Over cold drinks in the Florida heat, this TechCrunch reporter watched from the paddock as founders and investors — the rich and the richer — mingled in search of deals. Conversations barely paused, except for the occasional glance at the track where drivers, sealed inside multi-million-dollar machines, chased the chequered flag.

F1 weekend is a three-day affair, with the race as the finale. In between are kickoffs, soirées, cocktail parties, dinners, and nightclub takeovers — spaces where business and pleasure blur. Events like this, where wealth concentrates, have historically been places where business deals are struck. But the popularity of the F1 paddock has grown in recent years, especially among the startup and venture crowd.

“It’s a hot place for everyone with access trying to strike a deal,” one founder said, recalling being brought to the paddock by a venture firm two years ago.

This year, Chandler Malone, a founder, said he didn’t even attend the race; he only went to some of the side events. So many venture firms were hosting them and much more than usual, he said.

“You name the fund, it was someone there hosting clients,” Marell Evans, an investor, also told TechCrunch. “Lots of folks missed Milken for F1 Miami.”  

F1 teams, once sponsored by major oil, tobacco, banks, and alcohol companies, have embraced the new railroad giants. The F1 team liveries this season — plastered with AI, cloud computing, and enterprise company logos — is a literal sign pointing to where the money is.

The past five years reflects the shift. In that time, Oracle became the title sponsor of Red Bull Racing team, the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team struck a multi-year partnership with Microsoft, CoreWeave became Aston Martin Aramco’s official AI cloud partner, Anthropic began working with Williams Racing, Palantir and IBM partnered with Ferrari, AWS began providing data analytics to F1, and the audio app ElevenLabs and fintech Revolut have teamed up with Audi.

Some VC and PE firms also own stakes in F1 teams, including Dorilton Capital’s 2020 acquisition of Williams Racing and the 200 million euro investment into Alpine by backers Otro Capital, RedBird Capital Partners, and Maximum Effort Investments.

Hannan Happi, founder of the climate startup Exowatt, credits the 2020 Netflix F1 show “Drive to Survive” as a catalyst for increasing audience interest. But the tech industry showing up in force is more recent, Happi said, “really the last three or four years.” He cited all the big tech companies that have moved into the sport, including crypto and AI brands. “Where the sponsors go, the executives will follow,” he said.

A concentration of enterprise buyers

It’s no wonder, then, that TechCrunch ran into Lightspeed Ventures CMO Josh Machiz, who explained that founders and execs from many startups in its portfolio were also roaming the paddock. The goal for them, he said, was to strike some enterprise deals with other startups and tech giants.

Though TechCrunch ran into Machiz in the IBM Paddock, he said the firm actually has a structured program in place with Aston Martin to help introduce Lightspeed founders to Aston Martin and its enterprise clients. In the paddock, CIOs and CISOs stand next to CEOs, and rooms are small enough for people to actually chat with each other, Machiz said. Aston Martin, like all the F1 teams, is actively looking for ways to leverage the latest tech, as well as meet the founders behind it.

Technology has always been central to F1, helping drive advancements in consumer tech and car safety. Looking ahead is how teams stay ahead and these days, if a startup like Anthropic gets big enough, the team can nab a future sponsor, too.

Machiz calls Lightspeed the first firm to formalize this kind of partnership and said the Miami race brought in 10 portfolio companies. And it produced results, he said. One of the firm’s blockchain companies struck a handshake deal dover the weekend, and one of its AI infrastructure startups closed two more. Two came from Aston introductions, while the third came by chance, he said.

“The Aston Martin tech team also opened doors to our founders and talked about what they need from builders,” Machiz continued.

Machiz, who used to work at Redpoint, joined Lightspeed just a few months ago. One of the first things he wanted to do was to challenge the idea of the “traditional founder retreat,” where startups and their investors spend time in a remote location, talking, catching up, and, well, sometimes being bored out of their minds.

