Volvo becomes latest automaker to adopt Tesla EV charging standard

First came Ford. GM and Rivian followed. Now, Volvo is turning to Tesla’s North American Charging Standard.

Under an agreement announced Tuesday, Volvo EV owners will have access to about 12,000 of Tesla’s fast chargers, known as Superchargers, via an adapter starting in the first half of 2024. Today, Volvo produces and sells two battery electric vehicles, the XC40 and C40 Recharge. The company, which aims to only produce EVs by 2030, recently revealed the EX30 and EX90.

The bigger change occurs in 2025 when Volvo EVs sold in North America will be built with Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) charging port.

“As part of our journey to becoming fully electric by 2030, we want to make life with an electric car as easy as possible,” Volvo Cars CEO Jim Rowan said in a statement. “One major inhibitor to more people making the shift to electric driving – a key step in making transportation more sustainable – is access to easy and convenient charging infrastructure. Today, with this agreement, we’re taking a major step to remove this threshold for Volvo drivers in the United States, Canada and Mexico.”

Today, nearly all EVs sold in North America — with the exception of Tesla — are equipped with the Combined Charging System (CCS). Third-party charging networks like Electrify America, EVGo and Chargepoint are also on the CCS standard. Volvo said it will provide an adapter to future EV owners so they can still access public chargers equipped with CCS.

Last year, Tesla shared its EV charging connector design in an effort to encourage network operators and automakers to adopt the technology and help make it the new standard in North America. While there didn’t appear to be a lot of public interest, automakers began working with Tesla to adopt the system.

In the past month, Ford, GM, Rivian and more than a dozen EV charging companies have announced plans to adopt Tesla’s NACS. Stellantis and Hyundai have made public statements that they’re evaluating the Tesla standard.

Volvo becomes latest automaker to adopt Tesla EV charging standard by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

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DeepMind claims its next chatbot will rival ChatGPT

ChatGPT might’ve captured the world’s attention. But DeepMind claims that its next large language model will rival — or even best — OpenAI’s.

According to a piece in Wired, DeepMind, the Google-owned research lab, is using techniques from AlphaGo, DeepMind’s AI system that was the first to defeat a professional human player at the board game Go, to make a ChatGPT-rivaling chatbot called Gemini.

If all goes according to plan, Gemini will have the ability to plan or solve problems as well as analyze text, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told Wired’s Will Knight.

“At a high level you can think of Gemini as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the amazing language capabilities of the large models,” Hassabis said. “We also have some new innovations that are going to be pretty interesting.”

Knight speculates that Gemini, which was briefly teased at Google’s I/O developer conference in May, will leverage innovations in reinforcement learning to accomplish tasks with which today’s language models struggle. Reinforcement learning involves “rewarding” an AI system for certain behaviors and/or punishing undesired ones, with the goal of “teaching” the system which behaviors to exhibit in a given situation.

As Knight notes, reinforcement learning has already led to gains in the language model space — it’s key to the way systems such as ChatGPT respond to prompts. DeepMind, having a wealth of experience in reinforcement learning (AlphaGo being one example), is no doubt eager to apply its learnings to the generative AI domain.

Gemini isn’t DeepMind’s first foray into language models, it’s worth noting. The company last year introduce Sparrow, a chatbot that the lab claimed was less likely than other language models to give “unsafe” or “inappropriate” answer to questions. Hassabis told Time in January that DeepMind would consider releasing Sparrow for a private beta sometime this year; it’s unclear whether those plans are still on track.

Gemini is, however, DeepMind’s most ambitious work in the space so far, at least if early reports are to be believed. The Information reported in March that Gemini, which was spurred by the failures of Bard, Google’s chatbot project, to keep pace with ChatGPT, has direct participation from Google higher-ups including Jeff Dean, the company’s most senior AI research executive.

The race for dominance in the generative AI space comes amidst sky-high investor — and customer — enthusiasm. According to Grand View Research, the market for generative AI — including text-analyzing AI like Gemini — could reach $109.37 billion by 2030, an increase of 35.6% from 2030.

DeepMind claims its next chatbot will rival ChatGPT by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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Adobe indemnity clause designed to ease enterprise fears about AI-generated art

When it comes to artworks created by generative AI, enterprise users have specific legal concerns around permissions – and Adobe has recognized those worries. That’s why the company has written an indemnity clause that states that Adobe will pay any copyright claims related to works generated in Adobe Firefly, the company’s generative AI art creation tool.

In a statement about the clause, the company specifically refers to these enterprise customers:

With Firefly, Adobe will also be offering enterprise customers an IP indemnity, which means that Adobe would protect customers from third party IP claims about Firefly-generated outputs.

