Autonomous air mobility company Volocopter has added to the Series C funding round it announced in September 2019. The German electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft maker announced €50 million ($54 million at today’s exchange rate) in funding at the time, and the C round has now grown to €87 million ($94 million) thanks to new lead investor DB Schenker, a German logistics company with operations all over the world.

This round also includes participation by Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group, as well as the venture arm of its parent MS&AD, along with TransLink Capital . Existing investors including Lukasz Gadowski and btov also participated in this round extension.

With this new funding, Volocopter brings its total around $132 million, and it says it will use the newly acquired capital to help certify its VoloCity aircraft, its air taxi eVTOL designed to transport people, which is on track to become the company’s first ever vehicle licensed for commercial operation. Meanwhile, Volocopte will also use the new funds to help continue development of a next-generation iteration of its VoloDrone, which is the cargo-carrying version of its aircraft. It aims to use VoloDrone to expand its market to include logistics, as well as construction, city infrastructure and agriculture.

Already, Volocopter has formed partnerships with companies including John Deere for pilots of its VoloDrone, but it says that a second-generation version of the vehicle will help it commercialize the drone. On the VoloCity side, the company recently flew a demonstration flight in Singapore, and then announced that they’d be working with Grab on a feasibility study about air taxi services for potential deployment across Southeast Asia in key cities.

Alongside this round extension, Volocopter adds two advisory board members – Yifan Li from Geely Holding Group, which led the first tranche of this round closed in September, and DB Schenker CEO Jochen Thewes. Both of these are key strategic partners from investors who stand to benefit the company a lot not only in terms of funding, but also in terms of supply-side and commercialization.

Jaguar Land Rover has introduced a new concept vehicle that cuts a very different figure relative to its usual fare: It’s a four-wheeled electric urban mobility concept called ‘Project Vector’ that looks more like a low-floored airport shuttle train car than a traditional car.

This is a look that’s increasingly become popular among automakers designing for a future in which shared electric autonomous mobility plays a big role: Cruise, for instance, debuted a very similar looking long rectangle of a vehicle in January, with the crucial difference that its vehicle is a production model instead of just a concept.

Externally, JLR’s Vector concept looks very similar, with a front and end that could easily pass for one another, as well as sliding doors that open from the middle to allow the maximum amount of space for entry and exit. The floor is low to the ground to similarly accommodate easy onboarding and disembarkation, and that same floor houses the battery and drivetrain that make the vehicle go.

[gallery ids="1947767,1947765,1947764,1947763,1947762"]

Unlike Cruise’s strictly driverless design, however, the Jaguar vehicle features front-facing seats and a steering wheel for human control, though the interior is also “configurable” to eventually allow autonomous use, and to also offer flexibility for accommodating goods delivery as well as passenger transportation.

Jaguar Land Rover’s concept isn’t just the kind to get your noodle churning, either: The company says that it aims to work together with the Coventry City Council and the West Midlands Combined Authority to actually deploy a pilot mobility service using the Vector starting as early as “late 2021,” which it says will act as a “living laboratory for future mobility on the streets of Coventry.”

Most people probably don’t love the idea of hearing their streets will be made into a laboratory, but on the other hand pioneering shared electric transportation that more closely resembles public transit than traditional ride-hailing is likely a good thing.

Air mobility startup Volocopter will be working together with on-demand transportation, food delivery and payments company Grab on a feasibility study around air mobility in Southeast Asia. The joint study is part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by the two companies that covers exploration of the potential deployment of air taxi services in some of the cities in the region.

This is the first step in a partnership that could eventually result in actually running test flights and establishing routes for air taxi service deployment, though how far things go will likely depend on the results of this study and the subsequent appetites of both parties involved.

Volocopter, a German startup that has been building and demonstrating vertical takeoff and landing craft powered by electricity since 2011, has already demonstrated its aircraft in Singapore, working with local Singapore aviation regulators. It also unveiled a “world first” full-scale air taxi “VoloPort” last October in the city, working with partner Skyport to develop a commercially scalable model for these urban air taxi stations.

Grab seems to see Volocopter and its aerial taxi services as another potential piece of the overall puzzle that it’s putting together across various transportation methods. “This partnership will enable Volocopter to further develop urban air mobility solutions that are relevant for Southeast Asian commuters so they can decide on their preferred journey option based on their budgets, time constraints and other needs, in a seamless way,” said Grab Ventures CEO Chris Yeo in an emailed press release.

