TechCrunch is excited to announce Swyft Cities won the TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility 2022 pitch-off and is fast-tracked into the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt in October. Beyond Aero is runner-up.

The Mountain View-based company is committed to improving transportation through the use of autonomous, lightweight, fixed-cable vehicles. The company says that its solution offers a lower cost per mile with fewer carbon emissions than conventional transportation alternatives.

Swyft sees this as a new form of urban mobility that can solve transportation problems in densely developed areas, including corporate campuses, airports, universities and tourism districts. The platform is novel in that the vehicles move on a stationary cable, allowing for new connections that can be added when needed. This adds capacity into an area, allowing higher density and more profitable developments. It also reduces costs on parking and traffic mitigation. In some areas, providing connections within the site can drive high value.

Beyond Aero, based out of Paris/Toulouse, France, is building long-range aircraft powered by hydrogen-electric propulsion. The first aircraft is a zero emission private aircraft (6-9 seat), designed for hydrogen propulsion, flying 1,000 miles in range.

Mass transit has made a rebound with the return of city life post-Covid 19, and today a startup that’s building tech to help it run more smoothly is announcing a big round of funding to meet the rush. Optibus, which uses AI to help public transportation bodies and their mass transit partners plan and operate their networks, has raised $100 million, funding that it will be using to continue expanding its product set and wider business footprint, CEO and co-founder Amos Haggiag said in an interview in London this week.

The Series D funding values Optibus at $1.3 billion, which the Israeli startup says makes it the first “unicorn” in the public transportation tech space.

Insight Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Verizon Ventures, Pitango First & Pitango Growth, Tencent, SOMV Momentum are among the investors in this round, which is brings the total raised by the startup to $260 million and is coming about 14 months after Optibus raised $107 million in a Series C at a $400 million – $500 million valuation.

That’s a big leap, but in a period where a lot of growth-stage startups have found it a challenge to raise more money, Optibus stands out as an example of how the right mix of timing and traction can still close deals.

The company now has customers in over 1,000 cities, double the number of a year ago; and its employees have also grown to 300 (up from 120). In total, Optibus is being used to track and power about 2.5 billion trips on buses, on-street trams, light rails and subways annually around the globe. (Note: in the public transport push for more multi-modal options for users, Optibus also incorporates data about public bike, scooter and taxi access points but doesn’t provide data about their movements — not now, at least.)

Optibus’s rise underscores to a critical moment for the world of public transportation.

Mass transit services like buses and subways took a huge hit in the last couple of years, with numbers of users declining by some 80% globally in the wake of Covid-19: people stayed home more to work; when they did go out, they generally wanted to avoid contact with others and crowds so stayed off public transport; and public transport organizations themselves also reduced services and passenger flow to fit with public health rules.

That has largely come back now, with average numbers now at 80-90% of where they were pre-Covid, Haggiag said. But that’s not the full story.

Even before Covid-19 hit, he added, mass transportation use was seeing a general decline in a number of cities as people were choosing to walk, bike, and scoot — or order rides from the new wave of e-hailing taxi-type services — alongside the ever-popular option of using their own cars.

But at the same time, he added, cities are growing, with the concept of “mega city” becoming more common and… more mega, and that is playing out in a surge for needing more mass transit.

“By far one of the biggest demographic changes in our time and in history will be the mega city,” Haggiag said. “We’re not talking hundreds or thousands or even millions more people in in cities, but billions.”

So while Optibus is often parachuted into already-established public transportation systems — where “Everything is old tech, or just no tech at all,” in Haggiag’s estimation — it is also finding a new wave of greenfield projects in emerging markets where the mega city trend is really surging. In one example, it’s working with Kampala in Uganda to build a new bus system from scratch, he said.

This is playing into how Optibus itself is growing as a business.

The startup first made its name by way of its AI-based planning tools — used to help transportation organizations ascertain how best to manage mass transit resources against rush hours, slow periods, social distancing rules and more, which they in turn also used to share data with to customer-facing services like real-time, third-party navigation apps.

Now, Optibus is moving into a wider set of features. These include, most recently, a new analytics engine, called Ridership Insights that provides more granular data based on routes, including boarding and alighting data based on time and date, to make more informed planning decisions.