That means the company is prepared to pay out any claims should a customer lose a lawsuit over the use of Firefly-generated content.

The company knows that enterprise customers are worried about creating artwork in this way. Speaking at the Upfront Summit earlier this year, prior to the release of Firefly, Adobe chief strategy officer Scott Belsky said that Adobe talked to companies about this and the enterprise position was crystal clear:

“A lot of our very big enterprise customers are very concerned about using generative AI without understanding how it was trained. They don’t see it as viable for commercial use in a similar way to using a stock image and making sure that if you’re going to use it in a campaign you better have the rights for it — and model releases and everything else. There’s that level of scrutiny and concern around the viability for commercial use,” he said.

Belsky says even though the court has yet to rule on the copyright issues related to content created with generative AI, Adobe feels comfortable taking this stance because it has trained Firefly on Adobe Stock images, which it has broad permission to use, along with openly licensed content and public domain content where the copyright has expired. Unlike OpenAI and some other companies, it’s not training on the open internet, only content it is legally able to use.

“We had to be safe regardless [of how the courts might rule]. And that was a really helpful direction. And so, what we did is we decided to train when we launched this first generative AI family of models, everything was trained on either Adobe Stock or open datasets that are not in violation of any sort of copyright,” he said.

That approach greatly reduces Adobe’s risk associated with offering the indemnity clause, says Adobe general counsel Dana Rao. The enterprise customer knows Adobe trained the model on a limited set of content that they had permission to use, and if for some reason they still get sued, Adobe has them covered.

“If you do get sued on a Firefly-generated output, then we’re going to step in as part of our enterprise contractual agreement, and indemnify you and what are we going to indemnify? We’re going to indemnify the output of Firefly…if that’s somebody else’s work, and it looks like their work and it would be a copyright infringement because it was [someone’s] work, we will indemnify you because…we know where we got our work from. And so we feel good that we’re going to be able to win that case,” Rao told TechCrunch.

Ray Wang founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says the approach is smart for both Adobe and the creators who contribute to Adobe Stock. “It’s actually a brilliant move. Here’s why: It applies only to Adobe Stock and Adobe owns all the creative arrangements in Adobe Stock,” he said. “What’s more, they enable creators to make money from their works on the Adobe Stock derivatives created in Firefly.”

The company does place limits on how far it will take the indemnification, saying it only covers the specific Firefly-generated output and not anything else you might add to the output that could possibly infringe on a copyright, like say adding a likeness of Spiderman to the artwork, Rao says.

He sees the approach more like an insurance policy than a legal gimmick, designed to reassure skittish customers that it’s safe to use this technology for commercial purposes. “The law is not settled, and I can’t tell you which way the copyright cases are going to go, but I can guarantee you having been born in the United States of America that there are going to be a lot of lawsuits, so that insurance is pretty attractive [to our enterprise customers], and not really a gimmick.”

He says the enterprise users also recognize the likelihood of legal tests of the use of art generated with technology like Firefly, and it gives them some peace of mind. Adobe, knowing the content that the model was trained on, can feel similarly at ease, even if the law isn’t settled, and even if they might have to make some payments over time regardless of their position.

Adobe indemnity clause designed to ease enterprise fears about AI-generated art by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

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Aston Martin taps Lucid to help develop electric vehicles

Lucid Group, the U.S. automaker that produces the luxury all-electric Air sedan, will supply Aston Martin with powertrain components for future electric vehicle models, the companies said Monday. The iconic British luxury automaker aims to launch an EV in 2025.

The agreement marks a first for Lucid — a chance to act as supplier and diversify its revenue streams.

Lucid has been struggling to meet delivery expectations and drum up enough demand for its luxury EVs, and has consistently missed the beat on revenue. In March, Lucid cut its workforce by 18%.

Earlier this year, the startup unveiled a derivative of its electric drive unit specially designed for use in motorsports. The startup

Under the terms of the agreement, Aston Martin will make phased cash payments to Lucid and give the startup a 3.7% stake, or about 28,352,273 ordinary shares. The value of shares and cash payments should reach about $232 million.

Lucid will give Aston Martin technical support as the latter integrates Lucid’s electric powertrain technologies, including its twin motor drive unit, battery technology and onboard charging unit called the Wunderbox.

“Combined with our internal development, this will allow us to create a single bespoke BEV platform suitable for all future Aston Martin products, all the way from hypercars to sports cars and SUVs,” said Roberto Fedeli, chief technology officer of Aston Martin, said in a statement.

Aston already uses engines and other technology from Mercedes-Benz. China’s Geely recently increased its equity stake in Aston by 17%.

