Today, Uber followed Lyft in reporting its Q1 2021 earnings this week. And like its rival, its results take a little bit of work to understand. So, this afternoon, we’re going to parse them as a pair so that we both understand what’s going on at the ride-hailing and food-delivery giant.

Let’s start with the big numbers: Uber’s revenue missed sharply, while its profitability beat expectations. In numerical terms, Uber reported $2.9 billion in revenue for the three-month period, sharply under the $3.28 billion investors had expected. However, while the street had anticipated that the company would post a $0.54 loss per share, Uber’s GAAP results actually came to a far more modest $0.06 per-share loss.

How did investors vet Uber’s performance? The company’s stock is off around 4% in after-hours trading.

Surprised by the revenue miss? Shocked by the profit beat? Startled by the sharp drop in the value of Uber’s stock? Let’s unpack the numbers.

Uber’s quarter

A number of things impacted Uber’s quarter. The first, of course, was COVID-19. The pandemic shows up in a host of ways across Uber’s results, but most critically it continued to negatively impact Uber’s ride business and positively impact its delivery business.

Turning to numbers, here’s the company’s gross bookings data, which includes both segments:

Image Credits: Uber

A few things to note. First, Uber’s total platform spend went up in aggregate on a year-over-year basis. That’s good. And as we look at the year-over-year changes, that delivery’s growth compared to the year-ago period was nearly legendary. (Postmates is in there, so take that into account.) The ride-hailing business’s decline feels somewhat modest in comparison. And we’d note that Uber’s freight efforts are very nearly material.

Besides a passion for progress in the mobility space, what do Toyota AI Ventures’ Jim Adler, May Mobility’s Nina Grooms Lee and May’s Edwin Olson have in common?

All three of them are joining us on an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live. The show goes down on May 12 at 3pm ET/noon PT. Register here for free!

May Mobility is one the most exciting companies to enter the transportation space in the past decade. The autonomous shuttle company has a fleet of autonomous low-speed shuttles spread out between Detroit, Grand Rapids and Providence. Recently, May launched a Lexus-based autonomous shuttle. The company has raised $83.6 million in funding, including a $50 million Series B led by Toyota Motor Corp.

Which brings us this episode of Extra Crunch Live.

Toyota AI Ventures Founding Managing Director Jim Adler will sit down with May Mobility Chief Product Officer Nina Grooms Lee and May co-founder and CEO Edwin Olson to discuss how that Series B deal came about. We’ll talk about what made May stand out to Toyota, and vice versa, and how the teams have worked together since.

We’ll also talk about what to expect out of the ever-changing and growing mobility industry.

Following the interview, Grooms Lee, Olson and Adler will weigh in on startup pitches from the audience. Yup, that’s right. Our ECL audience will once again have the chance to pitch our seasoned tech professionals. Attendees can virtually “raise their hand” as soon as our virtual doors open and throw their hat in the ring for an opportunity to make a 2-minute elevator pitch. Imagine running into a VC or potential customer at a tech conference like Disrupt or bumping into them at a park. As such, no visual aids are allowed, including decks, videos, demoes, etc. Excited? Smash this link to register for free!

Extra Crunch Live goes down every Wednesday at 3pm ET/noon PT and is accessible to anyone and everyone. However, on-demand access to the content is reserved exclusively for Extra Crunch members. If you’re not yet a member, what are you waiting for?

The last year of pandemic living has been real-world, and sometimes harrowing, proof of how important it can be to have efficient and well-equipped emergency response services in place. They can help people remotely if need be, and when they cannot, they make sure that in-person help can be dispatched quickly in medical and other situations. Today, a company that’s building cloud-based tools to help with this process is announcing a round of funding as it continues to grow.

RapidDeploy, which provides computer-aided dispatch technology as a cloud-based service for 911 centers, has closed a round of $29 million, a Series B round of funding that will be used both to grow its business, and to continue expanding the SaaS tools that it provides to its customers. In the startup’s point of view, the cloud is essential to running emergency response in the most efficient manner.

“911 response would have been called out on a walkie talkie in the early days,” said Steve Raucher, the co-founder and CEO of RapidDeploy, in an interview. “Now the cloud has become the nexus of signals.”

Washington, DC-based RapidDeploy provides data and analytics to 911 centers — the critical link between people calling for help and connecting those calls with the nearest medical, police or fire assistance — and today it has about 700 customers using its RadiusPlus, Eclipse Analytics and Nimbus CAD products.