And, coming in June, it will be launching an operations stack that will give its customers an end-to-end platform for people management, and to provide real-time data and services to their drivers and other employees. This potentially will expand to include systems that replace the radio systems that bus drivers use to get updates on, say, a sudden traffic change due to an accident on the route.

Optibus is building a lot from the ground up, but it has also been snapping up smaller transport startups to bolt on new tech and services. Last month, it announced the acquisition of Portland, Oregon-based Trillium, which it acquired for around $10 million. To complement Optibus’s existing B2B platform, Trillium has built tech to provide data to passengers, used both to populate more accurate data in third-party navigation apps but also potentially for transportation operators to build and provide their own apps, by way of a white-label service.

“Transport agencies understand that most of the world uses apps like Google Maps so the first focus is to make sure that the data is super accurate for those,” Amos Haggiag. But building their own apps is a no-brainer, a way to provide more direct information and to glean more data about their customers and their usage, to sell tickets directly and more. “There is a chance to show all of that more immediately in apps,” he added.

In terms of competitors, Haggiag said that there are a number of localized players providing parts of the “tech stack” — if you could call it that — services to help monitor traffic and send out messaging to users, and ERP and CRM systems that are used by organizations but do not join up with the data showing now networks really work. Joining all of that up together is what seems to be attracting the customers.

“Optibus combines innovation and public transportation expertise like no one else in the industry. Their software is revolutionizing our business and day-to-day operations, as well as the passenger experience. Optibus is the future of public transportation and we celebrate this fantastic milestone with them,” said Carla Stockton-Jones, UK MD at Stagecoach Group, the largest public transport operator in the UK, in a statement.

“Optibus has modernized the industry and helped cities around the world bring quality and reliable transportation to their residents. As long-time investors in the company, we’re excited to continue our partnership with Amos and the team,” said Teddie Wardi, MD at Insight Partners in a statement. “We look forward to working with Optibus as they continue to grow and scale up.”

“For SOMV Momentum, Optibus represents everything that is great in tech; digitizing and disrupting the basic functions of society in a way that serves the common good, both in quality of service and environmental impact, whilst also being an island of solid growth, which is of prime importance for us in current market conditions,” added Merav Rotem Naaman, general partner at SOMV Momentum. “We are very proud to be continuing this journey with Amos and his amazing team.”

Travel and tourism are coming back online in the wake of Covid-19 restrictions getting relaxed, and today a startup tackling one part of the equation for getting from home to one’s destination is announcing some funding to capitalize on that. Bookaway, which has built a platform for people to view options for and book their ground transportation — journeys from a long-haul arrival point to a hotel or other final destination, with some 7,000 providers listed in all currently — has raised $35 million.

The Tel Aviv-based startup’s Series C is being led by Red Dot Capital Partners. Menorah, an insurance company based in Tel Aviv, and New York based Tenere Capital, along with previous backers Aleph, Corner Ventures and Entrée Capital are all also participating. The company is not disclosing its valuation but it has raised $81 million to date.

The travel industry sometimes feels like it is in a perpetual state of consolidation: partly because of price pressures due to the slowdown of the last few years; increasing fuel prices; and general competition, companies like Airbnb or Booking, airlines, and hotel groups build more services into their offerings in an attempt to improve their margins and bring more economies of scale into their operations.

But Noam Toister, the CEO and founder of Bookaway, believes that a huge opportunity remains in ground transportation largely because of how offline and fragmented it is, including when it comes to traveling to remote or exotic locations.

“Our group was born during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a shared belief that the ground transport industry will better meet the needs of travelers when it is united, not fragmented,” he said. The company has already made four acquisitions underscoring how some of that de-fragmentation will come in consolidation within the specific area of ground transportation itself. Founded originally to provide services in Asia as Bookaway.com, when bookings collapsed, it started to raise money to buy up other similarly-challenged businesses to shore up for a time when the tide would turn: 12Go and GetByBus acquisitions followed to expand in Asia Pacific and the Balkans, and then Plataforma 10 in Argentina followed.

