Given the current state of the worldwide aviation industry, checking a bag may not be the best idea right now. But sometimes you don’t have a choice and soon, at least if you’re flying Alaska Airlines, the whole process of checking a bag may just become a little bit easier. After a trial a few years ago, the airline today announced that it’ll start rolling out free electronic bag tags to a group of 2,500 of its Mileage Plan elites flying out of San Jose now, with a wide rollout to all Mileage Plan members (who will have to pay for their tags) coming in 2023.

Unlike the current system, where you print a tag at the airport — or have an airline employee do it for you — with these rugged new electronic tags you simply check in on your phone as usual. Then, after you decide you want to check a bag, you hold the phone close to the tag and, using your phone’s NFC chip, transfer that data to the tag to display it on the built-in e-ink display, which simply displays the standard barcode you’d also see on a printed bag tag. In addition, the tag also features an RFID chip, which a number of airports now use for their automated baggage systems.

Image Credits: Alaska

Charu Jain, Alaska’s senior VP of merchandising and innovation, tells me that the company will first provide free tags to about 2,500 flyers who regularly check bags in San Jose. All Mileage Plan members will be able to purchase these tags in early 2023.

“At Alaska, we’re very focused on improving our guests’ experience at every touchpoint, whether they’re buying a ticket or shopping — when they go to the airport or whether they’re on flight or they’re collecting their baggage,” she explained. “So as we looked at the airport environment specifically related to this project — you know, 50% of our guests check in a bag — and that means they need a bag tag because the bag tag is needed to route it through the whole system.” But the bag tag also becomes the bottleneck at the airport, because even if a traveler has already paid for their bag, they still have to print it and check it.

Now, for those lucky few in San Jose, the entire process will be automated. They simply arrive with the electronic bag tag and use the airline’s new self-service bag drops (which scan and weigh the bag automatically). Jain believes that for these travelers, the entire process of moving through the airport lobby and checking their bags should only take a few minutes. She noted that the airline already has a very high number of passengers who use its self-service check-in options and bag-tag printers.

When Alaska first tested an early version of this new bag tag in 2015, that tag still used batteries (the new one doesn’t, with the phone providing just enough energy to change the e-ink display) and had a few buttons. The tag is made of highly durable plastic. Gus Naughton, a senior software engineer at Alaska who worked on this project, told me the airline tested it by running everything from luggage carts, catering trucks and even jet bridge wheels over it. Apparently it did just fine, and these new tags could last a lifetime, the airline argues, saving quite a bit of paper in the process (and while Alaska argues there’s a sustainability aspect to all of this, my guess is that it’ll take quite a few bag tags to achieve any kind of parity given the energy and materials involved in creating these tags).

Anyway — don’t check a bag if you can avoid it. Thank me later.

Amazon tried but then ultimately stepped away from building its own cost-intensive Grubhub and DoorDash competitor in the U.S. back in 2019. Now three years on, it’s taking a different approach to tackling the space to build in one more sweetener to encourage more sign-ups to its Prime subscription service. Today, the e-commerce giant and Just Eat Takeaway — which owns Grubhub in the U.S. — announced an investment and partnership in which Amazon will offer free membership to Grubhub+ for one year to Prime members in the country, and take equity in Grubhub potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Grubhub+, when it launched in 2020, was described as the “Amazon Prime of food delivery”: like other loyalty programs run by other delivery services, it’s a subscription service where members get free delivery on orders and potentially other bonuses. It’s normally charged at $9.99 per month.

The commercial terms of the agreement looks like it will give Amazon a stake in JET (as Just Eat Takeaway abbreviates its name).

Specifically, it will include a provision to renew the deal annually (just like a Prime subscription!), and that ” a subsidiary of Amazon will receive warrants (exercisable at a de minimis price) over 2% of Grubhub’s fully-diluted common equity.”

It also notes that “Amazon will also receive warrants (exercisable at a formula-based price) over up to a further 13% of Grubhub’s fully-diluted common equity, the vesting of which is subject to the satisfaction of certain performance conditions, principally the number of new consumers delivered through the commercial agreement.”

Those actual values will change, but as of December 31, JET said that the gross assets of Grubhub were €6,521 million ($6.7 billion, down from the $7.3 billion it paid in 2020) and the loss before tax for the 12 months ending in that period was €403 million. Doing the math, that works out at the first set of warrants being valued at about a $134 million, with the performance-based warrants valued at $870 million.