That works out to about 10% of all 911 centers in the US (7,000 in total), and covering 35% of the population (there are more centers in cities and other dense areas). Its footprint includes state coverage in Arizona, California, and Kansas. It also has operations in South Africa, where it was originally founded.

The funding is coming from an interesting mix of financial and strategic investors. Led by Morpheus Ventures, the round also had participation from GreatPoint Ventures, Ericsson Ventures, Samsung Next Ventures, Tao Capital Partners, Tau Ventures, among others. It looks like the company had raised about $30 million before this latest round, according to PitchBook data. Valuation is not being disclosed.

Ericsson and Samsung, as major players in the communication industry, have a big stake in seeing through what will be the next generation of communications technology and how it is used for critical services. (And indeed, one of the big leaders in legacy and current 911 communications is Motorola, a would-be competitor of both.) AT&T is also a strategic go-to-market (distribution and sales) partner of RapidDeploy’s, and it also has integrations with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and OnStar to feed data into its system.

The business of emergency response technology is a fragmented market. Raucher describes them as “mom-and-pop” businesses, with some 80% of them occupying four seats or less (a testament to the fact that a lot of the US is actually significantly less urban than its outsized cities might have you think it is), and in many cases a lot of these are operating on legacy equipment.

However, in the US in the last several years — buffered by innovations like the Jedi project and FirstNet, a next-generation public safety network — things have been shifting. RapidDeploy’s technology sits alongside (and in some areas competes with) companies like Carbyne and RapidSOS, which have been tapping into the innovations of cell phone technology both to help pinpoint people and improve how to help them.

RapidDeploy’s tech is based around its RadiusPlus mapping platform, which uses data from smart phones, vehicles, home security systems and other connected devices and channels it to its data stream, which can help a center determine not just location but potentially other aspects of the condition of the caller. Its Eclipse Analytics services, meanwhile, are meant to act as a kind of assistant to those centers to help triage situations and provide insights into how to respond. The Nimbus CAD then helps figure out who to call out and routing for response. 

Longer term, the plan will be to leverage cloud architecture to bring in new data sources and ways of communicating between callers, centers and emergency care providers.

“It’s about being more of a triage service rather than a message switch,” Raucher said. “As we see it, the platform will evolve with customers’ needs. Tactical mapping ultimately is not big enough to cover this. We’re thinking about unified communications.” Indeed, that is the direction that many of these services seem to be going, which can only be a good thing for us consumers.

“The future of emergency services is in data, which creates a faster, more responsive 9-1-1 center,” said Mark Dyne, Founding Partner at Morpheus Ventures, in a statement. “We believe that the platform RapidDeploy has built provides the necessary breadth of capabilities that make the dream of Next-Gen 9-1-1 service a reality for rural and metropolitan communities across the nation and are excited to be investing in this future with Steve and his team.” Dyne has joined the RapidDeploy board with this round.

We may still be a long way off from Level 5, fully self-driving cars on the open road, but companies building autonomous vehicles and shuttles for specific uses within closed-campus deployments say they are on their way to commercial operations and are raising money to get there. In the latest development, a startup out of Toulouse, France, called EasyMile — which builds shuttles for transporting both people and goods — has closed a Series B of €55 million ($66 million).

The funding is being led by Searchlight Capital Partners — the investor that just earlier this week appointed former FCC chairman Ajit Pai as its newest partner — with McWin and NextStage AM also participating. Previous investors rail industry heavyweight Alstom, Bpifrance and auto giant Continental also participated. Searchlight is also an investor in Get Your Guide and Univision.

EasyMile claims to be the world leader in autonomous shuttles with 60% of the global market using its vehicles. It says that its vehicles have racked up 800,000 kilometers in over 300 locations in 30 countries. But as a mark of how small and nascent that market is today, EasyMile also says that it has just 180 vehicles deployed worldwide. (One big competitor, Navya, also happens to be based out of France, interestingly.)

EasyMile said it will use the funds to scale its business, by securing and building out commercial deployments in closed-campus environments. It will also continue to invest in its longer term strategy, to deploy its vehicles and technology in public transportation networks, although the company said believes its focus on more immediate use cases is what has helped it grow and attract new investment.

“We have stayed focused on what we can deliver in a reasonable timeframe and partnered with leaders in niche markets that are addressable now,” said EasyMile Founder and CEO Gilbert Gagnaire in a statement. “The participation of all of EasyMile’s earlier investors in the round is a strong vote of confidence in our expansion plan, and we are very happy to welcome Searchlight, McWin and NextStage and look forward to accelerating our growth thanks to their expertise.”

