Tech
TechCrunch Mobility: How do you issue a ticket to a robotaxi?
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!
We’re going to do a bit of a deep dive today, which may make this newsletter look a little different than normal. There is a reason!
This newsletter is not region-specific, but sometimes there are policies at the state level that have widespread implications for tech companies and startups alike. Which brings me to California and the new autonomous vehicle testing and deployment rules issued this week by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.
There are two new sets of rules — collectively 100 pages long — that cover requirements for the testing and deployment of AVs. I spent the past few days speaking to engineers and policy folks working at AV companies and discovered that they have strong opinions and few want to speak publicly about it. But thanks to the public commentary period on these regulations, we have some insight into what the industry supported and what it did not.
The regulations include new, more robust requirements for data collection and sharing, training, and operations. Here are a few items that stuck out and what insiders told me.
How do you ticket a robotaxi? Under these new rules, law enforcement can cite AV companies for traffic violations committed by their vehicles. The rule, called “Notice of Autonomous Vehicle Noncompliance,” requires the manufacturer (meaning the robotaxi company) to report the violation to the DMV within 72 hours of receiving it from law enforcement.
I’ve heard a number of interpretations of this rule and how it will be implemented, but it appears there is not a monetary fine attached to these violations. Instead, these violations are another piece of data that the DMV can use to identify problems and take action if needed.
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Insiders told me that the data is actionable and more important than a monetary fine. My question: Why not both?
The good news for industry: The DMV will now allow heavy-duty vehicles equipped with autonomous vehicle tech to test and eventually deploy on public roads. Self-driving truck companies are happy with this outcome. Daniel Goff, VP of external affairs at Kodiak, told me the company is already working on the required documentation to apply for a permit.
The burden for the industry: The word that came up in every conversation I had with someone in the AV industry was “burdensome.” And it was always used in reaction to the new data collection and sharing regulations.
Goodbye, disengagement reports; hello, malfunctions: Others were happy to see annual disengagement reporting disappear. Disengagement reports, which detailed instances when human drivers had to take over control due to technology failures or safety concerns, have been controversial because companies use varying standards. This has made it impossible to compare the results or rate the proficiency of autonomous vehicle technology.
That entire section has been removed and replaced with a requirement to report “dynamic driving task performance relevant system failure.” This may seem like semantics — trading one jargony phrase for another. Insiders tell me that while it is not a perfect metric, it is clearer than its predecessor. That doesn’t mean it is beloved either.
There is a lot more in these documents, including a requirement to provide annual updates to first responder interaction plans, access to manual vehicle override systems, two-way communication links with 30-second response times, and updated training requirements to ensure safe and timely interactions with first responders.
My question for you, reader, is whether these rules go too far or if they are appropriate and provide the kind of reporting and data collection needed to keep these companies accountable? Sign up for the Mobility newsletter to vote in our polls!
A little bird
We had a lot of little birds talk to us about the new California AV rules, so nothing new to add here. But remember, you can always send us tips. Here’s how.
Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.
Deals!
BMW i Ventures launched a new $300 million fund with a timely thesis: AI will reshape how the automotive industry operates. The fund will invest in early-stage through Series B startups in North America and Europe that are working on agentic AI and physical AI as well as industrial software, advanced materials, and manufacturing and supply-chain technologies. This third fund brings the firm’s total capital under management to $1.1 billion.
Other deals that got my attention …
Sereact, a German robotics startup, raised $110 million in a Series B funding round led by VC Headline. Other investors include Bullhound Capital, Felix Capital, Daphni, Air Street Capital, Creandum, and Point Nine.
Spirit Airlines is preparing to shut down after failing to secure a $500 million lifeline from the government, the WSJ reports. The company is expected to cease operations around 3 a.m. ET Saturday.
Notable reads and other tidbits
China suspended issuing new licenses for autonomous vehicles after dozens of Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis suddenly stopped last month, Bloomberg reported.