“The consistent ask from founders was always the same, ‘help me meet more buyers,’” Machiz said, recalling when he used to help plan founder retreats. “Another weekend in Sonoma was never going to do that, and the reviews were always that while [it was] nice to spend time together and to meet tech luminaries or VIP speakers, they’d have rather been building or meeting customers.”

Instead of another retreat, he took the Lightspeed Venture portfolio to F1. It is, after all, he said, “one of the densest concentrations of enterprise buyers anywhere.”

“The opportunity was obvious,” Machiz continued. “We wanted to build a structure around it, not just show up.”

Farooq Malik, founder of the Lightspeed company Rain, said he managed to close a deal, connect with another prospective client, and meet another founder whose product he’s interested in using as part of Rain’s ERP (enterprise resource planning). “This model was a lot more interactive with more organic interactions,” Malik said.

It’s not just startup founders, either. Evans, the investor, said backers are tired of going to dinner and attending conferences. “They want to see real-world experiences, and why not do it at the fastest-growing company in the world right now, F1?,” he mused.

Evans said top money makers like seeing how their business world intertwines with the tech these car teams are using.

“We’ve seen different brands showcase how they’re using AI for the drivers and some of the technology they’re using inside the cars,” he said.

‘Everyone there has capital’

Investor Immpana Srri said she went to Miami this year to look for deals and noted that over the past five years it has become a place for tech people to meet up.

“Sponsors followed, investors followed, and founders followed. Now it’s just where people are,” Srri said.

The race is actually quite fast, she said, and it’s the pre-race and post-race events that matter most over the three-day weekend. Srri flew in by herself, ran into some friends, then got an invite to the McLaren paddock and other brand activations — a micro-conference, she called it — where she met other operators, allocators, and founders.

“It’s all priced as a filter,” she said of how expensive tickets can be. “By the time you’re inside, the room has done the sorting for you. Everyone there has capital, the deal flow, or the kind of track record that justifies dropping six figures on a weekend.”  

Like Machiz, she also noted how tiny the spaces are — a pressure cooker of people quietly trying to one-up each other in conversations.

“Deals get showcased; names get dropped. Stuff gets teased. Over the weekend, I heard pitches across defense, CPG, and more,” she said.

Happi, the founder of Exowatt, said F1 champion-turned-investor Nico Rosberg stopped by the startup’s headquarters over the Miami Grand Prix weekend to see what the team was building.

Happi said F1 represents something tech also identifies with: “engineering excellence, rapid iteration, a willingness to spend big to win.”

The aesthetic of the whole sport, he continued, matches the startup world. It’s international by nature, he added, and the fact that the event usually lasts a few days gives people time to close a deal, should they wish.

“F1 is a luxury sport by nature, and that brings a certain type of person,” Happi said, adding that he’s heard of deals getting closed “in the helicopter to the hotel to the track.”

“And it doesn’t hurt that Miami and Las Vegas, suddenly two of the marquee races, are in really fun, entertainment-led cities,” he continued.

Miami kicked off the Lightspeed Aston Martin program, and Machiz hopes to continue throughout the season, at least at the U.S. races, the last of which is Las Vegas in November. Then, he wants to expand his program internationally and is planning to bring a small group of their European founders to England’s Silverstone later this year.

“In AI, distribution is speed,” he said. “The firms that win are the ones that can get founders in front of buyers and into deals faster than anyone else.”

Anthropic and xAI announced a big partnership this week, with Anthropic buying all the compute capacity at xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what the deal might mean for xAI’s parent company SpaceX, as SpaceX prepares to go public and apparently plans to dissolve xAI as a separate organization.

Kirsten did her best to offer “a positive view” on the partnership — after all, it’s a new way for xAI to make money. But she also noted that this also suggests xAI isn’t doing much when it comes to training its own frontier AI models, and it’s harder for the company to position itself as a “forward-looking, innovative” business when that’s the case.