Volocopter has said Singapore could be one of the best contenders for commercial service launch, and opened offices in the region last year. Other potential commercial launch markets include Dubai and Germany, the company has said previously.

Gojek has paid $30 million to take a minority stake in Blue Bird, one of the largest taxi operators in Indonesia, according to Bloomberg, which first reported that the deal was in progress last month.

Gojek’s stake in Blue Bird is worth $30 million. The taxi operator’s holding company disclosed in a regulatory filing earlier this month that it had sold 108 million shares of Blue Bird at 3,800 rupiahs (about 28 cents) to an undisclosed buyer. The company already offered reservations for Blue Bird taxis on its super-app, and the investment brings the two closer.

Gojek’s “super-app,” called that because it offers a wide range of services, including on-demand rides and deliveries, a payment service, streaming entertainment and services like home cleaning, competes against Grab, which announced last July that it will use $2 billion of the funding it raised from SoftBank to invest in Indonesian transportation infrastructure and businesses.

While Gojek and Grab compete in several markets, Gojek is currently the biggest player in Indonesia.

TechCrunch has contacted Gojek for comment.

SpaceX has launched a batch of 60 Starlink satellites to orbit, marking its fifth overall launch of a group of 60 of the small spacecraft and its third this year alone. This launch brings the total constellation to 300 satellites for Starlink on orbit, extending SpaceX’s lead as the largest commercial satellite operator in the world.

The Starlink project sees SpaceX deploying a constellation of small, low Earth orbit satellites that will work with one another in concert to delivery high-speed, low-cost broadband internet connectivity to users on the surface. The current goal is to launch enough satellites to begin providing service to customers in the U.S. and Canada later this year, followed by eventual rollout of service globally pending further expansion of the constellation.

SpaceX did something a little different with this Starlink mission, deploying them from the launch vehicle much earlier in the mission after just one burn of the rocket’s second stage, into an elliptical orbit from which they’ll use their own thrusters to climb to their target orbit around Earth. It’s a trickier maneuver to accomplish, but also saves SpaceX time, fuel and money in terms of launch costs.

Today’s launch not only furthered SpaceX’s Starlink work, but also included some crucial steps in the company’s ongoing efforts to develop and improve its launch system reusability. The Falcon 9 booster used on today’s launch was flown previously three times in 2019, for instance, and represents the fastest turnaround of a re-used booster yet for SpaceX with just 62 days between its last flight and today.

SpaceX also attempted to land the booster once again during this launch – what would’ve been its 50th successful landing of a booster to date – but it missed the intended landing. The rocket first stage returned to Earth and fired its landing engine burst as planned, but a live video feed from the drone ship landing pad operated by SpaceX appeared to show exhaust plumes suggesting it came down in the ocean wide of its mark instead of landing on the pad as planned. SpaceX last missed with a landing in June when the centre core of its Falcon Heavy vehicle failed to nail the landing, but has otherwise mostly been able to land its boosters in recent years.

This launch also continued a trend SpaceX has had recently of also trying to recover both the halves of the fairing, a protective shell that encloses the payload of satellites aboard the rocket as they fly through Earth’s atmosphere on their way to space. The company will attempt to catch both sides of that shell using two ships in the Atlantic Ocean with giant nets strung across struts extending from their hull, as they parachute back. We’ll update this post with the results of that recovery attempt when we get the news.

We won’t have to wait long for another Starlink launch, as SpaceX is set to send more of its satellites up to orbit sometime next month according to its current plans.

Launch startup Rocket Lab has been awarded a contract to launch a CubeSat on behalf of NASA for the agency’s CAPSTONE experiment, with the ultimate aim of putting the CAPSTONE CubeSat into cislunar (in the region in between Earth and the Moon) orbit – the same orbit that NASA will eventually use for its Gateway Moon-orbiting space station. The launch is scheduled to take place in 2021.

The CAPSTONE launch will take place at Rocket Lab’s new Launch Complex 2 (LC-2) facility at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Rocket Lab opened its launch pad there officially in December, and will launch its first missions using its Electron vehicle from the site starting later this year.