Google‘s Gemini AI assistant is hitting the road in millions of vehicles.
Faraday Future paid around $7.5 million to a company controlled by its founder, Jia Yueting, in 2025, senior reporter Sean O’Kane discovered in a recent SEC filing.
Rivian reported earnings this week and one item that stood out to us — and to many others — was the downsizing of its DOE loan from $6.6 billion to $4.5 billion. That loan restructuring comes with changes to its Georgia factory. Instead of two 200,000-vehicle capacity structures on the Georgia site, Rivian will now build a 300,000-vehicle capacity factory and leave the adjacent “pad” untouched and ready for future development. Analysts didn’t necessarily view this as negative but did position this as rightsizing. Barclays, for instance, views the modification as Rivian adjusting to the current EV environment, according to a research note published Friday. Barclays also stated it didn’t believe Rivian currently plans to build the second plant at Georgia, “at least not until early/mid next decade.”
Tesla launched a Semi-Charging for Business program, which includes a new product called the Basecharger that is designed for depot and overnight use.
Uber has tapped Hertz to clean, charge, and fix its Lucid Motors robotaxis. This announcement left us with a cheeky question: How many companies does it take to launch a robotaxi service?
Uber customers in the United States can now book hotels directly through the app, one of several new features announced this week that pushes far beyond the company’s original ride-hailing purpose and even deeper into its users’ lives. At launch, Uber customers will have access to more than 700,000 hotels worldwide through a partnership with Expedia Group, the travel company that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi led for 12 years.
Vay, a remote driving tech startup, says it has grown its fleet to 175 vehicles on the road and has surpassed 60,000 rides.
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Tech
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, all your M&A questions will be answered
The year keeps moving swiftly, and so is all of our planning for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026! We have an exciting new panel in store for founders in need of merger and acquisition advice … but first, we have a limited-time ticket offer to share.
Disrupt will once again be held in San Francisco’s Moscone West from October 13–15, and for a limited time, attendees can also bring a colleague, co-founder, investor, or teammate for less! You can buy one Disrupt 2026 pass here, and get 50% off a second pass of the same ticket type with a limited-time offer that ends May 8 at 11:59 p.m. PT.
As for the kind of programming that’ll keep you locked in during Disrupt’s three days, let’s dive into our newest panel that will be on the Builders Stage.
Hear at Disrupt how M&A is now an early-stage strategy
If you’ve been following our recent coverage, acquisitions and acqui-hires remain in vogue, especially within the AI scene. Whether it’s OpenAI buying Hiro, Anthropic acquiring Vercept, Google taking the team behind Hume AI, or Databricks pulling in two startups just for its security product, it’s been a busy year!
And being acquired is far from being the end of a long road for founders; it can be part of their early-stage journey. And with those, and many other acquisitions in mind, we’ve gathered an expert panel to help equip founders with what they need to know about all the M&A options that lie before them.
Their perspectives will equip you with a playbook for creating optionality for potentially selling, ways to make your startup more enticing to buyers, and the realities of going through the acquisition process. And for some background on our panel, let’s learn more about our industry leaders.
Aklil Ibssa, Head of Corporate Development and M&A, Coinbase
Aklil Ibssa brings a buyer-side perspective from one of the biggest companies in crypto, as he leads the company’s acquisition strategy and execution, helping identify where Coinbase should buy, invest, partner, or build. He’s overseen more than 14 acquisitions and nearly 50 early- and later-stage investments, and as one of the first hires on Coinbase’s corporate development team, he contributed to an M&A program that’s become among the most active in crypto, with more than 40 total completed acquisitions.
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Most importantly for founders, he’s seen firsthand how strategic buyers evaluate young companies: whether for technology, talent, licenses, product velocity, and beyond. And he’ll be able to speak to acquisitions, including Deribit, Liquifi, and Echo, and prominent investments in startups like Kalshi.