Then Sean asked: “Why be positive when you can be cynical?” In his view, this seems like “a major heat check before the IPO.” Yes, becoming a neocloud might be “a more believable business in the near term,” but it’s less likely to get outside investors excited in the long term. (And then there’s the environmental lawsuit that xAI is facing over Colossus 1.)

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Sean O’Kane: I always love a surprise, especially when everybody’s eyes [are] on another ball, a major trial that’s happening. Seemingly out of nowhere this week, SpaceX and therefore its AI subsidiary xAI — which apparently no longer exists now, or is imminently not about to exist, which we can get to — struck a deal with Anthropic.

Basically, the real version of the deal is that Anthropic’s essentially taking over all of the compute at the data center known as Colossus 1 in Memphis, Tennessee, to focus on Anthropic’s more enterprise-focused AI products. There’s been a lot of reporting about how [Anthropic’s] been looking for more compute […] and it seems like an escape valve for them to be able to strike this deal and get access to all this compute.

In the near term, for xAI and for SpaceX, yes, they are a neocloud now, in the sense that they had to do something with all this compute that they were building, because it certainly seems like they were not going to need it for Grok — which, outside of X, is not burning up the world as far as becoming the new hot consumer chat bot.

Kirsten Korosec: And we should say that in terms of what a neocloud is, for those who don’t know, this is the idea of buying GPUs from Nvidia and the like, and renting those out as opposed to using those for their own AI, training their own AI models.

So this is a different kind of business, and the point that our AI editor, Russell Brandom, makes is that a lot of companies are building out data centers, but if given a choice between, do they rent them out [or using them to train their own models], they are still prioritizing using this compute for their own internal AI model training. I think that’s an important point and one that suggests that maybe xAI isn’t doing so much on the AI model training [side]

Anthony Ha: Right, and as Sean was alluding to, most people would not necessarily think of Grok as — not only that it’s known for some pretty unpleasant, if not downright illegal, content, but also it’s not necessarily super cutting edge. Especially if we start talking about enterprise AI, which I know we’re gonna be getting into later in this episode, you don’t hear a lot about people using Grok for work-critical tasks. 

And so the question becomes: How can xAI actually make money? And apparently just selling the infrastructure could be one of the main ways to do it.

Kirsten: And you could take a positive view on that, right? They figured out a way to make money. But I think that when you are positioning your company — in this case, SpaceX-slash-xAI — as a forward-looking, innovative company, that’s tougher to sell if you are simply just renting out your GPUs and not using them for that innovation.

Sean: But why be positive when you can be cynical? Which is to say that this seems like a major heat check before the IPO that we’re about to see get rammed into the markets with SpaceX.

Anthony, you mentioned not only is Grok not being used for big enterprise tasks, there’s been reporting that xAI employees were using other models, they weren’t even using [Grok] internally, and that caused this big shakeup inside of xAI, post acquisition from SpaceX, that involved essentially all the co-founders leaving other than Elon Musk, [and] him basically saying he’s starting from scratch on xAI, despite the fact that SpaceX paid $250 billion for it in the run up to this mega-IPO. 

And now he’s saying that they’re going to dissolve xAI as a separate entity inside SpaceX altogether. He’s starting to call the whole thing SpaceXAI, because this man loves nothing but to ruin a brand that has some value to it — see Twitter.

This may be a more believable business in the near term, and so on some level, I could see this being maybe more attractive to investors come IPO time, because it’s like a bit more reliable and certainly more real than them being a frontier lab developer. But it’s also not the kind of business that’s going to draw the same — at least, in a normal environment — outside investment that we’re seeing go into all the frontier labs.

That’s maybe one of the biggest tension points we’ve seen develop during this IPO process.

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!

After years of hints and preparation, the Uber-backed electric bike and scooter rental startup Lime filed for an initial public offering. A micromobility company going public? In 2026? Surely it’s the wrong year. 

