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Equity Monday: TechCrunch goes Yahoo while welding robots raise $56M
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.
This morning was a notable one in the life of TechCrunch the publication, as our parent company’s parent company decided to sell our parent company to a different parent company. And now we’re going to have to get new corporate IDs, again, as it appears that our new parent company’s parent company wants to rebrand our parent company. As Yahoo.
Cool.
Anyway, a bunch of other stuff happened as well:
- Flywire, a Boston-based payments company filed to go public. More on the site about this shortly.
- Earnings this week are coming from Uber and Lyft and PayPal and Square and more.
- Dell is offloading Boomi to private equity as it wants to de-lever. Again.
- Cloud market share numbers are out, but what matters is that the growth of the cloud market helps explain the growth that we’re seeing in the startup game. (Our own Ron Miller dug into some rival cloud metrics here.)
- The Chinese government’s crackdown on its tech giants continues. And it’s impacting valuations.
- And Wealthsimple raised an epic CAD$750 million round, while Ohio-based Path Robotics just raised a $56 million Series B. Super cool.
We’re back Wednesday with something special. Chat then!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!
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Baidu announces Apollo Enterprise, its new platform for mass-produced autonomous vehicles
Baidu made several big announcements about Apollo, its open-source autonomous vehicle technology platform, today at CES. The first is the launch of Apollo Enterprise for vehicles that will be put into mass production. The company claims that Apollo is already used by 130 partners around the world. One of its newest partners, Chinese electric vehicle startup WM Motors, plans to deploy level 3 autonomous vehicles by 2021.
Apollo Enterprise’s main product lines will include solutions for highway autonomous driving; autonomous valet parking; fully autonomous mini-buses; an intelligent map data service platform; and DuerOS (Baidu’s voice assistant) for cars.
Baidu also released Apollo 3.5, the latest version of its platform, which now supports “complex urban and suburban driving environments.” Apollo 3.5 is already used by customers, including Udelv, an autonomous delivery van startup that recently partnered with Walmart to test grocery deliveries. Baidu says up to 100 self-driving vehicles based on Apollo 3.5 will be deployed in the San Francisco Bay Area and other regions in the United States.
In China, Baidu plans to launch 100 robo-taxis that will cover 130 miles of city roads in Changsha, the capital city of Hunan province. The robo-taxis will use Baidu’s V2X (i.e. vehicle-to-everything) technology, to enable them to communicate with road infrastructure, like traffic lights.
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Apollo for iOS is the only Reddit app you need
Former Apple intern Christian Selig says he wasn’t happy with the selection of iOS apps for browsing Reddit, so he decided to build his own. The developer this week launched his own Reddit client called Apollo, which offers a beautifully designed browsing experience for either iPhone or iPad, as well as customizable gestures, a media viewer and more. Read More
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Rackspace to go private after $4.3B acquisition by private equity firm Apollo
Rackspace, which is still best known as a hosting company even as it has expanded aggressively into offering services for businesses that use other platforms, went public in 2008. Now, however, it’s going private again after accepting a $4.3 billion offer (or $32 per share) in cash from private equity firm Apollo Global Management. The deal is still subject to regulatory approval and… Read More
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