EasyMile is not disclosing its valuation, nor how much it has raised to date in what it described as an oversubscribed round. We are asking the company and will update this post as we learn more.

EasyMile’s vehicles include the EZ10 people shuttles and TractEasy, an autonomous “tractor” trailer system for moving goods, and its over the years inked deals with companies like TLD (which runs ground transport and support in air cargo) and is currently working with the Peugeot, Chrysler and Fiat group Stellantis to build an autonomous vehicle using EasyMile technology.

The company has also had some setbacks. Last year, the NHTSA barred EasyMile from running any services with passengers on board after the company had an accident. (It can still operate vehicles without passengers.) We have asked the company to update us on the latest developments on this front.

On that front, it will be interesting to see how and if its new investor will have an impact in terms of helping with regulatory issues.

“We are excited to be investing in EasyMile at this critical juncture in the firm’s trajectory,” said Ralf Ackermann, a partner at Searchlight Capital, in a statement. “Having observed its robust, quality-driven approach and industry-leading technology, we are confident that it is well positioned to scale commercially and are delighted to be part of the journey.”

The fundraising is interesting in that it is coming at a time when we’re seeing some reshuffling and in some cases retrenchment in the autonomous driving space. Just this week Lyft sold off its Level 5 division to Toyota’s Woven Planet for $550 million. EasyMile believes that its continuing focus on specific markets around shuttles in closed-loops has helped it stay the course and build more traction and profile in what is still an early market and bound to go through more changes, and hiccups.

“This injection of capital validates EasyMile’s strategy and will allow us to finalize our technical development and finance our scaleup strategy. We’ll bring the technology up to a level that can be industrialized and deliver a real commercial service,” said GM Benoit Perrin, in a statement.

IRP Systems, a maker of innovative electric powertrains for electric vehicles, has raised a $31m Series C funding, bringing its total funding to $57m.

The financing was led by Clal Insurance and Altshuler Shaham, which are Israeli institutional investors. Also participating was Samsung Ventures, Renault-Nissan importer Carasso Motors, and Shlomo Group, as well as existing investors such as Entrée Capital, Fosun RZ Capital and JAL Ventures.

IRP Systems supplies a whole host of EV manufacturers including Renault. Its electric powertrain claims to have a high performance and efficiency while reducing the weight, size, and overall cost of the powertrain in electric vehicles of several sizes.

Moran Price, CEO and Co-Founder of IRP Systems said in a statement: “The automotive industry is undergoing tectonic shifts in recent years as electrification and digitalization are becoming core automotive technologies. IRP Systems is in the epicenter of this revolution. With the new investment, we will continue to create disruptive solutions as well as penetrate new EV segments.”
 
IRP Systems will use the new case to scale the development of its systems for EVs and reduce the path to mass production, expand R&D, operations and customer support and make a push on global sales and marketing.

On-demand access to electric mopeds — the small, motorised scooters that you sit on, not kick — has been a small but persistent part of the multi-modal transportation mix on offer to people in cities these days. Today, a startup out of The Netherlands is announcing some funding with ambitions to make e-mopeds more mainstream, and to expand into a wider set of vehicle options.

Go Sharing, which has a fleet of around 5,000 e-mopeds across in 30 cities in three countries — The Netherlands, Belgium and Austria — has picked up €50 million (around $60 million). The startup, based near Utrecht, plans to use the funding to expand its footprint for e-mopeds; add electric cars and e-bikes to its app; and continue building out the technology underpinning it all.

Go Sharing believes tech will be the answer to creating a profitable operation, using AI algorithms to optimize locations for e-mopeds, encouraging people to drop off in those locations with incentives like discounts, and keeping that network charged.

Germany, the UK and Turkey are next on Go Sharing’s list of countries, the company said.

The funding is being led by Opportunity Partners — a firm based out of Amsterdam that also backs online supermarket Crisp, with the startup’s founders — CEO Raymon Pouwels, Doeke Boersma, and Donny van den Oever — also participating. A previous round of about $12 million came from Rabo Corporate Investments, the VC arm of the banking giant.

In a world where we now have many choices for getting around cities — taxis, public transport, push and electric bikes, scooters, walking, carpools, car rentals or our own cars — e-mopeds occupy an interesting niche in the mix.