Lime CEO Wayne Ting has been talking about an IPO for years. TechCrunch spoke to him about it in 2020, 2021, and 2023. It never materialized and I sort of forgot about it, until — boom — the S-1 doc, the registration statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, posted early Friday morning. 

There are some interesting risk factors in the S-1, although we still are waiting for Lime to share terms of the offering.

Revenue is climbing, it has positive free cash flow, and net losses narrowed after 2023, although there has been a slight uptick between 2024 and 2025. Uber, which invested in Lime several years ago, still plays an important role for the company. Lime said about 14.3% of its revenue came through its partnership with Uber, which allows customers to find and rent scooters and e-bikes through its app.

All of this suggests Lime is a growth company headed toward profitability. But there is one substantial headwind. Lime has about $1 billion in current liabilities, and about $675.8 million of that is due by the end of 2026. In all, about $846 million is due within 12 months. Lime does not have sufficient liquidity to pay that, according to its filing. Lime states it plainly in the S-1: If it can’t go public and raise the necessary capital, or change its debt agreements, it may not be able to continue operating as a business.

Senior reporter Sean O’Kane, who likes digging through an S-1 as much as I do, spotted some other tidbits in the risk factors. Investment by cities in their public road infrastructure is a risk factor, according to the company. Lime specifically lists potholes, which made me chuckle and then nod in agreement. Potholes are not kind to shared scooters. 

Lime also warned that a significant portion of rides are concentrated in a relatively small number of markets in which it operates. One such market, which accounted for 22.2% of its revenue in 2025, is the U.K. 

A little bird

Last summer, Uber announced a plan to launch a premium robotaxi service using Lucid Gravity vehicles equipped with Nuro’s autonomous vehicle technology. This is more than a collaboration. Uber said it would invest $300 million in Lucid and would separately buy “at least” 20,000 of the EV maker’s new Gravity SUV over the next six years. Uber recently raised its investment in Lucid to $500 million and pushed the vehicle order to 35,000. 

The details about Uber’s investment in Nuro, a privately held startup based in Silicon Valley, have been slim — until now. At the time, we only knew that Uber invested an undisclosed “multi-hundred-million-dollar” amount into Nuro. One little bird has shared more details. 

Uber’s total financial commitment to Nuro, which includes its participation in the startup’s Series E round last year and future milestone-based investments, is nearly $500 million, per a source familiar with the deal. 

My educated guess is that Nuro just unlocked one of those milestones. The company is testing the Lucid vehicles in autonomous mode with a human safety operator in the driver’s seat. And last month it expanded testing to allow Uber employees to request an autonomous ride in a Lucid robotaxi with a human safety operator still on board. But the company just received two critical permits — a driverless testing permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles and a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission.

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!

Kodiak AI’s first-quarter earnings offers a case study for how challenging it is to commercialize frontier tech. The company announced a number of deals that showed progress. It locked in a commercial contract with Roehl; launched a pilot program to test Kodiak-equipped autonomous trucks at West Fraser Timber Co.’s log-hauling operations in Alberta, Canada; and announced a collaboration with the military vehicle maker General Dynamics Land Systems to create autonomous ground vehicles for defense applications.

But investors were not happy with the terms of its $100 million capital raise. The company sold shares at $6.50 each — a steep discount from its closing share price of $9.10. The raise also included warrants — instruments that give investors the right to buy additional shares later at a set price, in this case as low as $6.

The financing came from existing backer Ares Management and several unnamed institutional investors.

Kodiak’s stock price fell 37% in after-hours trading moments after the financing and Q1 earnings were released. Shares have recovered a bit since, perhaps as shareholders digested the news and looked at it from a glass-half-full perspective.

Kodiak will likely need more capital as it continues to burn cash as it pushes toward its big goal: driverless trucking operations on public highways.

Other deals that got my attention this week …

Moment Energy, a startup that’s developed a novel approach to repurposing EV batteries, raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Canadian VC firm Evok Innovations, with additional funding from grocery retailer fund W23, joining existing investors like Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund and In-Q-Tel, the CIA-funded VC firm.