“Along with Mercedes-Benz, we now have two world-class suppliers to support the internal development and investments we are making to deliver our electrification strategy,” Lawrence Stroll, executive chairman of Aston Martin, said in a statement. “With the recently announced long-term partnership with Geely, we will also gain the opportunity to access their range of technologies and components, as well as their deep expertise of the key strategic market of China.”

Aston Martin is scheduled to announce a strategic update that sets out new production targets on Tuesday.

Aston Martin taps Lucid to help develop electric vehicles by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

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French VC firm Frst reaches $80 million first close for its new seed fund

Frst, the Paris-based VC firm with no vowel in its name, is in the process of raising its second fund. The firm has already reached a first closing of €72 million (nearly $80 million at today’s exchange rate).

And if there’s one thing to say about this new fund is that it’s business as usual for Frst. As the name suggests, Frst aims to be the first VC firm to invest in a tech startup.

Frst even tells me that around half of the VC firm’s term sheets are sent before the startups are incorporated. The firm has decided to keep the exact same formula with some fresh capital to invest over the next few years.

The team led by Pierre Entremont and Bruno Raillard originally met when they were working for Otium Venture as part of Pierre-Edouard Stérin’s family office. In 2019, the team created its own VC firm and raised the initial Frst fund (called Frst 2). At the time, Frst raised €90 million (nearly $100 million at today’s exchange rate).

With today’s new fund called Frst 3, the investment firm expects to reach the upper limit of €100 million ($110 million). Frst has already secured funding from the European Investment Fund, Bpifrance’s Fonds National d’Amorçage 2, Axa Venture Partners and Isomer. Several individual investors are also investing in the fund itself, such as entrepreneurs working for Payfit, Owkin, Shippeo, Pigment, Electra, Supercell, Wolt, Aiven and Homa Games.

While Frst doesn’t focus on one vertical in particular, the firm believes that there will be plenty of interesting investment opportunities in the coming years due to the rise of artificial intelligence.

“The rapid developments observed in the field of Artificial Intelligence over the past few months and the disruptions they are creating make an extremely favorable context for startups. From work to medicine, defense, education, or natural resource management, the economy and society as a whole are preparing to undergo unprecedented changes,” Pierre Entremont said in a statement.

Overall, if you include Otium Venture’s original €44 million fund, the Frst team has more than €200 million of assets managed or advised ($219 million). With this metric, Frst says that it is now the largest seed fund focused on French startups specifically.

“France is particularly well positioned to play a leading role in this upcoming revolution, notably due to its production of top technical talent. This is why Artificial Intelligence has always been a very present theme in our investments, with, for instance, Owkin or Doctrine 7 years ago. We have also already made several investments with Frst 3 in teams with remarkable technical quality,” Bruno Raillard said in a statement.

The Frst team has invested in dozens of startups, such as Pigment, Electra, Poolside, Doctrine, Payfit, Shippeo and Owkin. With its new fund, it plans to invest between €1 million and €3 million in around 30 companies.

French VC firm Frst reaches $80 million first close for its new seed fund by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

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UTU raises $35M to help travelers get more from tax-free shopping

Utu, a travel tech company that helps flyers get more out of their tax-free shopping, announced today it has raised a $35 million Series B led by SC Ventures. Part of the funding was used to acquire CardsPal, a Singapore-based fintech that offers deals and promotions nearby to users.

During the pandemic-induced travel hiatus, utu worked to establish partnerships with travel, hotel chain and retail brands. The company notes that even though travel has rebounded, only about 1% of venture funding over the past 15 years has gone to travel, primarily short-term rental hospitality. Utu’s goal is to create innovation in the tax-free shopping sector, which allows tourists to reclaim VAT on their purchases.

Utu offers customers a Tax Free Card, which has two main offerings. First, tax-free shoppers can opt for frequent flyer miles or hotel points instead of VAT refunds. Or they can select an immediate store voucher that is equal to 120% of the VAT or GST they paid while shopping overseas. Utu says that retailers, airlines, hotels and other organizations that partner with them can not only increase customer loyalty, but also grow their revenue from tourist shopping by up to 40%.

Utu’s partners include 10 global airlines, like Air France-KLM, Emirates, Qatar Airways and Singapore Airlines, as well as Accor, one of Europe’s large hospitality brands. To facilitate payments, utu works with fintech partners with Nium and also uses its own proprietary tech. It plans to announce more partnerships later this year.

Customer pay VAT upfront, and can reclaim it through operators like Planet or Global Blue. But they don’t get back the full amount of VAT, which is where utu comes in.