In all, the company has knitted together thousands of providers — most of them independent and very local businesses — on a platform that travelers can use to book their journeys ahead of time, with providers including busses, ferries, trains, private transportation options and more. Digitizing that experience in itself is a big undertaking and shift: some 95% of ground transportation providers are “offline” according to Toister, and there are some 10,000 globally in what is collectively a $157 billion annual market. “If you are traveling in the world you book flights and hotels, but most destinations still don’t have a airport,” he said, meaning transportation from the airport to the hotel is a trek, “and it’s hard to book transport currently.”

He notes that Uber and companies like it are not currently seen as competitors although Uber has recently started to wade into this market, representing a potential threat, or perhaps a partner. “It’s heavy lifting to connect with 7,000 transport companies globally,” Toister said. 

“This is an experienced management team that have grown successful travel-tech companies before,” said Barak Saloman, managing partner, Red Dot Capital Partners, in a statement. “With a complex task like globalizing ground transport you need local knowledge, technology expertise and industry experience. Bookaway Group has all three and they’re committed to winning this market.”

Walker Drewett founded NuBrakes in May 2019. According to Mike Ghaffary, GP at Canvas Ventures, Drewett is building a high-growth business powered by a marketplace model, which is why Ghaffary led the company’s Series A. The product is simple: on-demand automotive maintenance and repair services. Join this episode to hear how Drewett raised capital and built NuBrakes on the learnings from his previous startup, NuWash (on-demand car washes, of course).

This event opens on June 22 at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT with networking and pitch practice submissions. The interview begins at 12 p.m. PDT followed by the TCL Pitch Practice at 12:30 p.m. PDT. Register here for free.

TechCrunch Live records weekly on Wednesdays at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT. Join us! Click here to register for free and gain access to NuBrake’s pitch deck, enter the pitch practice session and access the livestream, where you can ask the speakers questions.

Ralph Gilles started at Chrysler in 1992, and he’s still with the company as the chief design officer at the newly formed conglomerate, Stellantis. His design resume is legendary: The Chrysler 300C, Dodge Magnum, Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT and the SRT Viper. But now he’s leading Stellantis into the electric future, which requires (and allows) for radical new designs.

Gone are radiators, exhaust piping and massive crates of metal consuming the front quarter of the vehicles. Designers now need to account for just batteries and motors, and this is resulting in a dramatic paradigm shift that could see the reinvention of passenger vehicles.

Gilles has a daunting charge: create and implement a design language that links the far-flung Stellantis lineup. From Chrysler to Alfa Romeo to Ram and Peugeot, with Jeep and Dodge and Citroen mixed in, too. Some of Stellantis’ brands are among the oldest in the automotive world, and he’s in charge of pushing them into the future.

Look at the just-released Chrysler Airflow concept. To me, this speaks to his deep respect for the legacy of these brands. The 2025 Airflow is supposed to reinvent the Chrysler brand — just like the 1934 Chrysler Airflow reinvented the young Chrysler brand nearly 90 years ago.

Respecting the past while moving forward is a challenge facing every mobility vendor and manufacturer in the mobility space, and we’re thrilled to have Ralph Gilles speak candidly on the process at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 breaks through the hype and goes beyond the headlines to discover how merging technology and transportation will affect a broad swath of industries, cities and the people who work and live in them. Register today before prices increase May15!

Raquel Urtasun founded Waabi in 2021 after spending nearly three years as Uber’s R&D head of Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Waabi’s mission is to develop an AI-first approach to speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, starting with long-haul trucks. To do so, her company raised an $83.5 million Series A with Khosla Venture’s Sven Strohband leading the round. Both will speak to Urtasun’s unique (and commanding) perspective, and what allowed the company to raise the massive Series A.

This event opens on May 11 at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT with networking and pitch practice submissions. The interview begins at 12 p.m. PDT followed by the TCL Pitch Practice at 12:30 p.m. PDT. Register here for free.

TechCrunch Live records weekly on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT. Join us! Click here to register for free and gain access to Waabi’s pitch deck, enter the pitch practice session and access the livestream where you can ask the speakers questions.

Dat Bike is on a journey to reduce the amount of gasoline used in Vietnam. The startup makes electric motorbikes with key components that it designs and produces domestically to reduce costs and improve performance. Today, Dat Bike announced it has raised a $5.3 million Series A led by Jungle Ventures, with participation from Wavemaker Partners.