The launch is significant in a number of ways, including being the second ever lunar mission to launch from the Virginia flight facility. It’s also going to employ Rocket Lab’s Photon platform, which is an in-house designed and built satellite that can support a range of payloads. In this case, Photon will transport the CAPSTONE CubeSat, which weighs only around 55 lbs, from Earth’s orbit to the Moon, at which point CAPSTONE will fire up its own small engines to enter its target cislunar orbit.

Rocket Lab introduced Photon last year, noting at the time that it is designed in part to provide longer-range delivery for small satellites – including to the Moon. That’s a key capability to offer as NASA embarks on its Artemis program, which aims to return human astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, and establish a more permanent human presence on and around the Moon in preparation for eventual missions to Mars.

CAPSTONE will play a key role in that mission, by acting “as a pathfinder” for the lunar Gateway that NASA eventually hopes to build and deploy.

“CAPSTONE is a rapid, risk-tolerant demonstration that sets out to learn about the unique, seven-day cislunar orbit we are also targeting for Gateway,” said Marshall Smith, director of human lunar exploration programs at NASA in a press release. detailing the news “We are not relying only on this precursor data, but we can reduce navigation uncertainties ahead of our future missions using the same lunar orbit.”

In total, the launch contract with Rocket Lab has a fixed price of $9.95 million, the agency said. NASA expects contractors Advanced Space and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems to begin building the CAPSTONE spacecraft this month ahead of its planned 2021 launch.

Hello and welcome back to our regular look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

This afternoon we’re digging into Lyft’s earnings results, unpacking the company’s performance, the market’s expectations and why shares in the American ride-hailing giant are off in after-hours trading.

Lyft’s earnings — following Uber’s own results that promised investors a quicker-than-anticipated path to (adjusted) profits — and the market’s reaction to its performance, provide a good frame for evaluating investors’ appetite for profits against growth. It’s a topic that’s important for startup founders and private-market investors alike.

Our investigation today is contentedly straightforward. We’ll start with the big numbers, drill into comparative performance and then weigh what the market is telling us.

Lyft’s key Q4 2019 results

In the fourth quarter of 2019, Lyft’s revenue came in at $1.017 billion, a gain of 52% compared to its year-ago result of $669.5 million. Sticking to the growth side of things, the company’s “active rider” count rose from 18.59 million to 22.91 million from Q4 2018 to Q4 2019, a gain of 23%. Lyft’s active riders also spent 23% more year-over-year, reaching $44.40 in the final quarter of last year.

Turning to losses, Lyft’s net loss (a metric that includes all costs) was $356.0 million in the quarter, a sharply worse result than its $248.9 million net loss in Q4 2018. The company’s adjusted net loss, however, was $121.4 million, an improvement from its year-ago $238.5 million adjusted net loss.

Turning to adjusted EBITDA, a heavily adjusted profit metric, Lyft lost $130.7 million in Q4 2019, an improvement on its Q4 2018 adjusted EBITDA loss of $251.1 million.

Investors had expected Lyft to report just $985.8 million in revenue and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $163.2 million. The street had also anticipated 100,000 fewer active riders and slightly slimmer revenue per active rider. So, Lyft beat expectations regarding growth, user count and health and for adjusted losses.

And yet Lyft’s shares are off over 4% in after-hours trading. While Lyft’s stock has recovered from lows set in October, 2019, the company’s equity is now more than $20 down from its IPO price, taking into account its post-earnings movement.

Why Lyft’s stock should fall after beating expectations and not changing its profit forecast might appear a bit confusing. It’s not.

Damn you, Uber

SpaceX is gearing up for its historic first human spaceflight, with a crewed demonstration mission of its Crew Dragon spacecraft tentatively set for May 7 (though that date is flexible right now). The company on Tuesday showed a clip of the completed Crew Dragon spacecraft that will carry astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley undergoing testing, and CNBC revealed that it had hired former NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations William Gerstenmaier.

Gerstenmaier served NASA for 14 years in that capacity, and was with the agency for forty years working on the Space Shuttle program as well as the International Space Station. It’s likely there are few other individuals in the world, if any, who have as much experience as he does with flying people in space, which makes him a very clutch hire for SpaceX as it readies itself for the operational kick-off of its human spaceflight program.

After the Demo-2 mission later this year, which will be the first to carry astronauts, the next step is for SpaceX to become a regular provider of crew transportation for NASA, ferrying people to and from the Space Station for regular crew change operations. NASA currently relies on transportation aboard Russian Soyuz rockets operated by Roscosmos to get personnel to and from the orbital lab, an arrangement that’s been in place since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011.