Lindsey Mignano, Founder, Mignano Law Group
Lindsey Mignano brings the legal and structural expertise that often determines whether an early-stage M&A deal can actually get to the finish line. As founder of Mignano Law Group, she represents emerging technology companies, SMEs, venture-backed startups, and venture firms as outside general counsel. Her practice spans everything from SAFE notes, priced rounds, and bridge financings to buy-side and sell-side acquisitions, acqui-hires, and everything else you can bring to mind.
That uniquely equips her to educate founders without insight into how early M&A readiness can begin. Many of her clients are seed through Series B companies, including enterprise SaaS, PaaS, and AI startups — exactly the kinds of companies now facing strategic interest, and she’ll be able to ground the conversation in the realities of cap tables, contracts, asset sales, and the necessary work for acquisitions to happen.
Karl Alomar, Managing Partner, M13
Now it’s time for an investor and operator to join the conversation. As managing partner at M13, Karl Alomar backs seed and Series A software founders across infrastructure, fintech, developer productivity, and other categories, feeling the brunt of the AI revolution. He has intimate knowledge of the earliest strategic decisions founders make: when to raise, when to partner, when to accelerate growth, and when an acquisition path may create the best outcome for the company, team, and investors.
As COO of DigitalOcean, Alomar helped build the cloud infrastructure company from its first product to roughly $250 million in ARR and an eventual NYSE IPO, with its valuation peaking around $15 billion. But as a founder, he’s been a part of the acquisition cycle too. China Export Finance grew to approximately $140 million in revenue before being acquired in 2010, and Clearview Networks was acquired in 2000. That combination gives Karl a nuanced perspective on the core question facing founders in the audience: When should they keep building with their team, and when is M&A the right path forward?
Get your second pass at 50% off by May 8
And remember: If you register for Disrupt 2026 by May 8 at 11:59 p.m. PT, you can take advantage of that offer to get your pass with savings of up to $410, and get 50% off a second pass of the same ticket type. All the insights Disrupt offers are best shared with a partner or colleague, so don’t miss this opportunity!
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Tech
Aurora lands McLane deal to run driverless truck routes in Texas
Aurora Innovation will start hauling loads in driverless trucks for distribution giant McLane, the latest company to adopt the startup’s autonomous vehicle technology following a multi-year pilot program.
Under the commercial agreement announced Wednesday, trucks outfitted with Aurora’s self-driving system will be used to transport goods between Dallas and Houston. These trucks will operate autonomously and will not have a human safety driver on board who can take over. However, Aurora will still have what it describes as a “human observer” sitting in the cab — who does not operate the vehicle — per an agreement it has with truck manufacturer Paccar.
Aurora said it plans to expand to new routes between McLane distribution centers across the U.S. Sun Belt by the end of the year.
The companies launched a pilot program in 2023 using autonomous trucks with a human safety operator. The pilot eventually expanded to two round-trips daily between Dallas and Houston.
McLane recently approved moving to driverless operations, which now run seven days a week between the two Texas cities.
The companies are taking a novel approach to this route, using Aurora’s driverless tech for the long-haul portion of the trip before handing it over to a McLane truck driver who makes local deliveries to customers like fast food restaurants. Aurora said this handoff occurs at the company’s Dallas and Houston terminals located right off the freeway.
The commercial contract is the latest win for Aurora as it tries to transition from a developer of autonomous trucks to a commercial operator earning money on its driverless routes. And it comes a year after the company launched its commercial self-driving truck service in Texas. Since then, Aurora has landed a commercial agreement to haul frac sand for Detmar Logistics. Last month, Hirschbach Motor Lines agreed to buy 500 Aurora-powered trucks; that agreement, which is outlined in a memorandum of understanding, is expected to close later this year.
Today, the company operates driverless trucks — some with a human observer still in the cab — on routes between Dallas and Houston, Fort Worth and El Paso, El Paso and Phoenix, Fort Worth and Phoenix, and Laredo and Dallas.
Aurora reports its first-quarter earnings Wednesday after the markets close.