Rocsys, a startup that has developed hands-free depot solutions for autonomous electric vehicles, raised $13 million in an extended Series A round led by Capricorn Partners, with participation from Scania Invest, Forward.One, SEB Greentech Venture Capital, and Graduate Venture.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Aurora has started hauling loads in driverless trucks in Texas for distribution giant McLane. The commercial contract shows some progress by the self-driving trucks company. Disclaimer: These driverless trucks still have human observers in the cab, and the company tells us they cannot operate the vehicle. 

Lucid’s first-quarter earnings revealed a company still feeling the effects of a supplier issue earlier this year that caused it to recall its Gravity SUV and pause deliveries. The company, which is also going through a leadership transition, changed its guidance and said it was no longer sure how many EVs it will build or sell this year. 

In 2024, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration updated the New Car Assessment Program and added four new pass-fail tests to assess the performance of advanced assistance systems, starting in 2026. And we’re finally seeing the results. The later-release 2026 Tesla Model Y is the first vehicle to meet the agency’s new benchmark.

Ouster is launching a new lineup of color lidar sensors that CEO Angus Pacala believes will replace cameras.

EV startup Slate has lost a notable board member. The head of Jeff Bezos’ family office left the board, according to numerous state filings reviewed by TechCrunch.

Volkswagen is now Rivian’s largest shareholder, pushing Amazon out of the top spot.

One more thing …

Well, maybe two more. 

Senior reporter Rebecca Bellan interviewed Aurora founder and CEO Chris Urmson recently for the Equity podcast. Listen to the episode here. 

And, finally, we had a poll last week! Here was what I posed to readers: “The California DMV issued new rules for AVs. Self-driving trucks can now test and deploy in the state. Reporting, data collection, and operations requirements have been expanded and law enforcement can issue traffic violations. These rules: go too far, hit the mark, or aren’t restrictive enough.” 

About 41% picked “hit the mark,” while 27.6% said the rules go too far, and 31% said they aren’t restrictive enough.

To participate in our polls, sign up to get the Mobility newsletter in your inbox!

Over cold drinks in the Florida heat, this TechCrunch reporter watched from the paddock as founders and investors — the rich and the richer — mingled in search of deals. Conversations barely paused, except for the occasional glance at the track where drivers, sealed inside multi-million-dollar machines, chased the chequered flag.

F1 weekend is a three-day affair, with the race as the finale. In between are kickoffs, soirées, cocktail parties, dinners, and nightclub takeovers — spaces where business and pleasure blur. Events like this, where wealth concentrates, have historically been places where business deals are struck. But the popularity of the F1 paddock has grown in recent years, especially among the startup and venture crowd.

“It’s a hot place for everyone with access trying to strike a deal,” one founder said, recalling being brought to the paddock by a venture firm two years ago.

This year, Chandler Malone, a founder, said he didn’t even attend the race; he only went to some of the side events. So many venture firms were hosting them and much more than usual, he said.

“You name the fund, it was someone there hosting clients,” Marell Evans, an investor, also told TechCrunch. “Lots of folks missed Milken for F1 Miami.”  

F1 teams, once sponsored by major oil, tobacco, banks, and alcohol companies, have embraced the new railroad giants. The F1 team liveries this season — plastered with AI, cloud computing, and enterprise company logos — is a literal sign pointing to where the money is.

The past five years reflects the shift. In that time, Oracle became the title sponsor of Red Bull Racing team, the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team struck a multi-year partnership with Microsoft, CoreWeave became Aston Martin Aramco’s official AI cloud partner, Anthropic began working with Williams Racing, Palantir and IBM partnered with Ferrari, AWS began providing data analytics to F1, and the audio app ElevenLabs and fintech Revolut have teamed up with Audi.

Some VC and PE firms also own stakes in F1 teams, including Dorilton Capital’s 2020 acquisition of Williams Racing and the 200 million euro investment into Alpine by backers Otro Capital, RedBird Capital Partners, and Maximum Effort Investments.