They can be faster than bikes and scooters — 25 km per hour is a typical speed limit in cities, 40 km per hour in less dense areas — more agile than cars, completely quiet compared to their very noisy fuel-based cousins, and of course much more eco-friendly. For those managing fleets, they less likely to break down and need replacing than some of the other alternatives like e-bikes and e-scooters.

But they also represent a higher barrier to entry for picking up customers: riders need a license to operate them as you would other moving vehicles, and in some (but not all) places they need to wear helmets; and the operators of fleets need to sort out how required insurance will work and need special permits as a vehicle provider in most places, and they can also face the same issue as other vehicles like bikes and kick scooters of being a public nuisance when parked.

That mix of challenges — and the fact that fleets can be expensive to operate and might even if all the boxes are ticked still not attract enough users — has meant that the e-moped market has been a patchy one, with some startups shutting down, some cancelling cities after low demand, or retreating over and then returning with better safety measures.

Yet with on-demand transport companies increasingly looking to provide “any” mode in their multi-modal plays to capture more consumers at more times, they remain a class of vehicle that the bigger players and newer entrants will continue to entertain. Lime earlier this year said it was adding e-mopeds to its fleet in certain cities. Uber teamed up with Cityscoot in Paris to integrate the e-moped’s fleet into its app. Cityscoot itself raised some funding last year and is active in several cities across Europe.

And while it can be work to get permits and other regulatory aspects in place to operate services, Pouwels said that Go Sharing was finding that many municipalities actually liked the idea of bringing in more e-mopeds as an eco-friendly alternative to more vehicles — the idea being to provide a transport option to people who are not interested in kick-scooters or bikes and might have driven their own cars, meaning they already have licenses.

The eco-friendly option is also motivating how the company is planning out other parts of its strategy:

“What we have heard from regulators is that they want to motivate people to walk or move in other ways, for example with bicycles,” Pouwels said in an interview. “What we’ve seen with kick scooters is that they ‘deactivate’ people. This is why we see bikes [not adding e-scooters] as the healthy way of moving forward.” The plan with adding electric cars, he said, is to address the needs of people to travel longer distances than shorter inner-city journeys.

Handling supply for its services is coming by way of GreenMo, a sister operation run by Boersma that has been procuring and running a rental service of e-mopeds that are used by drivers for delivery services, with some 10,000 bikes already used this way. GreenMo recently acquired Dutch startup e-bike and a took a majority stake in Belgian company zZoomer, to expand its fleet.

French startup BlaBlaCar has raised a new $115 million funding round (€97 million). While the company is better known for its long distance carpooling marketplace, BlaBlaCar has also added a bus marketplace with the acquisition of Ouibus and an online bus ticketing platform with the acquisition of Busfor.

Existing investor VNV Global is leading the round. Two new investors are also participating — Otiva J/F AB and FMZ Ventures. Otiva J/F AB is a fund created by Avito founders Jonas Nordlander and Filip Engelbert. If you’re not familiar with Avito, they specialize in classified ads for the Russian market. Classified giant and global tech investor Naspers acquired Avito. As for FMZ Ventures, it’s a growth fund created by Michael Zeisser, who previously led investments for Alibaba and was a board member at Lyft and Tripadvisor.

It’s a convertible note, which means that the valuation will depend on the next financial event, such as another fundraising round or an initial public offering. But BlaBlaCar co-founder and CEO Nicolas Brusson consider it as a “pre-IPO convertible” round as BlaBlaCar still has a ton of cash on its bank account.

“We already had a lot of cash before this round and we still have more than €200 million in cash following this funding round,” Brusson told me.

Even if BlaBlaCar doesn’t go public right away (or doesn’t raise), there’s a clause with a time frame. After a while, those $115 million will convert into BlaBlaCar shares at a $2 billion valuation in case there’s no financial event.

BlaBlaCar’s strategy and goal with today’s funding round could be summed up with three pillars — carpooling, buses and aggregation.

Let’s start with carpooling, BlaBlaCar’s core business. The company started 15 years ago with a simple goal — matching empty car seats with passengers going in the same direction. While last year’s lockdown has impacted carpooling, it shouldn’t be compared with trains or flights.

“With our carpooling network, there’s no fixed costs,” Brusson said. So BlaBlaCar isn’t paying to put empty cars on the road as everything is community-powered. But, of course, as BlaBlaCar takes a cut from each transaction, revenue took a hit during last year’s lockdown.