Utu co-founder Asad Jumabhoy spent eight years working in the duty-free business, before another 25 in tax-free shopping. While operating fashion and perfume stores at Changi Airport in Singapore in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Jumabhoy started a tax refund business that evolved into Global Blue. After selling Global Blue in 2012, Jumabhoy decided to take his understanding of retail margins, value-added taxes and customer shopping habits to develop utu.

“The way we think about our work is that we are unbuilding new product layers on top of the existing tax-free shopping infrastructure that unlocks value for all stakeholders connected to tourist shopping—brands, tourists and our VAT refund partners,” he said.

Jumabhoy said even though tax-free shopping is a common practice, there are still two problems. The first is that the process of getting VAT refunds is difficult, and secondly, tourists only get part of their VAT spending back. Utu focuses on the second problem and wants to give tourists more value when they shop. For example, they can receive over 90% of their refund value in airline frequent flyer miles.

The CardsPal acquisition will give utu a digital marketplace, a promotions engine and self-service merchant registration portal. It will also expedite utu’s rollout in markets like France and Italy, plus another 50 countries that offer VAT and GST refunds.

Utu’s funding will be used to grow its product distribution across all countries that offer a VAT refund service, invest in technology and new products and strengthening its management to execute its growth plan.

UTU raises $35M to help travelers get more from tax-free shopping by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

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TreasurySpring raises $29M to expand its investment platform aimed at businesses with excess cash

Of the many issues highlighted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, one big one was the liability of having too much cash sitting in too few bank accounts. Today a London startup called TreasurySpring — which has built a platform for businesses to put some of their cash reserves to work, in investments — is announcing $29 million in funding to expand its products on the back of a surge of interest in its services.

The funding, a Series B, is being led by Balderton Capital, with new backer Mubadala Capital and previous backers ETFS Capital, MMC Ventures and Anthemis Group also participating. Previously the company had raised some $13 million, and partial details of this latest round (£15 million to be exact) leaked out last week. We now understand that the full round of $29 million includes both primary and secondary funding and values the startup at close to $100 million.

Prior to founding TreasurySpring, the three co-founders Kevin Cook (CEO), James Skillen (CTO) and Matthew Longhurst (COO), cut their teeth working in hedge funds, asset management and investment consulting and it was that experience, Cook said, that gave them the idea of building a platform to help businesses manage their cash reserves better.

The challenge is a familiar one in the world of business: big entities typically have better access to services than smaller organizations. In this case, what the three saw was that treasury departments at huge enterprises might typically work with large investment banks to invest their cash reserves in diverse ways, but for companies that are not the largest in the world, there were no routes to do the same, so the answer was to build a platform that could help them manage their money in similar ways.

To be clear, TreasurySpring’s customers are not exactly small. On average, they might have between $5 million and $10 million in cash reserves, and they include FTSE 100 corporations and other multinationals, as well as startups that are scaling, and also charities. Some of them are retail behemoth Sainsbury’s, Schroders, dairy giant Muller, Hg, Bunq, Lendable and Tide. In all there are already some 250 using its platform, with another 100 being onboarded right now, the company says (part of the surge of interest that spurred this round).

The platform, meanwhile, has been built to include some 600 standardised cash investment products, tapping seven currencies across three chief categories: governments, corporates and banks such as Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Societe Generale. Just as consumers have been served a range of ETFs to allow them to access portfolios of investments they might not have been able to access previously, in this case TreasurySpring offers FTFs: Fixed-Term-Funds that it describes as “standardised and regulated” and aimed at packaging and making different investment options more accessible to the treasury teams.

Cook said that business has been growing steadily for years — it was founded in 2017 — but the recent meltdown at SVB, and subsequently issues at Credit Suisse, really put TreasurySpring “on the radar.”

“When it comes to the cash you have in your business, you need to know where it is, and that you’re not too exposed,” Cook said, “and secondly you want to maximize any return you can on that cash.” With interest rates now at only around 5-6%, deposit accounts are still not a great return, and “if you’re not making the most of your money, you’re being delinquent.”

That being said, there is still a lot of work to do build out what is effectively a new market being sold to a clientele that is risk-averse by nature, it seems. (Indeed there are few competitors here: Flagstone is another player in a similar area, although it focuses on high interest savings accounts.)

“First they had to build the product and it took them years to do that, and I liked the resilience of the team,” said Rob Moffat, the partner at Balderton who led the investment. “But now it’s about getting to market. How do you get treasurers to buy something new? Does one really want to be the first treasurer to buy a new capital product?”

Cook however is bullish on what he sees as an obvious opportunity.

“Largest institutions [collectively] have multiple billions in cash,” he said, “and the common thread among all of them is that while they may be long on excess cash, they are short on time and expertise.”

TreasurySpring raises $29M to expand its investment platform aimed at businesses with excess cash by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

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