Rebecca Bellan

When he was a senior studying at Texas A&M University, Matthew Iommi realized that there were no good options for transporting groups of people. Fellow college students heading out for the night together didn’t have access to on-demand rides with the same convenience, accessibility, and affordability of typical ride-hail platforms, like Uber and Lyft.  “Once you hit that six to seven [person] mark, you had to split up and take multiple cars, which is inefficient

May Mobility is deploying autonomous vehicles differently than its peers. Rather than operate robotaxis for individual ride-hail, May has followed a “gentle on-ramp” approach to commercialization by offering on-demand shuttles and pooled rides within campuses and along uncomplicated routes. The startup announced Wednesday the launch of its first fully driverless commercial service in Peachtree Corners, Georgia. The city falls in the Atlanta metropolitan area, where May intends to launch its autonomous vehicles on the Lyft

Owners of the electric Lucid Gravity SUV will gain access to Tesla’s Supercharging network starting January 31.  The Gravity is Lucid’s second vehicle model in its lineup after its flagship Air sedan series, and the first to be built with charge ports compatible with Tesla’s NACS (North American Charging Standard) charge plugs. Lucid Air owners will gain access via adapters to the Tesla Supercharger network in the second quarter.  In 2023, several automakers, including Ford, General

In the age of generative AI, when chatbots can provide detailed answers to questions based on content pulled from the internet, the line between fair use and plagiarism, and between routine web scraping and unethical summarization, is a thin one.  Perplexity AI is a startup that combines a search engine with a large language model that generates answers with detailed responses, rather than just links. Unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity doesn’t train its

New York-based Revel has made a lot of pivots since initially launching in 2018 as a dockless e-moped sharing service. The BlackRock-backed startup briefly stepped into the e-bike subscription business. It launched and now operates a handful of electric vehicle charging stations across the five boroughs. And it started an all-Tesla, all-employee ride-hail service, in part so its charging infrastructure would see guaranteed utilization.  After dropping the moped-sharing business in 2023, Revel is pivoting once

Everything in society can feel geared toward optimization – whether that’s standardized testing or artificial intelligence algorithms. We’re taught to know what outcome you want to achieve, and find the path towards getting there.  Kenneth Stanley, a former OpenAI researcher and co-founder of a new social media platform called Maven, has been preaching for years that this method of thinking is counterproductive, if not outright harmful. Instead of prioritizing objectives, Stanley says we should be

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to city streets, these startups are taking their tech off-road.  Two recent entrants — Seattle-based Overland AI and New Brunswick-based Potential — are poised to get a first-mover advantage on this segment of autonomy.  While these startups are applying their tech in different ways, Overland AI

Serve Robotics, the Uber and Nvidia-backed sidewalk robot delivery company, debuted publicly on the stock exchange Thursday, making it the latest startup to choose going public via a reverse merger as an alternative path to capital needed to fund growth. The company, which spun out of Uber’s acquisition of Postmates in 2021, hits the Nasdaq under the ticker “SERV” with gross proceeds of roughly $40 million — “prior to deducting underwriting discounts and offering expenses,”