Activity bounced back last summer and it’s been up and down ever since depending on current restrictions. “Car is and will be the universal connector that doesn’t rely on train stations or bus stops,” Brusson said.

The carpooling marketplace will always remain a strong revenue generator. In 2020 alone, BlaBlaCar had 50 million passengers across 22 markets overall. In other words, never bet against carpooling.

For the past few years, BlaBlaCar’s second pillar has been buses. In particular, buses represent a huge opportunity in emerging markets and Eastern Europe.

There are already a ton of buses on the road, you simply can’t buy tickets online. BlaBlaCar’s total addressable market in this category is huge and the company is mostly focused on moving offline supply to its online marketplace.

That’s why the company is also acquiring Octobus, a Ukrainian company working on an inventory management system for bus supply. “It consolidates our tech stack in the region,” Brusson said.

Finally, BlaBlaCar’s third pillar is all about creating loyal users that keep coming back to the platform. The company wants to build a multimodal app where you can find all shared travel — carpooling, buses and soon trains.

The startup will add train operators on its marketplace by the end of 2021 or early 2022. I asked Brusson whether he wanted to build an Omio competitor. Formerly known as GoEuro, Omio lets you book train tickets, bus tickets and flights on a single platform.

BlaBlaCar wants to follow a different strategy. It wants to focus first on a handful of countries so that it can sell everything a local would expect.

Eventually, you could imagine opening the BlaBlaCar app to find the best way to go from A to B. It could involve a train ticket followed by a carpooling ride to reach a tiny town. Or it could mix carpooling with bus rides. Thanks to BlaBlaCar’s reach, the French startup is uniquely positioned to connect two small cities through shared transportation.

Gett, the ride-hailing startup that has been carving out a niche for itself in a crowded and competitive market for on-demand transportation by focusing on enterprise accounts and connecting people with rides in some 1,500 cities leveraging a number of third-party fleets, is adding another partner today as it continues to double down on its business model in the wake of corporate travel slowly coming back online.

Gett has inked a deal to integrate Curb Mobility to integrate yellow taxis into Gett’s app, which will now cover some 65 cities across the US. The news is coming at a time when Gett is looking to expand its service to meet more demand: it notes that rides currently at around 80% of the levels they were in Q1 2020, just ahead of Covid-19 really descending on the western world.

From what we understand, the deal does not involve any investment between Gett — which has raised around $865 million to date (including most recently closing a $115 million round) and was last valued at $1.5 billion in 2019 — and Curb — which is a part of Verifone, after the payments hardware company acquired it in 2015.

(If you think it sounds odd for a payments hardware company to own a taxi fleet app, this is only part of Curb’s business and is in fact also a hardware player: in addition to Curb providing a way to hail yellow taxis — it app covers some 50,000 cabs and 100,000 drivers — the company also builds hardware for cabs and fleet operations, including metering apps, payment terminals, and those interactive screens for passengers that let them pay for rides, watch news and advertisements and more.)

To differentiate its service from the very highly capitalized Ubers and Lyfts of the world, Gett has been building out a two-pronged strategy that covers both how it scales, and the services that it provides to its users.

On the scaling front, Gett has been moving away from managing fleets of contractor drivers in the US for some years now: back in 2019, after slogging it out for years against Lyft and Uber in its primary New York metro market, Gett effectively shut down its main fleet operation in the region and instead inked a deal with Lyft. That has become a template of sorts that the company has been repeating in other cities outside of the U.S. where it doesn’t have substantial market share. (For example, Ola is another Gett partner.) In some cities where it has a larger footprint, like London and Moscow, Gett works with drivers directly.

Partner fleets made up one-third of Gett’s business in the first quarter of this year, but as Gett brings on more to its network, it expects partner fleets to cover the majority of its rides by the end of this year, the company said.

On the service front, Gett has made a big bet on building a platform that integrates with businesses at the back end to make it easier to order rides and for them to reconcile more easily with a businesses expense management and accounting software. Gett’s big pitch to would-be customers is that this software makes it less expensive and significantly more efficient to hail a cab using Gett compared to the alternatives — for starters users can compare different prices from different providers — and it gives users significantly more choice.

“Today’s partnership cements Gett’s position as a technology platform focused on corporate Ground Transportation Management (GTM), where spend is worth $79.6 billion globally,” said Dave Waiser, CEO and co-founder of Gett, in a statement. “In recent years, we have become the GTM category leader, serving over a quarter of Fortune 500 companies.”