Meanwhile, SpaceX also shared a short video clip of the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will carry Behnken and Hurley to the ISS sometime later this year. The capsule is in a specialized testing chamber, undergoing electromagnetic interference testing, a key part of its verification process before being fully certified for flight. Earlier this week, Ars Technica reported that nearly everything was ready in terms of preparation for the Demo-2 mission, and that it should take place sometime between April and June, with May 7 as the current working date.

When Fair laid off 40% of its staff in October, CEO Scott Painter promised it wasn’t shuttering leasing services to on-demand fleets. But just a week later, Painter was removed and replaced in the interim with Adam Hieber, a CFA from Fair investor SoftBank. Today, according to two sources, Fair announced at an all-hands meeting that it would end its Fair Go program that helped Uber drivers lease cars. The program will cease in April. Uber now confirms the news to TechCrunch.

Formerly valued at $1.2 billion after raising over $2 billion in equity and debt financing from SoftBank and Lightspeed, Fair laid off 40% of its staff in October. It had bought Uber’s XChange leasing program in early 2018. The deal lets drivers lease an Uber eligible car with subscriptions to roadside assistance and maintenance for as low as $130 per week with a $500 start fee.

But Uber had sold the leasing program because it was unprofitable and adding to its losses at a tough time for the rideshare giant. As additional fees stacked up, Fair didn’t fare much better operating it.

A source tells us Fair Go was profitable. It was an important focus for the company as it retools its subscription services for traditional drivers. Another source says at one point Fair Go was adding about 250 to 300 car leases per day and had thousands of active leases. But Fair Go was facing higher insurance rates from carriers, which make sense since Uber drivers can be on the road far, far longer than traditional car owners.

Rather than trying to pass those fees along to drivers, many who are already cash-strapped, Fair told employees it would cease to lease to Uber drivers. That’s a respectable choice, since it could have pushed Uber drivers into debt if they didn’t fully comprehend what their total costs would be.

Attempts to reach Fair for comment were complicated by many of its in-house PR team being hit with October’s layoffs. An agency representative was asked for comment on the shut down but did not provide comment before press time.

However, an Uber spokesperson confirmed the shut down of Fair Go and their partnership, telling TechCrunch that “Unlocking options for vehicle access so drivers can earn with Uber remains a top priority. We’re thankful for Fair’s collaboration, and their contributions to our vehicle rental program. We’re  continuing to invest in rental partnerships, and building more flexibility beyond hourly, weekly, and monthly options available today.” 

Uber tells me it remains committed to offering leasing options to drivers through partnerships with Hertz, Avis, ZipCar and Getaround, and they may be able to work with Uber drivers formerly leasing from Fair.

The news is the latest low point for the SoftBank portfolio in the wake of the WeWork implosion. That’s caused potential repeat LPs for SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund to tighten their purse strings and other late stage investors to focus on sustainable unit economics. Late-stage startups have been left scrambling to cut their burn rates, often through layoffs.

SoftBank’s portfolio, which may have trouble raising on good terms after what many saw as inflated valuations propped up by the megafund, has been hit the hardest. This week TechCrunch broke the news that Flexport was laying off 3% of staff, or 50 employees. Other SoftBank-funded company layoffs include Zume Pizza (80% of staff laid off), Wag (80%), Getaround (25%), Rappi (6%), and Oyo (5%).

NASA is looking for input from industry – including vehicle makers and tech companies not necessarily already in the space business – as to what future lunar rovers should look like. This is part of its Artemis program, which seeks to return humans to the surface of the Moon, including the first woman and the next American man.

This ask includes two formal ‘Requests for Information (RFI): One seeking ideas about robotic rovers designed for automated exploration, and another looking for concepts and ideas that could lead to the development of a lunar terrain vehicle (LTV) that’s rated for human use, with astronauts able to drive them around on the Moon while wearing protective pressurized suits (meaning they’re essentially looking for open-top designs).

NASA’s goal with these vehicles is to help astronauts explore beyond their future landing site, which will be somewhere eon the lunar South Pole, and be able to extend the range of terrain they can access to conduct their experiments and gather data. The robot vehicles will support in a similar fashion, while also ideally being able to reach where humans can’t necessarily reach.