Just Eat Takeaway — a massive food delivery conglomerate that includes both of those international brands, plus Grubhub in the U.S., among other interests — has been under some pressure in its U.S. business in recent times, where it competes against the likes of Uber Eats and Doordash and many other outfits in what its a highly competitive, and often low margin, space. In a trading update from April (its most recent figures) it noted that Q1 orders in North America were at 89.6 million, a decline of 5% over the same period a year ago (when pandemic buying lifted many delivery boats). Revenues on paper looked like they grew 3% but in constant currency also declined by 5%.

At the same time, the company has been reassessing its ownership of Grubhub. It hotly contested buying the operation back in 2020 for $7.3 billion, but by May of this year it was weighing options for the business. It confirmed today that this remains the case: “The Company, together with its advisors, continues to actively explore the partial or full sale of Grubhub,” it said in a statement.

JET noted that the deal is expected to expand Grubhub+ membership, although it doesn’t disclose current membership numbers; and that it will have a “neutral impact” on Grubhub’s 2022 earnings and cash flow, with accretive impact from 2023 onwards.

This is not the first time the two companies have danced together. About a year ago, Amazon started offering Grubhub+ subscriptions free for a year to Amazon Prime Student members. It’s not clear how well that partnership has gone, although today’s news feels like an expansion of that, so chances are it’s been positive overall.

Sometimes those dances are not so harmonious, though. In the U.K., where Amazon pulled out of its original Restaurants service as it did in the U.S., it also stepped back into the restaurant delivery biz in a similar partnership, but this time with JET competitor Deliveroo, offering a free year of Deliveroo Plus to its Prime members in the country. Deliveroo Plus is — you guessed it — Deliveroo’s take on the membership subscription/free delivery model.

Amazon deal came in part because it is an investor, and thus part-owner, of Deliveroo. Given JET’s bigger picture of the state of its business in the U.S., and the fact that Amazon clearly still sees a lot of opportunity in building more strands for its delivery and subscription beast, it’s interesting to consider how and where these three companies will continue to compete, where they will cooperate, and possibly where they might potentially swap assets?

The deal today does certainly seem to point to at least some more ties in that regard.

“I am incredibly excited to announce this collaboration with Amazon that will help Grubhub continue to deliver on our long-standing mission to connect more diners with local restaurants,” said Adam DeWitt, CEO of Grubhub. “Amazon has redefined convenience with Prime and we’re confident this offering will expose many new diners to the value of Grubhub+ while driving more business to our restaurant partners and drivers.”

In Indonesia, many logistics providers still use old-fashioned systems to track their operations and fleets, including pen-and-paper ledgers. McEasy wants to change that. The startup, which develops software-as-a-service solutions for the logistics and supply chain industry, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding led by East Ventures.

The startup was founded in 2017 by Raymond Sutjiono and Hendrik Ekowaluyo, and now serves more than 200 clients, including Cleo Pure Water, KMDI Logistics, MGM Bosco Logistics, Rosalia Indah and the Tanto Intim Line.

Its software and smart tracker, called Vehicle Smart Management System, has been adopted by users like passenger buses, freight forwarding services and refrigerated vehicles used to transport pharmaceuticals, meat, seafood, dairy and frozen foods. Other products include Mobility Software-as-a-Service to digitize vehicles for real-time tracking, solutions for improving business efficiency and an open API ecosystem.

The new capital will be used on developing products for SMEs and establishing a stronger foothold in Indonesia’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. McEasy says it has grown more than 12x in the past 18 months.

Sutjiono told TechCrunch that he met and became best friends with Ekowaluyo while both were studying mechanical engineering at Purdue University. The two then worked at Ford in structural engineering. Sutjiona said Ekowaluyo is an expert in structural design and program management in cars, while he focuses more on engine electronics, system control and data handling.

After returning to Indonesia, the two started McEasy to produce hybrid motorcycles. But after researching the market, they realized that the market was shifting to digital instead of hybrid bikes, so they came up with a smart tracker for motorcycles. But because the trackers were cost-prohibitive, they decided to do another shift to B2B logistics and automotive.

“B2B logistics players were still using the conventional method, and we wanted to make a digital solution to improve the business process,” said Sutjiono. “The logistics sector was chosen because of its promising potential and growth during the pandemic. Indonesia has more than 22.5 million units of passenger vehicles and more than 5 million units of freight cars.