On the part of Curb, it gives drivers using its software another link through to an app that might bring in more business at a time when riders have more choice than ever before, covering not just other on-demand car apps, but eco-friendly, exercise-ready, and traffic-busting options like e-bikes, scooters and shared rides. As the profile of the average corporate user changes and gets younger, that too will change the expectations many of them will have for what constitutes a preferred set of ground transportation options, depending on the situation.

“As cities across the U.S. prepare for the return of international travel, our partnership with Gett will create new income opportunities for local drivers and ensure Gett’s business users have access to the same safe, reliable transportation options trusted by locals,” said Amos Tamam, CEO at Curb. “By integrating with platforms like Gett, we’re aiming to make taxis more ubiquitous online by opening up new digital avenues for today’s consumers and businesses to find and book taxis.”

Ocado, the UK online grocer that has been making strides reselling its technology to other grocery companies to help them build and run their own online ordering-and-delivery operations, is making an investment today into what it believes will be the next stage of development of that business: the company is taking a £10 million ($13.8 million) stake in Oxbotica, a UK startup that develops autonomous driving systems.

Ocado is treating this as a strategic investment to develop autonomous systems that will work across its operations, from vehicles within and around its packing warehouses through to the last-mile vehicles that deliver grocery orders to people’s homes. It says it expects the first products to come out of this deal — likely in closed environments like warehouses rather than open streets — to be online in two years.

“We are excited about the opportunity to work with Oxbotica to develop a wide range of autonomous solutions that truly have the potential to transform both our and our partners’ CFC [customer fulfillment centers] and service delivery operations, while also giving all end customers the widest range of options and flexibility,” said Alex Harvey, chief of advanced technology at Ocado, in a statement.

The investment is coming as an extension to Oxbotica’s Series B that it announced in January, bringing the total size of the round — which was led by bp ventures, the investing arm of oil and gas giant bp, and also included BGF, safety equipment maker Halma, pension fund HostPlus, IP Group, Tencent, Venture Science and funds advised by Doxa Partners — to over $60 million.

The timing of the news is very interesting. It comes just one day (less than 24 hours in fact) after Walmart in the US took a stake in Cruise, another autonomous tech company, as part of recent $2.75B monster round. Walmart owns one of Ocado’s big competitors in the UK, ASDA; and Ocado recently made its first forays into the US, by way of its deal to power Kroger’s delivery. So it seems that competition between these two is heating up on the food front.

More generally, there has been a huge surge in the world of online grocery order and delivery services in the last year, with earlier movers like online-only Ocado, Tesco in the U.K. (which owns both physical stores and online networks), and Instacart in the U.S. seeing record demand, but also a lot of competition from well-capitalized newer entrants bringing different approaches (next-hour delivery, smaller baskets, specific products).

In Ocado’s home patch of Europe, they include Oda (formerly Kolonial), Rohlik out of the Czech Republic (which in March bagged $230 million in funding); Everli out of Italy (formerly called Supermercato24, it raised $100 million); Picnic out of the Netherlands (which has yet to announce any recent funding but it feels like it’s only a matter of time given it too has publicly laid out international ambitions). Even Ocado has raised huge amounts of money to pursue its own international ambitions. And that’s before you consider the nearly dozens of next-hour, smaller bag grocery delivery plays.

A lot of these players will have had a big year last year, not least because of the pandemic. Now, the big question will be how that market will look in the future as peoples go back to “normal” life.

That may well tighten the competitive landscape, and could be one reason why companies like Ocado are putting more money into working on what might be the next generation of services, one more efficient and run purely (or at least mostly) on technology.

Logistics account for some 10% of the total cost of a grocery delivery operation. But that figure goes up when there is peak demand or anything that disrupts regularly scheduled services.

My guess is also that with all of the subsidised services that are flying about right now where you see free deliveries or discounts on groceries to encourage new business — a result of the market getting so competitive — those logistics have bled into being an even bigger cost. So it’s no surprise to see the biggest players in this space looking at ways that it might leverage advances in technology to cut those costs and speed up how those operations work.

In addition to this collaboration with Oxbotica, Ocado continues to seek further investments and/or partnerships as it grows and develops its autonomous vehicle capabilities.

