Tech
Eclipse backs all-EV marketplace Ever in $31M funding round
If you want to buy or sell a used EV right now, what’s the first step you’d take?
A startup called Ever wants to be the answer to that question. The company, which bills itself as the first “AI-native, full-stack auto retail business” for electric vehicles, already has thousands of customers buying and selling their EVs on the platform.
Now it’s looking to scale with help from a $31 million Series A funding round led by Eclipse, with Ibex Investors, Lifeline Ventures, and JIMCO — the investment arm of the Saudi Arabian Jameel family (an early investor in Rivian) — as co-investors.
Over the last decade, companies like Carvana and CarMax helped usher in the digital car-buying experience. More recently, myriad startups have tried to improve the car-buying experience with AI, pitching ideas like voice agents or smarter scheduling software. Eclipse’s Jiten Behl thinks this is the wrong approach if you want to really modernize the automotive retail experience, though.
“These bolt-on AI tools are band-aids,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. He likened it to how many major automakers’ first EVs were essentially combustion vehicles that were repackaged to fit electric drivetrains. That approach came with major tradeoffs compared to designing a new EV from the ground up, which was the approach companies like Tesla and Rivian took.
“Auto retail is a perfect candidate for disrupting with AI, you know? It’s a lot of process, lot of labor, [very] rules-based,” he said.
Lasse-Mathias Nyberg, Ever co-founder and CEO, said in an interview that buying or selling a car typically triggers “hundreds or thousands of different actions” that a retailer needs to perform in order to complete the transaction. “There’s massive complexities or frictions on both sides.”
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In 2022, he and his team set out to reduce or remove those complexities. What they settled on after a year of research was a digital-first auto retailer. The core tech is an orchestration layer or “operating system” that can handle all the different workflows behind a transaction, whether it’s processing information submitted by a prospective buyer or seller, or managing the vehicle inventory.
“When you do appraisals, or pricing, or titling, it’s very deterministic in terms of what steps need to be taken. And today, there are lots of single point solution tools that are used,” he said. Most companies “use these tools together in a very inefficient manner, and you think that you are on a digital journey — but if you actually could clean-sheet it, and if you actually could use the power of agentic AI, and you can create one unified customer experience and remove all these micro-frictions.”
Nyberg claimed that building the company this way has allowed Ever’s sales team to be two to three times more productive than they would be otherwise, and he expects that to scale as the company grows. He said this extra efficiency and productivity beefs up their margins, which can be booked as profit or passed along to the customer by offering lower prices.
Ever applies this fresh approach to both its online marketplace and physical locations. Nyberg said the hybrid model is important because seeing and trying a car in person remains crucial to the shopping experience for a lot of buyers — especially those who might be assessing EVs for the first time.
Early reviews of Ever’s product have been mixed. Users on one particular Reddit thread from last year were split, with some drawn to how Ever is making EVs easier to buy, while others detailed struggles getting in touch with the startup’s team. Ever was just getting off the ground and was more or less operating in stealth, and so Nyberg chalks that up to a learning experience. He said his team is working hard to make sure its system can be flexible enough to accomplish everything the company has set out to do.
The bigger challenge may be overall interest in EVs, which has cooled a bit in the United States. Nyberg said he hasn’t ruled out Ever buying or selling used combustion cars in the future, but wants to stick to EVs in the near-term since there isn’t a retailer that is laser-focused on these vehicles.
Behl, who spent eight years on Rivian’s leadership team, admitted he’s a “hopeless romantic when it comes to EVs,” and said he still believes the industry is moving toward electric propulsion because of the inherent benefits. And he said his “first thought” when he started doing diligence on Ever was: “I wish Rivian was doing this.”
More broadly, Behl said, companies like Carvana are still in the single digits of market share when it comes to automotive retail. That’s why he sees so much upside in Ever.
“Customers are going to continue to gravitate towards better experience when it comes to buying cars, which means it is going to be a digitally-led customer experience which takes away all the friction of buying and selling a car,” he said.