The founders say that more than 85% of businesses in the transportation and supply chain sectors still use paper ledgers for their operations, including managing drivers, expenses, fuel consumption and route efficiency. To convince people to move from their legacy systems to McEasy, it offers a free trials and is growing its operations through word of mouth.”

In a prepared statement, East Ventures co-founder Willson Cuaca said, “McEasy has managed to accelerate positively in this post-pandemic environment. They combine the best of both worlds – logistics and technology – to elevate their offerings, strengthen their national footprints, and maintain profitability levels.”

Flight information boards, especially the old electromechanical ones with their clacking letters, are often an iconic part of an airport. But just like flying today is quite different from 30 years ago, most airports have now moved to large LCD screens instead. Despite the fact that you could easily find all of this information on your phone, travelers regularly congregate around these signs to get up-to-date information about their flights.

At CES 2020, Delta Air Lines and Misapplied Sciences first showed off what the future of these displays could look like, with a large board that shows up to 100 passengers personalized information about their flights in parallel. Today, the company is launching this experience in its Detroit hub and any Delta flyer who wants to give it a try can now do so, marking the first time one of these boards is being used in a public venue.

Image Credits: Delta Air Lines

Back in 2020, Delta and Misapplied Sciences said they would bring the first Parallel Reality experience, as Misapplied calls it, to Detroit by the middle of 2020. Those were the optimistic days before the pandemic, so it’s maybe no surprise that the two companies decided to hold off on installing it until now. In June 2020, after all, fewer than 300,000 people got on a plane in Detroit.

The Parallel Reality displays work because every pixel in the display can simultaneously project millions of light rays in different directions. As travelers scan their boarding passes to opt in to the experience (with the potential for mobile tracking and similar technologies following later), the system’s sensors will track them, even as they walk around the display, and show the right information for their eyes only. It sounds a bit like magic, but I remember trying it out during CES 2020 and it does really work. It’s not a 4K cinematic experience, but the screen is perfectly legible and with two extra years of development time, Misapplied Sciences was able to improve the display, too.

Image Credits: Delta Air Lines

The new display is six and a half feet tall and 21 and a half feet wide, Misapplied CEO Albert Ng told me. “The point of Parallel Reality is that you can create an entire venue that is customized just for you,” he explained. “The vision is of course, as you walk through from curb to gate, throughout the airport, you’ll be able to have the entire airport just handhold you and provide a seamless, personalized experience for you and we’d like to show off kind of the largest scale display for that.”

To show that Delta is all in on this, the company removed a large legacy sign in the airport that had been in use for more than 20 years (showing tram information).

Forbes noted that by scanning a boarding pass, users opt into using this new system, but now that Delta also has its Digital ID facial recognition system, which it launched last fall, the plan is to use personal devices for users to opt in, too.

Greg Forbes, Delta’s managing director of Airport Experience, noted that it was important for his team to find a useful application for this system. “We have these flight information boards that have been a feature of airports for decades and decades,” he said. “And it’s funny, because, going from the kind of mechanical flipping ones over to digital — that’s really the big innovation that has happened since. And you have all these challenges where there are more and more flights, so you add more and more screens, and that just makes it even harder for customers to use. You see big crowds of people standing around, trying to pick out their flights as it’s moving.”

Image Credits: Delta Air Lines

In the ideal world, these signs would just follow you around in the airport and keep pointing you to your gate or the airline lounge. But for now, Delta is going to test this single board in Detroit, and even though Forbes noted that the company is thinking about how to use it in its Sky Club lounges, for example, it’s not planning to simply bring the same experience to another one of its hubs. Instead, he believes it’ll be more interesting for now to experiment with other use cases. The two companies are also looking at how to improve the current board with features like multi-language support.

As for Misapplied Sciences, it’s worth noting that while Ng noted the close collaboration between his company and Delta, there is no exclusivity here. “Parallel Reality is a widely applicable technology to any out-of-home venue where many people are looking for different things, have different preferences and would benefit from a different curated personalized experience,” Ng said. “The airport is just the start. We’re very excited to introduce this into other venues, like retail venues, stadiums or other entertainment venues, hospitality venues — anywhere out of home where many people can be experiencing personalized experiences in a shared public environment.”

He wasn’t quite ready to announce any future deployment plans just yet, though.

If you’re traveling through Detroit anytime soon, you’ll likely come across this new board. If you don’t opt in, you’ll still just see the usual departure board, so nothing would change for you there.