Hannan Happi, founder of the climate startup Exowatt, credits the 2020 Netflix F1 show “Drive to Survive” as a catalyst for increasing audience interest. But the tech industry showing up in force is more recent, Happi said, “really the last three or four years.” He cited all the big tech companies that have moved into the sport, including crypto and AI brands. “Where the sponsors go, the executives will follow,” he said.

A concentration of enterprise buyers

It’s no wonder, then, that TechCrunch ran into Lightspeed Ventures CMO Josh Machiz, who explained that founders and execs from many startups in its portfolio were also roaming the paddock. The goal for them, he said, was to strike some enterprise deals with other startups and tech giants.

Though TechCrunch ran into Machiz in the IBM Paddock, he said the firm actually has a structured program in place with Aston Martin to help introduce Lightspeed founders to Aston Martin and its enterprise clients. In the paddock, CIOs and CISOs stand next to CEOs, and rooms are small enough for people to actually chat with each other, Machiz said. Aston Martin, like all the F1 teams, is actively looking for ways to leverage the latest tech, as well as meet the founders behind it.

Technology has always been central to F1, helping drive advancements in consumer tech and car safety. Looking ahead is how teams stay ahead and these days, if a startup like Anthropic gets big enough, the team can nab a future sponsor, too.

Machiz calls Lightspeed the first firm to formalize this kind of partnership and said the Miami race brought in 10 portfolio companies. And it produced results, he said. One of the firm’s blockchain companies struck a handshake deal dover the weekend, and one of its AI infrastructure startups closed two more. Two came from Aston introductions, while the third came by chance, he said.

“The Aston Martin tech team also opened doors to our founders and talked about what they need from builders,” Machiz continued.

Machiz, who used to work at Redpoint, joined Lightspeed just a few months ago. One of the first things he wanted to do was to challenge the idea of the “traditional founder retreat,” where startups and their investors spend time in a remote location, talking, catching up, and, well, sometimes being bored out of their minds.

“The consistent ask from founders was always the same, ‘help me meet more buyers,’” Machiz said, recalling when he used to help plan founder retreats. “Another weekend in Sonoma was never going to do that, and the reviews were always that while [it was] nice to spend time together and to meet tech luminaries or VIP speakers, they’d have rather been building or meeting customers.”

Instead of another retreat, he took the Lightspeed Venture portfolio to F1. It is, after all, he said, “one of the densest concentrations of enterprise buyers anywhere.”

“The opportunity was obvious,” Machiz continued. “We wanted to build a structure around it, not just show up.”

Farooq Malik, founder of the Lightspeed company Rain, said he managed to close a deal, connect with another prospective client, and meet another founder whose product he’s interested in using as part of Rain’s ERP (enterprise resource planning). “This model was a lot more interactive with more organic interactions,” Malik said.

It’s not just startup founders, either. Evans, the investor, said backers are tired of going to dinner and attending conferences. “They want to see real-world experiences, and why not do it at the fastest-growing company in the world right now, F1?,” he mused.

Evans said top money makers like seeing how their business world intertwines with the tech these car teams are using.

“We’ve seen different brands showcase how they’re using AI for the drivers and some of the technology they’re using inside the cars,” he said.

‘Everyone there has capital’

Investor Immpana Srri said she went to Miami this year to look for deals and noted that over the past five years it has become a place for tech people to meet up.

“Sponsors followed, investors followed, and founders followed. Now it’s just where people are,” Srri said.

The race is actually quite fast, she said, and it’s the pre-race and post-race events that matter most over the three-day weekend. Srri flew in by herself, ran into some friends, then got an invite to the McLaren paddock and other brand activations — a micro-conference, she called it — where she met other operators, allocators, and founders.

“It’s all priced as a filter,” she said of how expensive tickets can be. “By the time you’re inside, the room has done the sorting for you. Everyone there has capital, the deal flow, or the kind of track record that justifies dropping six figures on a weekend.”  

