillaga Foundation, according to a TechCrunch review of California state records.
California Forever’s strategy mirrors Arrillaga’s: Both targeted cheap agricultural land, both operated largely in secrecy, and both set out to establish metropolises before there was any obvious demand for them.
The parcels owned by A&P Children Investments that lie across the highway from the planned California Forever are not currently zoned for urban development, meaning that, for now, they’ll lie fallow. The parcel in Vacaville, however, is further along. Morris said the city is beginning a three-year planning process, before the development’s plan is potentially approved.
Despite A&P Children taking a distinctly different approach than California Forever, the development has still faced residual anger from the controversial utopia. At the April meeting, one resident cited the ambitious project as he cautioned the town council to be careful greenlighting more development. “We don’t know how the magical city over by Rio Vista is going to turn out,” he said, referring to California Forever. “Why should we hurry?”
During that meeting, townsperson after townsperson pushed back against further development. “Ask yourself if this is the dream,” said Wendy Breckon, another Vacaville resident. “To the residents here, this is not the dream.”
But Andreessen’s family might still have an easier victory in Solano County with the A&P project. Vacaville is “such a beautiful area,” Stocking said, adding that “there’s already a big enough demand for housing.”
Image Credits: Stoke Space (opens in a new window)
Stoke Space is nothing if not ambitious. The five-year-old launch startup has generated a lot of hype due to its bold plans to develop the first fully reusable rocket, with both the booster and second stage vertically returning to Earth.
Those plans got a major boost a year ago, when the U.S. Space Force awarded Stoke and three other startups valuable launch pad real estate at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Stoke plans on redeveloping the historic Launch Complex 14, which was home to John Glenn’s historic mission and other NASA programs, in time for its first launch in 2025.
At the center of Stoke’s plans is Nova, a two-stage rocket that is designed so that both the booster and the second stage return to Earth and land vertically. The only other rocket under development that is aiming for full reuse is SpaceX’s Starship. According to Stoke, their reusable upper stage will unlock incredible possibilities, like the ability to return cargo from orbit, land anywhere on Earth, and drive launch prices down by an order of magnitude.
Before any of this can take place, the Space Force must complete its “environmental assessment” of the company’s plans at LC-14, in order to evaluate how repeat launches will affect local flora and fauna. These assessments are mandatory under federal law, and they can often take months — but the upside is that they provide a closer look at a company’s operational plans.
Stoke’s goals are audacious, but the draft environmental assessment for Stoke’s launch pad shows that it would be an error to expect a test of returning even the booster on the first flight. Indeed, the environmental assessment does not consider reusable operations at all, but only missions with the 132-foot-tall Nova flying in a fully expendable configuration. The document, released last month, calls this Stoke’s “phased program approach.” Phase 1 involves operating a totally expendable vehicle at a relatively low launch cadence. Phase 2, which would require a supplemental environmental analysis and is not considered in this draft document, would involve the fully reusable rocket.
Image Credits: Stoke Space
To start, Stoke is seeking authorization to conduct around two launches next year — the first year of operation — and then told regulators that it anticipates a maximum launch cadence of 10 launches per year. Stoke told the regulators that Nova will be capable of carrying up to 7,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, the maximum payload capacity of the rocket when it will not be reused.
A person familiar with Stoke’s plans said that the company has no intention of pursuing the reusable aspects of Nova until it has successfully demonstrated the ability to regularly deploy payloads to planned orbits, and that this phased approach was always part of the internal roadmap.
A phased approach isn’t uncommon: SpaceX, which is the global kingpin of launch, launched its Falcon 9 rocket for the first time in 2010, but only returned the booster back to Earth in 2015. Stoke is clearly seeking to take a similar path, though the draft document does not propose any dates by which the company might start testing its reusable tech.
While it’s too soon to say when reusable flights might start at the Cape, Stoke has been busy conducting its own “hop” campaigns of its second stage at its facilities in Washington State. Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa said in a recent podcast appearance that the company started developing Nova’s second stage first because there was no playbook on second-stage reuse; but because rocket stage design is so tightly coupled, they had to understand the second-stage parameters in order to begin to design the booster.
“The whole vehicle, from a technical side, has to be designed with the end state in mind,” he said. “It has to be architected for that. Everything we’ve done from founding to today is take that end state and build for that end state architecture.”
Once the reusable technology is fully developed, the Space Force will need to conduct a supplemental environmental analysis. At that point, the supplemental EA will consider the environmental impacts of landing at a landing zone near the launch pad, landing on a barge offshore, or at some other location. Depending on the complexity of the changes to the original analysis, this process could take six months or more.
But Stoke will be ready to shift into that second phase, Lapsa said on the podcast: “The millisecond we reach orbit, our focus shifts entirely on, okay, now let’s show that we can get back down. Once we show that we can get back down […] then the millisecond after that, we start focusing on reuse.”
Zapp Electric Vehicles wants to turn its London-based electric two-wheeler brand into a global EV company. And India will be one of its launchpads, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The company will launch its first product — an urban electric two-wheeler called the i300 — in the UK as early as next month, followed by Thailand. The company is now adding India into the mix, a massive market that will provide a true test to its international global expansion strategy, Zapp founder and CEO Swin Chatsuwan told TechCrunch in an interview.
The Nasdaq-listed company advanced its plans for India after Chatsuwan noted the country’s potential. The world’s most populous country not only witnesses millions of two-wheeler sales annually, it’s also the second-biggest two-wheeler manufacturer worldwide after China.
“We thought India would be phase two for us when we did our research a few years ago, but we made a decision earlier this year that it can’t wait,” Chatsuwan said.