Scooter and micromobility company Bird has to fly at a slightly higher altitude — at least if it wants to keep its New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listing. The company issued a press release on Friday noting that it had received word from the NYSE that its share price was “not in compliance” with the exchange’s requirement that Class A Common Stock for a listed company be at least $1.00 over the course of a consecutive 30-day trading period.

Bird’s share price has followed a fairly consistent downward trajectory since its debut via a SPAC merger last November. The closing price has remained below $1 per share since around mid-May, just after when it reported its first fiscal quarterly earnings for 2022. Those results saw revenue, gross margins and ride profit drop quarter over quarter — those ride profits grew considerably year over year.

The non-compliance note from NYSE doesn’t mean immediate delisting — it’s a preliminary step that gives Bird six months to get back in compliance, which means holding an average share price of at least $1 across a span of 30 consecutive trading days and also having a share value above $1 on the final trading day of that same month. To get above water, Bird says in its release that it will be considering a number of options, including a reverse stock split (pending shareholder approval).

Bird’s share price closed at $0.5558 on the trading day.

The era of commercial autonomous robotaxi service is here — Cruise officially became the first company to offer faired rides to the general public in a major city as of late Wednesday. The milestone comes after Cruise received official approval from the California Public Utilities Commission in early June to operate driverless in a commercial capacity.

Initially, Cruise’s driverless autonomous offering will operate only between 10 pm and 6 am, and only on designated streets in the city. But the limits are part of a plan by regulators and the company to prove out the safety and efficacy of its system before deploying it in more locations at at additional times. The new operating window already extends its total active time by 1.5 hours as compared to the free driverless test pilot service it was offering between June of last year and the debut of this paid service.

It sounds like Cruise is still a ways off from making this offering available far and wide to San Franciscans eager to take a trip with a robot chauffeur, but this is still a major step towards a future where AVs crawl the streets in big cities picking up paying fares.

It’s been a tough few years for Omio, the Berlin-based travel search and booking platform that saw 98% of its revenues evaporate overnight when COVID-19 hit Europe back in Spring 2020. But the company kept on trucking and has found some light at the end of the tunnel: Today it’s reporting revenues which have rebounded to more than double pre-pandemic levels. It’s also announcing close of an $80M Series E.

The E round includes backing from some new investors including Lazard Asset Management and Stack Capital Group. Existing investors reupping their support for the almost decade-old business include NEA, Temasek, and funds managed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, amongst others.

It’s Omio’s first funding since a $100M convertible note it took in just under two years ago to see it through the first waves of the coronavirus crisis. In all, it’s raised around $480M since being founded back in 2013.

The new funding will be put towards reviving global expansion activities that have necessarily had to take a bit of a backseat during the pandemic — including through M&A; and by doing more with its transportation data and inventory by scaling its partnerships (existing collaborations include tie-ups with Kayak, Huawei and LNER (London North Eastern Railway), among others. Investment for hiring and product dev is also planned.

“When COVID-19 hit we paused this global expansion strategy so that’s now back on track,” founder and CEO, Naren Shaam tells TechCrunch. “But with a slightly different twist — and the twist is basically we’re very much focused on our learnings and our scars we gained during COVID-19. So we’re going about it in a much more disciplined fashion.”

That means the preference will typically be ‘build vs buy’, he says — but with the possibility of strategic acquisitions for selective technology and/or inventory to support further global scaling.

As it stands, Europe remains Omio’s biggest market — but Shaam says demand in the US, where Omio had launched just prior to the pandemic, has “bounced back” so he sounds bullish again on growth prospects over the pond.

The travel startup is not disclosing a valuation for its business at the latest raise but that’s essentially a point of principle for Shaam, who bats away the question with a laugh. “We don’t comment on valuation ever,” he says, adding: “Let’s just say I’m building a business for the long term so I’ve never really focused on that.” (Albeit it sounds like it’s fair to say the August 2020 raise was a down valuation, and the E round is back up.)

Having a long term mindset amid such a shock crisis for the primary industry your business is built to serve has probably been essential to getting Omio through the worst moments of the past two years — as well as setting it up for whatever problems might lie or lurk ahead. More pandemic-shaped tunnels remain possible, of course, given the COVID-19 virus continues to evolve.

One knock-on effect of the crisis has been to force startups in affected industries to tightly focus on managing and shrinking their costs. Omio is no exception — which is why a slightly more modestly sized raise now is all it needs to stay on track now, per Shaam. (We’re also told the Series E raise should last it two to three years.)

