Tech
Anduril has invented a wild new drone flying contest where jobs are the prize
Palmer Luckey’s eyes light up, and he talks a mile a minute, when discussing his company’s new recruiting event: the AI Grand Prix.
This is a drone flying contest with a twist. Rather than humans operating drones, the drones must operate autonomously. The humans will be tested on their software-writing skills that cause the drones to outfly their competition.
There are prizes ranging from a $500,000 pot to be spilt amongst the highest-scoring teams, to jobs at Anduril, and a chance to bypass the company’s standard recruiting cycle.
“It was something that I decided we should do,” Anduril founder Luckey said in an interview with TechCrunch. Luckey and the team were meeting to discuss recruitment strategy, he recalled.
Someone suggested sponsoring a drone racing tournament, which was somewhat in line with the company’s previous marketing tactics. For instance, Anduril sponsors the NASCAR Cup Series race known as the Anduril 250.
Luckey generally liked the idea but then said, “‘Guys, that would be a really dumb thing for Anduril to sponsor. The whole point, our entire impetus and reason for being, is this pitch that autonomy has finally advanced to where you don’t have to have a person micromanaging each drone,’” he recalled, then adding, “‘What we should really do is sponsor a race that’s about how well programmers and engineers can make a drone fly itself.’”
After discovering that such an event didn’t exist, the company opted to create it themselves. Interestingly, though, Luckey pointed out that the teams in the AI Grand Prix will not be flying Anduril’s drones, but those built by another defense tech startup: Neros Technologies. According to Luckey, Anduril’s drones are too physically big to run in the contained course in Ohio where the finals will take place.
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“We talked about having teams use Anduril drones, but Anduril doesn’t make any drones that are of the ultra-high speed, very small nature that you would want for a Drone Racing League. It’s mostly bigger stuff,” he said.
Anduril is also partnering with one of the established racing leagues, the Drone Champions League to operate the event, as well as JobsOhio. The final race will take place in Ohio (where Anduril’s key manufacturing facility is located).
Although Luckey is clearly excited about how fun the event will be, he won’t be a racer himself. “I absolutely will be there,” he says, but “it’s going to be about who can build the best software to pilot these drones.”
He smiled and said, “I’m not actually a very good software programmer. I’m more of a hardware guy. I’m an electromechanical and optical guy, and I know just enough about coding to glue stuff together in a way that works for my prototypes.”
(Luckey calls Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf “our de facto lead software brains” at the company.)
The founder is hoping for at least 50 teams, and already has interest from multiple universities, he said. Should this competition be a successful event, the plan is to expand it into races with the other types of autonomous vehicles.
“We are starting with these quadcopter racing drones, which is what people expect from drone racing. However, we want to be, in the future, applying AI racing to other platforms as well,” he said.
Underwater AI racing, ground AI racing, potentially even AI racing of spacecraft were some of the ideas Luckey shared.
The contest is open to all international excluding teams from Russia.
“The difference with Russia is they are actively engaged in the act of invading Europe,” he said.
The concern is that the people qualified to enter such a race may also be working for their nation’s military. “I would love to have everybody, but we’re not the Olympics,” he added.
Luckey said the event was following the lead from the World Cup, which has also excluded Russia.
Interestingly, teams from China (home to a lot of autonomous engineering) are welcome, despite it being the country that U.S. autonomous weapons hawks often name as their biggest fear.
Should a Chinese team win, the prize of a job at Anduril, which makes weapons used by the U.S. military, would not be a given. “If you work for the Chinese military, you’re not going to be allowed to get a job at Anduril,” Luckey said. Certain laws apply, he pointed out. In fact, there will still be some interviews and qualification process for all the job candidates.
The competition will take place across three qualifying rounds beginning in April with the final Grand Prix race scheduled for November.
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
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Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
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While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
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Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
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