Tech
Why top talent is walking away from OpenAI and xAI
AI companies have been hemorrhaging talent the past few weeks. Half of xAI’s founding team has left the company — some on their own, others through “restructuring” — while OpenAI is facing its own shakeups, from the disbanding of its mission alignment team to the firing of a policy exec who opposed its “adult mode” feature.
Watch as TechCrunch’s Equity podcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into the week’s biggest deals and departures, from billion-dollar bets on fusion and robotics to the tech exodus reshaping AI companies.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Tech
Fintech lending giant Figure confirms data breach
Figure Technology, a blockchain-based lending company, confirmed it experienced a data breach.
On Friday, Figure spokesperson Alethea Jadick told TechCrunch in a statement that the breach originated when an employee was tricked with a social engineering attack that allowed the hackers to steal “a limited number of files.”
The statement said the company is communicating “with partners and those impacted,” and offering free credit monitoring “to all individuals who receive a notice.”
Figure’s spokesperson did not respond to a series of specific questions about the breach.
The hacking group ShinyHunters took responsibility for the hack on its official dark web leak website, saying the company refused to pay a ransom, and published 2.5 gigabytes of allegedly stolen data.
TechCrunch saw a portion of the data, which included customers’ full names, home addresses, dates of birth, and phone numbers.
A member of ShinyHunters told TechCrunch that Figure was among the victims of a hacking campaign that targeted customers who rely on the single sign-on provider Okta. Other victims of the campaign include Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).
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Tech
Airbnb says a third of its customer support is now handled by AI in the US and Canada
Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it’s preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year’s time, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be handled by AI voice and chat in all the languages where it also employs a human customer service agent.
“We think this is going to be massive because not only does this reduce the cost base of Airbnb customer service, but the quality of service is going to be a huge step change,” CEO Brian Chesky said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call this week. This seems to suggest he believes the AI would do a better job than its human counterparts in resolving some issues.
The company also touted its recent hire of CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, poached from Meta for his AI expertise, and its plans to create an AI-native experience.
With his guidance, Chesky said that Airbnb was poised to introduce an app that doesn’t just search for you, but one that “knows you.”
“It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better run their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,” Chesky explained, adding that’s why Airbnb brought Al-Dahle on board.
“Ahmad is one of the world’s leading AI experts. He spent 16 years at Apple, and most recently led the generative AI team at Meta that built the Llama models. He’s an expert at pairing massive technical scale with world-class design, which is exactly how we’re going to transform the Airbnb experience,” Chesky noted.
Like other businesses poised for disruption by AI, Airbnb’s leadership is pushing the idea that it has a unique database and product that other AI chatbots can’t replicate.
“A chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million proprietary reviews, and it can’t message the hosts, which 90% of our guests do,” Chesky told analysts during the earnings call. Instead, he pitched the idea of layering AI over the Airbnb experience, which he claimed would help to accelerate growth.
The company forecast revenue growth would be in the “low double digits” this year, after pulling in $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, above estimates of $2.72 billion. This quarter, it expects revenue of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, above Wall Street forecasts of $2.53 billion.
Investors still wanted to know if AI platforms could be a risk in the long-term, assuming they moved into the short-term rentals market. Chesky, however, pushed back at that idea, saying that Airbnb isn’t just the consumer-facing app; it’s also the host app, the customer service, and the protections it offers, like insurance and user verifications.
“We’ve built this over 18 years. We handle more than $100 billion in payments through the platform,” he said.
Meanwhile, AI chatbots serve a function similar to search, in that they deliver top-of-funnel traffic, he noted. That traffic also converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google, Chesky pointed out, suggesting that the shift to AI would benefit Airbnb.
The company is already using AI to power its search, with the feature now enabled for a “very small percentage” of Airbnb’s traffic, while it experiments with making its search more conversational. Later, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings within search.
While Spotify this week told investors its best developers hadn’t written a single line of code since December, thanks to AI, Airbnb offered a more high-level metric on its own internal AI adoption. The company said that 80% of its engineers now use AI tools, and it’s working to get that to 100% soon.
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Why top talent is walking away from OpenAI and xAI