Both are returning investors. Jungle Ventures led Dat Bike’s seed round a year ago, when TechCrunch first profiled the company. The latest funding brings Dat Bike’s total to $10 million raised since it was founded in 2019 by Son Nguyen.

Dat Bike is recognized by the Vietnam Ministry of Transportation as the first domestically-made electric bike. Nguyen said that Dat Bike uses vertical integration instead of relying on third-party, imported electric drivetrains and parts because that keeps costs down while improving quality. Most of the parts on Dat Bike’s vehicles are designed by the company and 80% of its suppliers are located in Vietnam. It also uses a direct-to-consumer distribution model, pushing prices down lower.

Part of the funding will be invested in its technology. Nguyen explained that the three most important parts of an electric bike are its battery, motor and controller. Right now, Dat Bike owns technology for its battery packaging and controller. With its new capital, it will be able to invest in its engine technology. Nguyen added that the company will also upgrade its mobile app, adding new features and shortening the feedback loop on its error reporting feature.

One major thing the company had to address was consumer concerns about the performance of e-bikes compared to their gasoline counterparts. The company says its first product line, the Weaver, displayed three times the performance (5 kW versus 1.5 kW) and two times the range of (100 km vs 50 km) of most competing electric bikes. Dat Bike’s second model, the Weaver 200, was launched last year with higher performance, or a range of 200 km and 6 kW power. It also reduced charging time from 1 hour for 100 km to 2.5 hours for its full 200 km charge.

“We aim to develop a new product every year and research for faster charging,” Nguyen said.

Dat Bike currently has two stores in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, and its bikes can be ordered online, too. Part of the funding will be used to expand its offline-to-online model into more large cities, including Thai Nguyen, Bac Ninh, Hai Phong, Hai Duong, Ha Long, Vinh, Quy Nhon, Nha Trang, Danang, Can Tho and Vung Tau.

QED incubated this auto financing company in 2016 and Kevin Bennett became CEO in 2018 and soon after raised its first seed round. It started as MotoRefi, and rebranded in November 2021 to Caribou. But the mission remains: Transforming consumers’ financial relationship with their cars. Since the founding, Bennett has raised $74 million for the company, including early angel funding from Rachel Holt. At the time, she was a rising executive in Uber — a post she left in 2020 when she co-founded Construct Capital. Hear how Bennett pitched early investors, and what investors like Holt can provide to mobility companies.

This event opens on May 4 at 11:30 am PT / 2:30 pm ET with networking and pitch practice submissions. The interview begins at 12 pm PT followed by the TCL Pitch Practice at 12:30 pm PT. Register here for free.

TechCrunch Live records weekly on Wednesday at 11:30 am PT / 2:30 pm ET. Join us! Click here to register for free and gain access to Caribou’s pitch deck, enter the pitch practice session and access the livestream where you can ask the speakers questions.

After months of teasers and a slow drip of information, BMW today announced its new i7 xDrive60, the first all-electric version of its full-size luxury sedan. For $119,300 (plus destination fee), you’ll get a car with 536 horsepower and 549 lb-ft of torque that will get you from zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds. Speed is capped at 149 mph and the company promises a range of up to 300 miles. Preorders start today, with a $1,500 deposit, and the U.S. launch is currently planned for Q4 2022.

The new 7 Series also marks the production debut of BMW’s 31.3-inch 8K Theater Screen with built-in Amazon Fire TV and touch screen remotes in the door panels. BMW first teased this at CES 2020. Content on Fire TV maxes out at 4K, but either way, that screen should keep your backseat drivers entertained for a while. You can move the screen within arm’s reach to use its touch controls, too, and when you’re done watching, it folds into the roof. Because there’s little BMW does in terms of sound that doesn’t involve Hans Zimmer, the whole folding and unfolding sequence also involves “a sound composition created exclusively for this purpose as part of the collaboration between the BMW Group and renowned film score composer and Academy Award winner Hans Zimmer.”