“COVID-19 impacted us heavily. We had to focus on costs. And we really kept a very lean business coming out of COVID-19,” he says, describing himself as “very happy and humble” that business “survived” — before immediately qualifying the remark with: “And not just survived; but we’ve managed to come back so strong that we’re doing now 2x the revenues of 2019.”

“The travel industry as a whole has not yet bounced back to 2x of 2019,” he also emphasizes. “We’re significantly more efficient — the path to profitability is a lot closer so that just tells us we don’t need to continue to raise large amounts of capital and I’d rather be independent of that as fast as possible. So it’s very much a decision around where the business is today, rather than the need to just keep larger rounds going.”

How close is profitability for Omio? Shaam characterizes the key milestone as now looming on the horizon — saying: “We very clearly see [it] in the near term.”

“Overall it’s also a function of how efficient the business is,” he adds. “We’re getting more efficient with scale and as we grow we’re getting even more efficient — which is almost a little counter intuitive because when you grow very fast you lose some efficiency and you have to catch up.”

Asked what’s further down the tracks — and whether Omio is planning for an IPO — Shaam dubs it “a little premature” for such plans, while signalling that it’s where he hopes to end up in the not too distant future. (“The company is more ready to be — hopefully — a public company some day soon,” is how he frames it.)

That said, he also points to the current state of public markets, with tech stocks continuing to take a battering, as obviously putting the brakes on moving anything forward on that front at present.

“We’ve created the discipline internally from an operational perspective — our operating leverage has grown tremendously,” he also tells us. “We’re significantly more profitable on a contribution margin basis. Our Opex is low. Both businesses, Omio and Rome2Rio which we acquired, are out-performing any internal projections we had by significant levels. So, for now, we’ll just keep — as we anyway do — financial closing on a quarterly basis with IFRS [international financial reporting standards] etc. So we’ve got — let’s say — many of the tools that’s necessary, if not all, of a public company and we’ll just keep an eye on the markets.”

Omio operates in a space with no shortage of competitors for travellers’ attention but its platform stands out by merit of being multimodal — which is to say it can span multiple transport types, from buses and trains to flights and ferries (with price comparison baked in) — making it a more comprehensive option for travel planning vs (just) consulting train or flight booking sites.

That said, journeys don’t have to be complex, multi-legged affairs; Omio can sell you a ticket just to get from destination town A to B (or for an airport transfer), using just the one mode of transport too. But there’s no doubt the core platform excels off the road less travelled — as it’s focused on building out its inventory broadly, rather than concentrating effort around major hubs. Which means that as the pandemic has shaken out into a longer tail of behavioral impacts — changing how, where and even when and how people are travelling — its business looks well placed to adapt to and serve that changing demand.

This includes being able to respond to growing concern around climate goals — and the need to shrink the travel sector’s emissions — given Omio’s early focus (when it was called GoEuro) on train travel which remains a far more sustainable choice than flying, for example; as well as the years of work it put in getting state rail companies on board with its booking platform. (A recent addition is Portugal’s state-owned railway company, Comboios de Portugal — with Omio becoming the first third-party booking platform to sell its tickets.)

“There’s some fundamental underlying shifts in travel consumer behavior that has played to our advantage,” argues Shaam. “When COVID-19 hit we focused on those as a bet — and invested in those — which was more ground transport, more app-driven bookings (vs kiosks)… more focused on our core strength, which is non-hub travel; smaller towns — so that became, during COVID-19, ‘work from anywhere’, go to less crowded places — and now it’s more like where people travel; I won’t say ‘long tail’ but definitely not to crowded hubs only.

“And all of those destinations need access to ground transport — and those customers are booking on mobile — so these kind of underlying shifts are very, very strong and we’ve managed to capture a lot of that… So hopefully we’ve taken a good amount of market share given where revenue is relative to the industry as a whole.”

Asked about the hardest moment he’s faced as a founder since the pandemic hit, Shaam points back to the revenue-crushing impact of the first wave of COVID-19 hitting Europe in late March/early April 2020 when Omio saw 98% of its revenues dry up. “And I wasn’t sure how to make head nor tail out of it, whether we were going to survive or not at the time — so that was a hard moment, followed immediately by furloughs, restructuring… so it was just one [hard moment] after another.”