Like Machiz, she also noted how tiny the spaces are — a pressure cooker of people quietly trying to one-up each other in conversations.

“Deals get showcased; names get dropped. Stuff gets teased. Over the weekend, I heard pitches across defense, CPG, and more,” she said.

Happi, the founder of Exowatt, said F1 champion-turned-investor Nico Rosberg stopped by the startup’s headquarters over the Miami Grand Prix weekend to see what the team was building.

Happi said F1 represents something tech also identifies with: “engineering excellence, rapid iteration, a willingness to spend big to win.”

The aesthetic of the whole sport, he continued, matches the startup world. It’s international by nature, he added, and the fact that the event usually lasts a few days gives people time to close a deal, should they wish.

“F1 is a luxury sport by nature, and that brings a certain type of person,” Happi said, adding that he’s heard of deals getting closed “in the helicopter to the hotel to the track.”

“And it doesn’t hurt that Miami and Las Vegas, suddenly two of the marquee races, are in really fun, entertainment-led cities,” he continued.

Miami kicked off the Lightspeed Aston Martin program, and Machiz hopes to continue throughout the season, at least at the U.S. races, the last of which is Las Vegas in November. Then, he wants to expand his program internationally and is planning to bring a small group of their European founders to England’s Silverstone later this year.

“In AI, distribution is speed,” he said. “The firms that win are the ones that can get founders in front of buyers and into deals faster than anyone else.”

Anthropic and xAI announced a big partnership this week, with Anthropic buying all the compute capacity at xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what the deal might mean for xAI’s parent company SpaceX, as SpaceX prepares to go public and apparently plans to dissolve xAI as a separate organization.

Kirsten did her best to offer “a positive view” on the partnership — after all, it’s a new way for xAI to make money. But she also noted that this also suggests xAI isn’t doing much when it comes to training its own frontier AI models, and it’s harder for the company to position itself as a “forward-looking, innovative” business when that’s the case.

Then Sean asked: “Why be positive when you can be cynical?” In his view, this seems like “a major heat check before the IPO.” Yes, becoming a neocloud might be “a more believable business in the near term,” but it’s less likely to get outside investors excited in the long term. (And then there’s the environmental lawsuit that xAI is facing over Colossus 1.)

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Sean O’Kane: I always love a surprise, especially when everybody’s eyes [are] on another ball, a major trial that’s happening. Seemingly out of nowhere this week, SpaceX and therefore its AI subsidiary xAI — which apparently no longer exists now, or is imminently not about to exist, which we can get to — struck a deal with Anthropic.

Basically, the real version of the deal is that Anthropic’s essentially taking over all of the compute at the data center known as Colossus 1 in Memphis, Tennessee, to focus on Anthropic’s more enterprise-focused AI products. There’s been a lot of reporting about how [Anthropic’s] been looking for more compute […] and it seems like an escape valve for them to be able to strike this deal and get access to all this compute.

In the near term, for xAI and for SpaceX, yes, they are a neocloud now, in the sense that they had to do something with all this compute that they were building, because it certainly seems like they were not going to need it for Grok — which, outside of X, is not burning up the world as far as becoming the new hot consumer chat bot.

Kirsten Korosec: And we should say that in terms of what a neocloud is, for those who don’t know, this is the idea of buying GPUs from Nvidia and the like, and renting those out as opposed to using those for their own AI, training their own AI models.

So this is a different kind of business, and the point that our AI editor, Russell Brandom, makes is that a lot of companies are building out data centers, but if given a choice between, do they rent them out [or using them to train their own models], they are still prioritizing using this compute for their own internal AI model training. I think that’s an important point and one that suggests that maybe xAI isn’t doing so much on the AI model training [side]

Anthony Ha: Right, and as Sean was alluding to, most people would not necessarily think of Grok as — not only that it’s known for some pretty unpleasant, if not downright illegal, content, but also it’s not necessarily super cutting edge. Especially if we start talking about enterprise AI, which I know we’re gonna be getting into later in this episode, you don’t hear a lot about people using Grok for work-critical tasks. 