As for the electric drive features, BMW notes that the i7 xDrive60 is powered by its fifth-generation eDrive technology with integrated drive units at the front and rear axles. For the i7, BMW refined the existing adaptive recuperation feature from the iX and i4 to automatically optimize the brake energy regeneration based on upcoming downhill sections or the state of the traffic lights ahead of you (thanks to its built-in traffic light recognition function). Drivers can also manually choose the brake regeneration settings, and there is a mode that’s akin to one-pedal driving, too.

To extend the life of the batteries, the company tweaked the charging software to use a charging curve over the previous step settings it used in other models. “Following an initial, temperature-dependent phase of constant power supply, the new process now also controls charging based on a continuous nominal voltage curve that makes allowance for the variables of temperature, recharged capacity, and charge level at start of charging,” the company explains.

Talking about charging, the i7 xDrive60 will be able to AC power at up to 11 kW and DC power up to 195 kW. You should be able to charge to 80% in about 34 minutes at a DC fast charger, BMW says, and 10 minutes of DC fast charging will give you about 80 miles of range. Going from 0 to 100% on the battery will take about 10.5 hours on AC power.

If you thought it wouldn’t be long before Kia turned the Concept EV9 into a production model, you guessed correctly. The automaker has revealed that a road-ready version of the electric SUV will be available in Europe in 2023. There was no mention of launches in North America or other regions, but it’s an SUV — it may just be a matter of time before you see the EV9 cruising American and Canadian streets.

Kia didn’t say what would change in the transition from concept to production. However, we’d expect the badge to cut many of the more exotic features, including the yoke, giant wheels, retractable roof rails and lounge-like seating modes. We wouldn’t be surprised if Kia kept the 27-inch display and even the hood-mounted solar panel, though.

The production EV9 might also preserve the claimed specs. The concept promised up to 300 miles of range and 350kW fast charging that could take it from a 10 percent charge to 80 percent in 30 minutes. Kia also recently detailed autonomous “Automode” technology for the EV9 that can take over from the driver on the highway.

There are still important unknowns like pricing. Even so, the EV9 could be one of Kia’s most important all-electric vehicles to date, at least in some areas. While the EV6 has been well-received so far, some markets (particularly North America) skew heavily toward crossovers and SUVs. The EV9 could help Kia take on competitors like the Tesla Model Y and Volkswagen ID.4, not to mention reel in buyers who haven’t been thrilled by the Niro EV.

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

Following the release of its dual-motor variant late last year, Polestar announced on Wednesday that the 270-mile long range, single-motor version of its Polestar 2 EV is now available for sale in the US.

Starting at $45,900 — $33,400 after federal and state incentives — the single-motor Polestar 2 is $4,000 less expensive than its AWD sibling (which starts at $51,200) and provides 16 extra miles of driving range to the all-wheel’s 249 miles. Other than the number of e-motors affixed to their axles, the two are functionally identical.

Folks looking to stick it to their local petrochemical conglomerate can schedule a test drive either through the Polestar 2 configurator site or at one of the company’s physical retail locations located in major cities throughout the US.

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

Tesla has raised the prices of its electric vehicles for the second time within the month. After adding $1,000 to some long-range models last week, the automaker has now implemented a much larger price increase across its lineup. As Electrek reports, its prices now start at $46,990 for the base Model 3, $2,000 higher than before. The Model 3 Dual Motor All-Wheel Drive is now $2,500 more expensive at $54,490, and the Performance version now costs $3,000 more at $61,990.

Tesla

Meanwhile, Model Y’s prices now start at $62,990, or $2,000 higher than before, for the Long Range version. Tesla has increased the Performance version’s pricing by $3,000, as well, which means it’ll now set you back $67,990. For both Model S options, Tesla has added $5,000 on top of their previous prices, so you’ll have to spend at least $99,990 for one. None of the other EVs got a price increase as big as the Model X, though, which now costs $10,000 more at $114,990.

One of the materials affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine is nickel, with its prices soaring and more than doubling since the war started. Russia is a key supplier of the metal, which is a critical component of lithium-ion batteries used by Tesla and other EV manufacturers. In addition, Electrek says Tesla is experiencing a massive surge in new orders due to heightened interest in electric vehicles caused by the rise in gas prices.

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