But he also describes a second hard moment that’s been sustained over these years, as a result of the uneven impact of COVID-19 — and which he says he found even harder to navigate. Even if, ultimately, the company that’s emerged from the pandemic, with all its COVID-19-related scars, is necessarily a stronger, leaner and more mission-committed business.

“There were specific industries that were totally grounded… and other industries that were seeing their best days ever. And that was much harder, as a CEO of one of those companies, to navigate through,” he says. “Labor markets are fluid and the [people] who believed in the business have stayed — and it’s very good for me because it shows that they believe in the business and I’m very grateful for that.”

Tesla vehicles just got a bit more expensive to get into, with price increases ranging from $2,500 for the Model 3 Long Range, to $6,000 for the Dual Motor AWD Model X, as first reported by Electrek. Some of the already more expensive trim levels remained the same price as before, but ever vehicle in Tesla’s lineup was affected.

The Model Y got a $3,000 bump on its Dual Motor AWD version, and a $2,000 increase on the Performance model, while the Model S saw a $5,000 increase on the Dual Motor AWD variant. Both the Model S and the Model X already saw their pricing jump earlier this year, so new buyers could be facing significant potential sticker shock.

Tesla has called out supply chain issues in its most recent earnings call, noting they could result in factories running at under max output capacity. That, combined with rising inflation, could be a key contributor to the price hikes, which will help control demand and compensate for rising costs.

Technology built with defense in mind is getting some significant and serious traction at the moment, spurred by world events, advances in technology, and a growing appetite from end users to invest in more innovative ways to protect themselves. In the latest development, Shield AI — which makes software and hardware for drones and other autonomous aircraft used by military and other government organizations — has raised $165 million in funding, $90 million in Series E equity and $75 million in debt.

The funding is coming in at a $2.3 billion valuation, Shield AI said. The company has been on a strong pace on that front: it follows on from a $210-$300 million Series D about ten months ago that valued the company at $1.25 billion. (It never confirmed the final amount, which was also a mix of equity and debt.)

Doug Philippone at Snowpoint Ventures led the round, with Riot Ventures, Disruptive (a returning backer; it led Shield AI’s Series D) and Homebrew (it led Shield AI’s seed round). The company’s other investors include Point72, Andreessen Horowitz, Breyer Capital, and SVB Capital.

Philippone is an interesting person to lead on this latest round: in addition to being an investor, he is also Palantir’s global defense lead, a job he’s been in for the last 14 years. This is important not least because Palantir arguably was one of the key companies to change the game for how startups, spurred by the tech boom out of Silicon Valley, both engaged and started to win defense contracts and raised huge sums from VCs to fuel that growth.

Another influential startup changing the conversation around funding defense tech is Anduril, which as we reported just the other week, is raising up to $1.2 billion (potentially more) at a $7 billion valuation. That round, we have heard, is basically now closed.

Shield AI is based out of San Diego, which you could say is a little like the Silicon Valley of the defense industry. It’s the home port of the U.S. Pacific fleet, and according to stats gathered by the city’s chamber of commerce, outside of Fairfax County, Virginia (where the Pentagon is based) greater San Diego gets more defense spending than any other place in the U.S. Shield is based there among a dozens of other major and smaller defense contractors.

And if you don’t follow the defense industry, but have at least seen or heard of Top Gun or its recently-released blockbuster sequel, you’ll know that it’s a major center specifically for aerospace development. Shield AI targets a very specific customer base that is focused around the U.S. military and its allies, but even so it speaks about what it does in terms that bring is purpose and function into context for more ordinary people.

“China’s military is Netflix; the U.S. military is Blockbuster. China is Amazon; the U.S. is Barnes & Noble. China is Tesla; the U.S. is General Motors,” writes Brandon Tseng, the president of the company who co-founded it with his brother Ryan (who is the CEO). Brandon is also a former Navy SEAL so he speaks with some authority in making these sorts of analogies.

And on the company’s home page, it describes Hivemind, its AI-based autonomous software platform, as what else? “A Top Gun for every aircraft.”

As with a lot of other companies (maybe every company) in autonomous transportation, be it in the air or on the ground, Shield AI has a mix of software and hardware that is already usable, and then products that are still in development. Some will be used in purely autonomous systems, and some in tandem with humans.

In the case of Shield AI, the company says that Hivemind and its Nova drone (or small-unmanned aircraft system, sUAS, in more formal terminology) have been in use since 2018. Ryan Tseng tells us that the specifics of exactly where and how are classified, as are most of the companies other activities, but they are part of the U.S. Department of Defense Program of Record.

