Mark your calendar — StrictlyVC London is just around the corner on 13 May. Designed for founders, entrepreneurs, and investors, this exclusive gathering promises deep VC insight and high-value connections. We’re thrilled to welcome our first pair of confirmed speakers: Nazo Moosa, managing director of Paladin Capital Group, and Sonali De Rycker, partner of Accel...
Category: Tech Crunch
Lucid Motors wins bankruptcy auction for Nikola’s Arizona factory and other assets
EV startup Lucid Motors has emerged as a surprise winner in the bankruptcy auction for electric trucking company Nikola’s Arizona factory and other assets, according a late Thursday night court filing. Lucid committed around $30 million in cash and non-cash considerations in exchange for the factory, Nikola’s lease on its Phoenix headquarters, and “certain machinery,...
Tesla used car listings skyrocketed in March
A growing number of Tesla owners are putting their used vehicles up for sale, as consumers react to Elon Musk’s political activities and the global protests they have fueled. In March, the number of used Tesla vehicles listed for sale on Autotrader.com skyrocketed, Sherwood News reported, citing data from Autotrader parent company Cox Automotive. The...
Stripe CEO says he ensures his top leaders interview a customer twice a month
Digital payments platform Stripe invites customers to join its management team meetings on a bi-weekly basis so it can get “candid feedback,” according to co-founder Patrick Collison. In an April 8 post on X, the fintech giant’s CEO said the company has a customer join for the first 30 minutes of the meeting, which is...
How Chef Robotics found success by turning away its original customers
A few years ago, Chef Robotics was hurting. But founder Rajat Bhageria turned it around by doing something that early-stage founders fear to do.
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, launches an API for Grok 3
Billionaire Elon Musk has just been countersued by OpenAI, but that isn’t stopping his AI company, xAI, from making its flagship Grok 3 model available via an API. It has been several months since xAI unveiled Grok 3, the company’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini. Grok 3 can analyze images and respond to questions,...
Wayve’s self-driving tech is headed to Nissan vehicles
Nissan said it will use self-driving software developed by Wayve to beef up its advanced driver assistance system starting in 2027, a landmark deal for the buzzy UK startup that has raised more than $1.3 billion from Nvidia, Microsoft, SoftBank Group, and Uber. Nissan will integrate Wayve’s software as well as sensors, including lidar from an undisclosed...
How a hydrogen explosion led a teenage founder to become Sequoia’s first defense tech investment
As Sequoia Capital’s first defense tech investment, Mach Industries is an industry darling, raising over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, began Mach as a teenage MIT student before dropping out to focus full-time on his startup. But a few months before landing a seed investment from Sequoia...
Google to embrace Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data
Just a few weeks after OpenAI said it would adopt rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to the systems where data resides, Google is following suit. In a post on X on Wednesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Google would add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to its Gemini models...
A fresh $100M rolls into DIG Ventures as it bids to woo early-stage European startups
The number of “operator VCs” — former founders turned VCs — in Europe in recent years. This is common in the U.S., where the majority of VCs are former founders. The reverse is true in Europe, where most come from banking or finance. Recent examples in Europe include Wise founder Taavet Hinrikus, Glovo founder Oscar...