Notably, Oxbotica and Ocado are not strangers. They started to work together on a delivery pilot back in 2017. You can see a video of how that delivery service looks here:

“This is an excellent opportunity for Oxbotica and Ocado to strengthen our partnership, sharing our vision for the future of autonomy,” said Paul Newman, co-founder and CTO of Oxbotica, in a statement. “By combining both companies’ cutting-edge knowledge and resources, we hope to bring our Universal Autonomy vision to life and continue to solve some of the world’s most complex autonomy challenges.”

But as with all self-driving technology — incredibly complex and full of regulatory and safety hurdles — we are still fairly far from full commercial systems that actually remove people from the equation completely.

“For both regulatory and complexity reasons, Ocado expects that the development of vehicles that operate in low-speed urban areas or in restricted access areas, such as inside its CFC buildings or within its CFC yards, may become a reality sooner than fully-autonomous deliveries to consumers’ homes,” Ocado notes in its statement on the deal. “However, all aspects of autonomous vehicle development will be within the scope of this collaboration. Ocado expects to see the first prototypes of some early use cases for autonomous vehicles within two years.”

More to come.

As expected, Southeast Asian super-app Grab is going public via a SPAC, or blank check company.

The combination, which TechCrunch discussed over the weekend, will value Grab on an equity basis at $39.6 billion and will provide around $4.5 billion in cash, $4.0 billion of which will come in the form of a private investment in public equity, or PIPE. Altimeter Capital is putting up $750 million in the PIPE — fitting, as Grab is merging with one of Alitmeter’s SPACs.

Grab, which provides ride-hailing, payments and food delivery, will trade under the ticker symbol “GRAB” on Nasdaq when the deal closes. The announcement comes a day after Uber told its investors it was seeing recovery in certain transactions, including ride-hailing and delivery.

Uber also told the investing public that it’s still on track to reach adjusted EBITDA profitability in Q4 2021. The American ride-hailing giant did a surprising amount of work clearing brush for the Grab deal. Extra Crunch examined Uber’s ramp towards profitability yesterday.

This morning, let’s talk through several key points from Grab’s SPAC investor deck. We’ll discuss growth, segment profitability, aggregate costs and COVID-19, among other factors. You can read along in the presentation here.

How harshly did COVID-19 impact the business?

The impact on Grab’s operations from COVID-19 resembles what happened to Uber in that the company’s deliveries business had a stellar 2020, while its ride-hailing business did not.

From a high level, Grab’s gross merchandise volume (GMV) was essentially flat from 2019 to 2020, rising from $12.2 billion to $12.5 billion. However, the company did manage to greatly boost its adjusted net revenue over the same period, which rose from $1.0 billion to $1.6 billion.

Spotify this morning officially announced the limited U.S. release of its first hardware device, the oddly named Car Thing, aimed at Spotify Premium subscribers. The new device — which Spotify is surprisingly offering for free plus shipping — has evolved substantially from the version that first began testing in 2019. This upgraded model has a touchscreen, a big, grippable knob for navigation, voice control features, and four preset buttons at the top for favorite music, podcasts or playlists, similar to Spotify on mobile devices.

The company explained its interest in Car Thing is about solving a need for customers who want a “more seamless” and personalized in-car listening experience. Although many cars today support Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, Spotify points out that the average age of a car in the U.S. is actually 11 years old and the average lifetime of cars is 18 years. That means there are still a large number of cars on the road that don’t support modern, in-car infotainment systems.

Car Thing is being introduced to serve this market — and likely, to give Spotify the opportunity to explore future business models where it has a more direct relationship with customers inside the vehicle, though the company isn’t speaking to its longer-term ambitions at this time.

Image Credits: Spotify

The new Car Thing itself is a lightweight (3.4 oz.), thin (4.6″ x 2.5″ x 0.7″) music and podcast player that offers a combination of voice control, knobs, buttons, and a touchscreen display for navigating its menus and selecting the media you want to hear. You can choose to use set up the device to work via Bluetooth or an AUX or USB cable, depending on how you usually connect your phone to your car stereo to play music.

You’re also able to mount Car Thing to your dash in a variety of ways as the device ships with three different types of dash and vent mounts to choose from, along with a car charger and USB-C cable.

Image Credits: Spotify

At launch, Car Thing will walk you through a quick tour where it explains how to get started. The user interface recalls the Spotify mobile app, so it isn’t difficult to get used to for first-time users. Here, you can tap, swipe and use your voice to interact with the screen. The knob lets you quickly move through your choices — an experience that may be more comfortable to those used to interacting with knobs on their car’s built-in stereo.