It’s also working on a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft called V-BAT that will be soon equipped with Hivemind. The software is being integrated into other aircraft, too, such as the F-16 fighter jet pictured above, where it will act as a co-pilot alongside a human, with the aim for it to be used also across F-22s, F-18s, and other models. In the meantime, Tseng said in an interview that its V-BAT craft also have been operational since 2018 around the globe.

“The DoD and international militaries are acquiring V-BAT at a rapid rate so we’re ramping production as quickly as possible,” he said — one reason for this funding. V-BAT beat out 13 competitors to win a major Navy Program of Record, he added. Its selling point is its ability to withstand challenging conditions. “The unique design and controls allow it to take off & land in high winds, on crowded flight decks, aboard moving vessels with landing zones as small as 12’ x 12’.”

The bigger strategy is to build a “swarming” capability for its devices — essentially to use a number of them in concert as a way of evading jamming technologies from adversaries. This, Tseng said, is on track for coming to market by the end of 2023 (although since a lot of what they do is classified, they may not actually make anything public until it’s already being used).

Taking both Anduril’s recent landmark round and this latest round for Shield AI, we’re in a moment right now where VCs — working themselves in a challenging financial climate — have changed their tune when it comes to backing companies in the defense space, which includes not just companies like these building military technology, but also those working in cybersecurity and other kinds of technology that helps with resilience. This could include, interestingly, alternative energy tech and of course products that can be used by more than just governments but enterprises as well.

“The fundraising climate has never been more favorable for defense technology companies,” Tseng told TechCrunch. “Supporting defense was taboo in many circles. We were rejected by many early investors because defense was considered too controversial. Today, there is growing recognition that investment in defense contributes to security, stability, and peace, all of which are foundational to a flourishing society.”

As noted by others who are investing in this space right now, or building for it, there has indeed been a noticeable shift in how people view companies like Shield AI and what they are trying to develop. That is still a challenge, though, which might be one reason why a company like Shield goes through the work of putting out messaging to people who may never actually be customers to still take in what they are trying to do.

“Many people don’t realize the scope of conflict in the world – before Ukraine, 84 million people were displaced by violence and persecution, up from 39 million in 2011,” Tseng said. “There aren’t that many opportunities to contribute to technologies that meaningfully address humanity’s great challenges – or that create the general conditions for human achievement. When you work on AI pilots for defense – you are working on the most important and disruptive defense technology of the next thirty years – and are empowering our country and allies to advance security, stability, and peace.”

That is filliped also by the fact that adversaries are also hot on the heels building their own similar systems. China is aiming for military parity by 2027 in the Pacific, Tseng pointed out, meaning they aim to exceed the U.S. by 2028. And he added that there have been reports that it is already benchmarking their prototypes against Shield AI’s pilot.

Tseng also may be biased but has a very different idea of why autonomous matters more in this context. “Waymo engineers get to build minivans that plod through the suburbs at 25 mph, we get to work autonomous fighter jets that fly 1000+ mph, dodge missiles, and find threats,” he said.

All this is spelling not just an opportunity in the business sense, but a wider one, too, for those backing Shield AI.

“Investors are flocking to quality. This round is a reflection of Shield AI’s success in creating great products, building a business with strong fundamentals, and dominant technological leadership – with an AI pilot proven to be the world’s best in numerous military evaluations,” said Philippone in a statement. “We love that they are leveraging an AI and software backbone across a variety of aircraft to deliver truly game-changing value to our warfighters. The work they are doing today is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Despite already struggling to meet production targets, luxury EV maker Lucid has now issued a recall for the Air due to potential issues stemming from the car’s wiring harness.

In a recent notice posted on the NHTSA website spotted by Lucid Insiders, a summary for the recall says unsecured wires on 2022 Air vehicles could cause the car’s displays to turn off. And because the Air’s displays contain critical information including speed, range and warning indicators, this would present a hazard in violation of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.

The notice states that the potential number of affected vehicles is 1,117. That means with Lucid having delivered less than 1,000 cars to date, the recall appears to cover all 2022 Air Dream Edition and Grand Touring models. For any potentially affected owners, you can get more info by calling Lucid’s customer service at 1-888-995-8243 and mentioning recall number NCR-22-01-0.