In its explanation of the RFI, NASA notes that it’s looking for expertise from industry players involved in all types of vehicle production, including all-terrain, electric and other kinds of ground craft. That could include autonomous car companies and innovative mobility tech startups, for instance.

NASA plans to address questions during a virtual industry forum in case anyone’s seeking more info, and submissions are due on February 26 for the LTV rover RFI, while there’s a little longer to contribute to the robotic rover RFI, which closes on March 6.

The agency issued a similar RFI for commercial robotic lunar landers in 2018, prior to announcing its Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract program in February 2019. Given that model, it may indeed be the case that this RFI ultimately leads to some kind of commercial partner program for rovers to be used in future NASA Moon missions as well.

SpaceX has launched a new web-based booking tool for its rideshare Falcon 9 launches, a service it announced last year to expand its addressable market to include small satellite customers who don’t have the budget or need to book a full rocket, which can cost upwards of $60 million. Prices for the rideshare services that SpaceX is offering through the website start at $1 million for payloads ranging up to 200 kg (440 lbs), with additional weight adding $5 per kg to the cost.

The selection tool asks you to specific the desired orbit (sun synchronous, low-Earth or polar) and your minimum readiness date (the earliest your payload can possibly fly) with dates starting this June as of this writing. You then input the total mass of what you want to fly and get an estimated cost. Proceeding brings you to a series of screens where you select whether you’ll need either a 15-inch or 24-inch port on the launch vehicle (which is largely a function of volume and mass) as well as the specific rocket you’re looking to book a ride on from upcoming scheduled missions.

Other options include add-ons like port adapters to meet the standard seizes that SpaceX uses, as well as a SpaceX-provided separation system in case yo udon’t have your own, along with options for on-site fuelling if your spacecraft has its own propulsion system and insurance for up to $2 million in value. It’s a little bit like configuring a car through Tesla’s configurator – but for launching something into space.

This isn’t just a lead generation form, either; once you’ve selected all your options, and confirmed that you’re not subject to any actions or International Traffic in Arms (ITAR) restrictions imposed by the U.S. government, you can put in a credit card number to instantly pay $5,000 as a deposit with three instalments due thereafter to make up whatever your total is, including the largest one due within 5 days of SpaceX confirming acceptance of your request.

[gallery ids="1942413,1942414,1942415,1942416"]

SpaceX has also published an accompanying ‘Rideshare User’s Guide‘ that goes into a lot more detail about the program, including technical requirements, details about things like environmental testing, legal considerations and much more. But it’s still amazing that I could, in theory, have just put up a down payment to send something to space as easily as I could reserve a Tesla Model Y.

Of course, I would forfeit that deposit because I don’t have the slightest clue about getting anything to space from a regulatory perspective, or the minimum $995,000 required to pay the balance for even the smallest payload without any additional frills. But if you do know what you’re doing, there’s now no easier way to book an orbital flight.

Drone startup Wingcopter, working with partners Merck and the Frankfurt University of Applied Science, has completed a first flight of a new drone delivery trial designed to show the benefits of using drones instead of trucks or other road faring vehicles for moving small cargo between two physically separate office facilities. This first flight covered around 25 km (roughly 15.5 miles), taking a sample of pigments from one Merck lab in Gernsheim to its headquarters in Darmstadt in Germany.

This trial is significant in more ways than one: The area it covered spanned a fairly dense metropolitan area, flying over power lines, trains, roadways and more. It also did all of this without continuous line-of-sight, something that’s been required of most drone delivery trials in a commercial setting to date. The partners involved are hoping this means it can stand as a blueprint to other similar pilot projects and trials being run all over the world.

Next up, the project will continue to fly additional deliveries and then summarize their findings in a report to be delivered in March. Already, using drones instead of trucks seems to provide advantages in terms of time (saving between an hour and even a full day in some cases) and emissions, and it can cut down on the amount of empty return trips made by large, heavy gas-guzzling vehicles as well.

Wingcopter CEO Tom Plümmer points out in a press release detailing the news that his company has “repeatedly demonstrate” the advantages of drone delivery across a number of use cases, including for use in getting life-saving medical supplies to remote areas. Trials in the U.S. include Alphabet’s Wing, which partnered with FedEx, and UPS, which is working with Matternet, but this commercial trial shows a potentially more fruitful avenue for deploying services in the near-term that don’t require buy-in from the average consumer.