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TechCrunch Mobility: The Cybertruck experiment is over
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, the role AI is playing in it.
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, the role AI is playing in it.
The decisions behind this week’s headlines: how to price for falling model costs, how to report growth when your percentages are shrinking, and why you need to test whether you’re expanding the TAM or just taking share. On Thursday’s 20VC x SaaStr, Harry, Rory and I covered OpenAI cutting its valuation to $1.25T, Anthropic’s slowing quarterly growth, DoorDash buying Instacart, and a round of IC pi…
Their confidence. That’s the first thing you see: Are they confident in their progress? Are they confident in their metrics? Do they know them cold: customer count, ACV, # leads, etc.? Do they have confident, credible, data-driven reasons to meet the plan for this year? Are they confident as a team: do they finish each other’s sentences in the right way? Are they confident in their understanding o…
We recently had a critical app go down for almost two full days. Work stopped, the team built workarounds in spreadsheets, and someone asked for an update every few hours. Outages happen. I’ve been on the vendor side of this. Every B2B company that runs long enough will have a bad day, and some will have a bad two days. I can forgive the downtime. What I can’t get past is that they never offered a…
Guidewire sells core systems to property and casualty insurers: policy, billing, and claims. It was founded in 2001. Its buyers are some of the slowest-moving in B2B. In a year when the market repriced anything that looked like legacy software, it still trades at roughly 10x ARR. Fiscal 2026 closed July 31. ARR was $1,237 million at current exchange rates, up 19% in constant currency, and fully ra…
Zack Abrams / The Block : Sam Altman's World launches a World ID verification suite for banks, bundling tools to verify human and agent identities, its first industry-specific offering — The identity project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman named Bain Capital and VanEck Funds among its design partners but did not name …
Aaron Kirchfeld / Financial Times : Europe's three biggest industrial companies are cashing in on the AI boom, as Schneider and Siemens expand further into software, while ABB focuses on equipment — Schneider Electric and Siemens move further into software as rival ABB bets on physical equipment
Nick Lichtenberg / Fortune : SF-based home insurer Stand, which uses digital twins of homes to price wildfire risk and insures $10B+ of property, raised a $70M Series C at a $1B valuation — Matt DiStefano shares his screen and rotates a gray 3D model of a California neighborhood. He zooms in on one house and overlays a heat map.
Bailey Lipschultz / Bloomberg : Sources: Nscale faces investor pushback on its ~$30B IPO valuation, with some urging a lower valuation of $16B to $19B, as Microsoft exits a UK data center deal — Nscale Ltd. is facing opposition to the valuation target it's pursuing in its initial public offering, according to people familiar …
Phoebe Liu / The Information : Sources: industry execs expect only 7-10 of hundreds of neoclouds to survive, as Nvidia supports them with easier credit terms, site finding, and $20B in leases — How many young AI cloud providers can the market, and Nvidia, support? — That's one of the big questions after a week …
Anthropic : Anthropic says it is committing 5% of its shares to a Public Benefit Fund, a wholly owned LLC that can't lobby, plus 2% for every 50% rise in its valuation — Today, we're committing a portion of Anthropic's shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new entity with a structure that increases the stake as the company grows.
Kyu-Seok Shim / Reuters : Sources: Nvidia asked Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron to make base dies for its custom NVHBM memory on TSMC's 3nm process; Samsung agreed, its first use of TSMC — Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) will use TSMC's (2330.TW) 3-nanometre process to produce base dies for Nvidia's (NVDA.O) …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg : Sources: HomeView units sat in warehouses for months; Apple plans a Nov. 6 store reset, likely for new Macs; iPhone Duo preorder mess could boost 18 Pro sales — Also: The company is planning Nov. 6 retail store reset, indicating potential Mac release date.
Giovanni Colantonio / Polygon : An interview with Apple's new VP of the App Store, Carson Oliver, on Apple's gaming vision, Apple Arcade, providing tools for indie game developers, and more — Back when Apple Arcade launched in 2019, there was a resounding belief among gamers that the mobile gaming service wasn't long for this world.
Financial Times : RegLayer: 47+ large US data center projects were delayed, withdrawn, or blocked in 2026; Bernstein says ~35% of the planned US data center pipeline is credible — A vast bet on the future of the technology is running into the unforgiving economics of the physical world
New York Times : AI debt worries mount as CoreWeave's bond yield tops 15%, insuring SoftBank debt gets pricier, and some Oracle debt trades near 80 to 90 cents on the dollar — Debt trouble at CoreWeave, Oracle and SoftBank raises questions about whether there are broader problems with the data center build-out.
Nick Lichtenberg / Fortune : Holyvolt, which develops AI tools for making and testing new battery materials, raised $45M from Zone II, CC.VC, and others, a source says at a $245M valuation — Steven Prast is old enough to remember when a mobile phone came in a bag. It was too heavy to carry around, so most people mounted it in the car.