Official notification letters are slated to be sent out on June 20th Meanwhile, for cars that are subject to the recall, the NHTSA says Lucid dealers will be responsible for inspecting vehicles and addressing the issue as needed, free of charge.

Going forward, Lucid Insiders claims the company has already started making adjustments to the glass canopy on new vehicles to prevent any issues with unsecured wires. However, perhaps the bigger concern is that this recall comes just a few months after Lucid recalled 200 cars for having front strut dampers that may have been improperly installed by a supplier. And with reservations for the Air now exceeding 25,000 cars, ironing out any issues will be hugely important if Lucid hopes to deliver those vehicles in a timely manner.

Update, 5/25/22 3:35PM ET: A Lucid spokesperson has provided Engadget with an official statement regarding the recall which you can see below.

“For Lucid, the safety of our customers and their families is the highest priority. Lucid is recalling certain model year 2022 Lucid Air vehicles because of the possibility that the wiring connection to the instrument panel may not have been secured properly during assembly. The recall applies to 1,117 vehicles that have been delivered to customers, and it is estimated that the defect is present on 1% of cars. Lucid is not aware of any instances when these components have failed in a vehicle or caused an interruption to the instrument display panel.“

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

The world’s fifth-largest automaker will reportedly soon plead guilty to end a multi-year investigation into its efforts to conceal the amount of pollution created by its diesel engines. According to Reuters, the US Justice Department and Dodge parent company Stellantis could announce as early as next week that the automaker has agreed to pay $300 million to settle allegations of crminal fraud. Stellantis declined to comment on the report.

The Justice Department began investigating Stellantis around 2019 when the automaker recalled nearly 1 million vehicles in the US and Canada for not meeting federal tailpipe emission standards. As of last year, the agency has announced criminal charges for just three Stellantis employees. The probe involved approximately 100,000 Ram pickup trucks and Jeep SUVs sold in the US.

The deal comes five years after Volkswagen famously pleaded guilty to its own emissions scandal. “Dieselgate” saw the German automaker eventually pay more than $20 billion in fines and legal settlements for installing illegal software designed to cheat government emissions tests. Since then, sales of diesel vehicles have plummeted in Europe and other parts of the world.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi’s shareholders have voted to delist the company from the NYSE. The decision is a long-expected result of the company finding itself in hot water with the Chinese government after a rushed and later troubled public-market debut in the United States.

Didi went public in the middle of 2021 in an offering that came together quickly. After listing in June, by early July, TechCrunch was already flagging issues between the newly floated company and the Chinese government.

Putatively irked over data concerns, the Chinese Communist Party was executing a regulatory push at the time, making Didi’s foreign IPO all the less palatable. Quickly after the listing, Didi had to stop accepting new user registrations, among other regulatory penalties.

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The company’s subsequent suffering was absorbed by its new investors post-IPO. After listing at $14 per share and trading as high as $18.01, per Yahoo Finance data, Didi’s shares bottomed out recently at $1.37. Today, the company is worth $1.56 per share, up 4% on the news of its impending delisting.

Per filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (condensed):

[Didi] today announced that the following resolution, which had been submitted for shareholder approval, has been approved at the extraordinary general meeting of the Company’s shareholders held in Beijing today: as an ordinary resolution, to delist the Company’s American Depositary Shares from the New York Stock Exchange as soon as practicable, and that in order to better cooperate with the cybersecurity review and rectification measures, the Company’s shares will not be listed on any other stock exchange before the Delisting is completed.

The company is expected to list in Hong Kong after it delists from U.S. markets, though when that could occur is not clear.

What’s notable, or perhaps ironic, about the timing of the Didi delisting is that it seems to have caught the worst on both ends. Recall that the scuppered Ant IPO of late 2020 was the unofficial kickoff of a regulatory crackdown by the Chinese Communist Party on its domestic technology market. A wave of changes was announced, from video game restrictions to the abolishment of the for-profit edtech market, and more.

But after years of punishment, the Chinese tech market is shedding staff and value as its ruling government seeks to smooth the waters somewhat. More simply, Didi went public in the United States quickly after its government began clamping down on the company and its peers, and is now delisting just as the Chinese government is seeking to change its tune about its tech economy.

Vice-Premier Liu He made noise just last week about “signs of easing [China’s] crackdown on the technology sector which has wiped billions of dollars of value from its most prominent companies,” as CNBC put it. Those came too late for Didi. How will other companies fare?