Zapp has named Indian electric two-wheeler maker Bounce Electric 1 as its contract manufacturer to produce and sell the i300 locally in the country. After completing the homologation process, sales are expected to begin in 2025. The British company aims to have a minimum capacity of 5,000 units per year in India as part of its broader global goal of 25,000 units by 2026.
Of the 17 million two-wheelers sold in India last year, Chatsuwan told TechCrunch that 2.8 million were high-speed vehicles, and 36% of those high-speed vehicles were heavy-weight cruiser motorcycles from the Chennai-based brand Royal Enfield. Zapp wants to duplicate Royal Enfield’s success with its step-through model, which was unveiled first in 2018.
“We’re not trying to conquer the world. We’re not trying to take half Royal Enfield’s market share and sell 500,000 bikes in India. We’re not. We would see that our quality and performance peer is BMW, particularly their CE 02 and CE 04 step-through electric scooters,” the executive told TechCrunch.
The India launch of Zapp’s i300 will help the company expand its total addressable market (TAM) of 60 million units annually by 25%. By adding India to the map, the TAM of its first phase of market debut has reached 30 million annually, the company said.
The early launch in India will help Zapp understand the “breadth, depth and quality” of the country’s supply chain, Chatsuwan stated. This may help export vehicles from India to global markets over time.
Unlike electric two-wheelers by key Indian manufacturers Ola Electric, TVS Motor and Ather Energy that sell between $1,000 and $1,800, Zapp’s i300 will be a pricey option. The two-wheeler will debut in Europe with a base price of $7,590, excluding taxes.
The India pricing is yet to be decided, though Chatsuwan said it wouldn’t be “more than a million rupees, but I doubt it will be lower than 500,000 rupees.”
The i300 is hitting the streets soon
Zapp unveiled the i300 as its first two-wheeler in 2018. The vehicle comes with an aerospace-grade alloy load-bearing exoskeleton and a chrome-moly steel underbone design. It also carries an air-cooled electric motor with a peak power of 14kW and packs two portable batteries, each with 720Wh capacity.
The company started taking pre-orders for the i300 soon after its unveiling, charging a reservation fee of 100 euros. It promised to begin deliveries in the fourth quarter of 2019. However, the COVID-19 pandemic halted production and deliveries.
Image Credits: Zapp EV
Nonetheless, Zapp is set to start delivering the i300 in the U.K. in the next few weeks. It also plans to begin selling in Thailand this year through a facility in Bangkok.
Zapp set to become ‘complete motorcycle company’
“We’re not a one-hit wonder. We want to show the world that we’re a complete motorcycle company, but let’s begin with executing the first product first,” Chatsuwan told TechCrunch when asked whether Zapp looks to expand its product lineup.
The company also plans to stack up the i300 with “loads of” personalization options and accessories. It already offers the two-wheeler in four distinct versions and lets consumers customize its color and wheel design based on their preference and add accessories, including a hidden storage and fast charger.
Zapp plans to expand its market by entering Spain, Italy, Vietnam and Indonesia in phase two and expand to countries in the Middle East and South America over time.
“We want to be the 21st-century version of Triumph and Royal Enfield and Norton,” Chatsuwan said.
AI big shot Andrew Ng’s AI Fund, a startup incubator that backs small teams of experts looking to solve key problems using AI, plans to raise upward of $120 million for its second effort.
A filing with the SEC shows that the AI Fund’s second fund, AI Venture Fund II, has so far amassed $69.75 million from 13 partners — leaving around $50 million to be invested. The AI Fund’s PR declined to comment.
Ng, the founder of the Google Brain deep learning project, co-founder of Coursera, and recent Amazon board appointee, was one of the most recognizable names in the AI community when he became Baidu’s chief scientist in 2014. He left Baidu in 2017 to jumpstart a number of AI ventures, including the DeepLearning.ai course and Landing AI, a startup developing AI tools targeting manufacturing companies.
Ng launched the AI Fund in 2018 with $175 million, serving as the incubator’s GP and leading its direction. (On the aforementioned SEC filing, he’s named as the “managing member of the general partner” for AI Venture Fund II.) The idea was to provide funding at the seed and Series A stages of a company’s life cycle, allowing teams to work in relative stealth until they were ready — and connecting them with Ng’s extensive professional network.
Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Sequoia Capital and SoftBank Group were among the AI Fund’s initial backers. Crunchbase lists 38 portfolio companies, including AI observability platform WhyLabs, Ng’s own Landing AI, and AI app-building tool Baseten.
At $120 million, AI Venture Fund II would be considerably smaller than the first AI Fund vehicle. Still, it’s more than double what Ng reportedly originally hoped to raise — $50 million — for the AI Fund’s follow-up.
Take it as another potential sign that the AI bubble — particularly the buzzy generative AI segment within it — may be deflating.
PitchBook recently reported that, for two consecutive quarters, generative AI dealmaking at the earliest stages has declined, plummeting 76% from its Q3 2023 peak. VC deal value for pre-seed and seed-stage deals fell in Q1 2024 to $122.9 million, down from Q3’s high of $517.7 million.
Enterprise reluctance could be to blame.
In a pair of recent surveys from Boston Consulting Group, about half of the respondents — all C-suite executives — said that they don’t expect generative AI to bring about substantial productivity gains and that they’re worried about the potential for mistakes and data compromises arising from generative AI-powered tools. As my colleague Ron Miller wrote last week, businesses are finding that generative AI is harder to implement at scale than they once assumed — and that execs are exercising caution.
