Nuro CEO Dave Ferguson at TC Sessions: Mobility on July 10 in San Jose

Autonomous delivery startup Nuro, fresh with nearly $1 billion in capital from SoftBank, is bursting with ideas — as some recent patent filings (and our recent deep dive into the company) suggest. And we can’t wait to learn more about what Nuro has planned. It’s only fitting that Nuro co-founder and CEO Dave Ferguson is […]

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Transportation weekly: Nuro dreams of autonomous lattes, what is a metamaterial, Volvo takes the wheel

Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. We love the reader feedback. Keep it coming. Never heard of TechCrunch’s Transportation Weekly? Read the first edition here.  As I’ve written before, consider this a soft launch. Follow me on Twitter @kirstenkorosec to ensure you see it each week. […]

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How Nuro plans to spend Softbank’s $940 million

Autonomous delivery startup Nuro is bursting with ideas since SoftBank invested nearly $1 billion in February, new filings reveal. A recent patent application details how its R1 self-driving vehicle could carry smaller robots to cross lawns or climb stairs to drop off packages. The company has even taken the step of trademarking the name “Fido” […]

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Transportation Weekly: Uber’s spending habits, Tesla Model Y, scooters and AVs in Austin

Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. We love the reader feedback. Keep it coming. Never heard of TechCrunch’s Transportation Weekly? Catch up by reading the first edition here or check out last week’s edition, which offered the gamut of mobility news from Lyft and Bird to […]

View More Transportation Weekly: Uber’s spending habits, Tesla Model Y, scooters and AVs in Austin

Uber said to be raising $1B at a $10B valuation for its self-driving car unit

The SoftBank Vision Fund is in talks to invest directly in Uber’s autonomous vehicle business, reports The Wall Street Journal.

View More Uber said to be raising $1B at a $10B valuation for its self-driving car unit

Grab confirms $1.46B investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund

Grab has become the newest addition to the SoftBank Vision Fund after it announced today that it has pulled in a $1.46 billion investment from the super fund. Grab said the new money will be used to further its super app strategy, which is aimed at making its service a daily app for Southeast Asian […]

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Why can’t we build anything? (Part 2)

One of the major themes we are working on these days at the Extra Crunch Daily is trying to understand why America and many other Western nations can’t seem to build infrastructure anymore. The answers are complicated but critical: our infrastructure is decrepit, climate change is intensifying, and population growth will put even more strain […]

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Why longer term sheets are better

Recently in a conversation, the length of term sheets came as a topic (I assure you, it was a riveting conversation). The complaint was that a term sheet which had recently been received was too long, and therefore the VC who sent it wasn’t being founder friendly. The travails of successfully raising money! Actually though, […]

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Blockchain is solid, in that there is no liquidity

The quality of a financial market is driven by liquidity. Companies want to list on the NYSE, because that’s where the most financial investors in the world are located, and the thicker the market for investors, the better the valuations for companies. The NYSE has “problems” though — its closed most hours of the week, […]

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Softbank’s next bet: $940M into autonomous delivery startup Nuro

Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup, has raised $940 million in financing from the Softbank Vision Fund, a whopping amount that will be used to expand its delivery service, add new partners, hire employees and scale up its fleet of self-driving bots. Nuro has raised more than $1 billion from partners including SoftBank, Greylock Partners and […]

View More Softbank’s next bet: $940M into autonomous delivery startup Nuro

WeWork rebranding won’t work

The company formerly known as WeWork has rebranded as the We Company — although a better name for its network of on-demand office spaces for the newly incorporated and nominally employed; co-living spaces for the same Easyjet-set; and educational and coding services could be “House of Cards”. News of the rebranding (first reported via Fast Company) comes […]

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With today’s IPO sinking, a year of highs and lows for SoftBank

If there was a word that dominated startup and tech news coverage this year, it was SoftBank. The Japanese telecom conglomerate’s Vision Fund pushed out a prodigious amount of capital this year — quite literally billions of dollars — into companies as diverse as a molecular manufacturer (Zymergen) and a robotic pizza delivery business (Zume Pizza). […]

View More With today’s IPO sinking, a year of highs and lows for SoftBank