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Tech
Ethos raises $22.75M from a16z for its expert network with voice onboarding
When companies are looking for opinions or advice on a project, they tend to go to LinkedIn or use expert networks such as GLG, Third Bridge, or Alphasights. But they often don’t find quality inputs, despite their searches.
Today, these sites ask experts to fill in a form based on their job title, which is then used to match them with companies in need of their help.
London-based Ethos thinks that AI can improve both sides of this experience. For experts, it offers voice-powered onboarding to ask a broader set of questions and get more data about their knowledge in various domains that their job titles don’t cover. For companies, Ethos can better match natural language queries posed by these organizations for their project, thanks to the wider range of data it has collected.
Ethos said that its voice-based onboarding and data allows it to answer complex client questions like, “Find me people who worked at a funded startup by A-grade investors solving for finance automation.”
Another example the startup gave was how a pharma company using its platform could search for doctors who specialize in a certain area, but who have also written papers on the subject or have an understanding of drug development.
Today, Ethos announced a $22.75 million Series A round led by a16z with participation from General Catalyst, XTX Markets, Evantic Capital, and Common Magic.
a16z’s Anish Acharya thinks that legacy platforms like LinkedIn and GLG only show shallow signals with job titles. He believes that Ethos captures different sub-specializations through its voice interview process with curated questions.
“I think voice is the original form of human communication. Most people, you know, most people don’t know how to write their story down in a very succinct, compelling, and accurate way. Voice is a big unlock for Ethos,” Acharaya told TechCrunch over a call.
How Ethos is scaling its network
Ethos was founded by James Lo and Daniel Mankowitz in 2024. Lo previously worked at McKinsey and later at Softbank, where he worked on the transformation of companies like WeWork and Arm. Mankowitz worked as an AI researcher at DeepMind, where he worked on YouTube’s video compression algorithm, Gemini, and the AlphaDev sorting algorithm.
Both founders arrived at tackling the problems of building an expert network from different angles. Lo always wanted to work on providing the right economic and employment opportunities to people. Mankowitz thought that the economy is a knowledge graph of people, companies, and products, and using the right algorithms, you can match these entities with each other.
“Traditional expert platforms almost purely focus on a mixture of job titles and job descriptions. What we observe is that most clients and most employers are not looking for a job title company. They’re looking for a specific skill and a specific capability. We also observed that, over time, looking for a skill and capability is going to gradually merge between the human economy and the agent economy,” Lo said.
Beyond the data provided by experts, Ethos also looks at other public sources like blogs and academic papers, along with social links to match companies with the right people.
The company also conducts interviews through its own platform using voice agents and extracts insights. Startups like Listen Labs and Outset already provide a way for companies to use conversational AI for interviews, offering some competition on this front. But Ethos thinks that its network of experts is better suited for certain clients than its competitors.
Ethos doesn’t name its client base, but said that top hedge funds, private equity firms, leading foundational AI labs, and enterprise consulting were already using its product. It’s taking 30% or more as a per-project fee from businesses, depending on the nature of the project. The company noted that it’s on track for “an eight-figure annualized revenue” but didn’t provide specific numbers.
It also didn’t say how many experts are on the platform, but said that roughly 35,000 people are joining each week. (Ethos sends invites to people whom they think can benefit from it.)
One challenge for the startup is growing an expert user base that’s relevant to its clients. The company said that AI labs’ spending money to map human talent has been helping its cause.
“Our perspective here is the AI labs have — are pointing a giant capital gun at every economically valuable occupation in the world. They’re trying to map out every profession. And so that’s an amazing tailwind for us,” Lo said.
He noted that these labs are building professional services in areas of law, health, finance, and management, so they would want all kinds of experts in these networks to build out their models and get feedback about their products and strategy.
The company has eight people on its team now, and its goal is to keep the team compact while scaling up.
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At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, all your M&A questions will be answered
Aurora lands McLane deal to run driverless truck routes in Texas