Across the top of the device are four preset buttons that let you save your favorite content for easy access. By default, these are configured with your Liked Songs and Spotify’s Daily Drive and Morning Commute playlists, with the last preset empty. Many users may just keep these selections, but you can change them at any time, Spotify says.

Image Credits: Spotify

Ahead of the device’s launch, Spotify quietly began rolling out support for its “Hey Spotify” voice command, which Car Thing leverages, too. This lets you speak your requests directly to Spotify, by asking for a song, album, artist, playlist, station or podcast, which Car Thing “hears” by way of its four microphones at the top. (Four, because Spotify wants Car Thing to respond even if you’re blasting your music or have the windows down, which creates additional noise.)

On mobile devices, using “Hey Spotify” is an opt-in option that you can shut off from the app’s settings. But Car Thing represents a smarter, not to mention more safety-focused, use case for voice control. Instead of fiddling with the screen or knobs, you can speak your commands — or allow your kids to shout out their options from the backseat, perhaps.

Image Credits: Spotify

Spotify’s policy regarding its use of voice data explains the company will collect recordings and transcripts of what you say along with information about the content it returned to you, and may use the data to improve the feature over time. The company told us that beyond the voice data, the device isn’t collecting any more information that it does already in the mobile app. Still, Car Thing does give Spotify a more direct window into what people listen to during commutes and longer road trips, which could inform its future products, programmed playlists and other features.

“In a typical year, Americans spend over 70 billion hours in their cars and there are 250 million cars on America’s roads today,” noted Spotify’s Head of Global Culture and Trends, Shanon Cook. “That’s a lot of time spent on the road. So what you do and what you listen to, to help you get through those hours in the car really matters.”

Initially, Car Thing is being made available during this limited release period for free, as selected users will just pay the cost of shipping — a choice Spotify made because Car Thing is still somewhat experimental.

“This is Spotify’s first hardware, and we obviously want to get things right,” said Spotify’s Head of Hardware Products, Andreas Cedborg. “And we want to learn quite a lot here in the beginning, so it’s a natural way for us to start,” he said.

Spotify says the current retail price for the device is $80. It doesn’t know if or when it will begin to retail the device, however. But it can roll out updates to its software so at least the device won’t be immediately obsolete, if Spotify decides to go in a different direction one day.

Despite Spotify’s exploration into hardware, the company stressed it doesn’t aim to be a hardware company. If anything, it’s seems more likely that Spotify is toying with the idea of becoming the next SiriusXM by way of a specialized in-car experience — although one that’s even more of an add-on than SiriusXM is as you physically have to attach the thing — the Car Thing — to your dash. Longer-term, it’s not clear it makes much sense to develop a Car Thing product line as cars get smarter every year and infotainment systems become more standard.

Car Thing will only be offered on an invite-only basis via carthing.spotify.com to U.S. Spotify Premium subscribers with a smartphone. The company declined to say how many units would be shipped, so you’ll probably want to jump on the waitlist sooner rather than later if such a device interests you.

After a short hiatus, The Exchange is back. We’ll spend part of this week digging into the global venture capital scene’s Q1 performance, but today, we’re kicking off with a quick dive into Uber, Lyft, Deliveroo and DoorDash — and the ability of on-demand companies of various stripes to generate profit.

Uber is our lodestone today because it dropped a new SEC filing that includes some notes on its recent performance. And, most critically, a piece of guidance for investors concerning its ability to make money this year.

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By “make money,” we don’t mean traditional net income on a GAAP — generally accepted accounting principles — basis. We mean Uber is providing its public investors with notes on its future adjusted profitability. Real profits are still somewhere out in the uncharted future.

So let’s parse Uber’s latest, vet its profit promise, consider its rivals and their performance, and then ask ourselves if the great ride-hailing and food-delivery booms will ever make back the money they cost to scale.

Uber’s planned profits

In 2019, Lyft told investors to expect positive adjusted EBITDA by the final quarter of 2021; at the time, Uber said it would generate full-year positive adjusted EBITDA. Those are slightly different (if related) promises. Later, Uber moved up its profitability promise to Q4 2020, but that was not to be.

After Uber changed up its profitability timeline, COVID-19 came. The pandemic forced the American ride-hailing company to revert to its previous adjusted profitability promises.

Uber and Lyft took huge revenue hits as their core ride-hailing businesses dried up faster than water on a Texas sidewalk after COVID-19 lockdowns took effect. In response, Uber fell back on its Uber Eats business, while Lyft had to get by without a second business line.