And so the question becomes: How can xAI actually make money? And apparently just selling the infrastructure could be one of the main ways to do it.

Kirsten: And you could take a positive view on that, right? They figured out a way to make money. But I think that when you are positioning your company — in this case, SpaceX-slash-xAI — as a forward-looking, innovative company, that’s tougher to sell if you are simply just renting out your GPUs and not using them for that innovation.

Sean: But why be positive when you can be cynical? Which is to say that this seems like a major heat check before the IPO that we’re about to see get rammed into the markets with SpaceX.

Anthony, you mentioned not only is Grok not being used for big enterprise tasks, there’s been reporting that xAI employees were using other models, they weren’t even using [Grok] internally, and that caused this big shakeup inside of xAI, post acquisition from SpaceX, that involved essentially all the co-founders leaving other than Elon Musk, [and] him basically saying he’s starting from scratch on xAI, despite the fact that SpaceX paid $250 billion for it in the run up to this mega-IPO. 

And now he’s saying that they’re going to dissolve xAI as a separate entity inside SpaceX altogether. He’s starting to call the whole thing SpaceXAI, because this man loves nothing but to ruin a brand that has some value to it — see Twitter.

This may be a more believable business in the near term, and so on some level, I could see this being maybe more attractive to investors come IPO time, because it’s like a bit more reliable and certainly more real than them being a frontier lab developer. But it’s also not the kind of business that’s going to draw the same — at least, in a normal environment — outside investment that we’re seeing go into all the frontier labs.

That’s maybe one of the biggest tension points we’ve seen develop during this IPO process.

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!

After years of hints and preparation, the Uber-backed electric bike and scooter rental startup Lime filed for an initial public offering. A micromobility company going public? In 2026? Surely it’s the wrong year. 

Lime CEO Wayne Ting has been talking about an IPO for years. TechCrunch spoke to him about it in 2020, 2021, and 2023. It never materialized and I sort of forgot about it, until — boom — the S-1 doc, the registration statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, posted early Friday morning. 

There are some interesting risk factors in the S-1, although we still are waiting for Lime to share terms of the offering.

Revenue is climbing, it has positive free cash flow, and net losses narrowed after 2023, although there has been a slight uptick between 2024 and 2025. Uber, which invested in Lime several years ago, still plays an important role for the company. Lime said about 14.3% of its revenue came through its partnership with Uber, which allows customers to find and rent scooters and e-bikes through its app.

All of this suggests Lime is a growth company headed toward profitability. But there is one substantial headwind. Lime has about $1 billion in current liabilities, and about $675.8 million of that is due by the end of 2026. In all, about $846 million is due within 12 months. Lime does not have sufficient liquidity to pay that, according to its filing. Lime states it plainly in the S-1: If it can’t go public and raise the necessary capital, or change its debt agreements, it may not be able to continue operating as a business.

Senior reporter Sean O’Kane, who likes digging through an S-1 as much as I do, spotted some other tidbits in the risk factors. Investment by cities in their public road infrastructure is a risk factor, according to the company. Lime specifically lists potholes, which made me chuckle and then nod in agreement. Potholes are not kind to shared scooters. 

Lime also warned that a significant portion of rides are concentrated in a relatively small number of markets in which it operates. One such market, which accounted for 22.2% of its revenue in 2025, is the U.K. 

A little bird

Last summer, Uber announced a plan to launch a premium robotaxi service using Lucid Gravity vehicles equipped with Nuro’s autonomous vehicle technology. This is more than a collaboration. Uber said it would invest $300 million in Lucid and would separately buy “at least” 20,000 of the EV maker’s new Gravity SUV over the next six years. Uber recently raised its investment in Lucid to $500 million and pushed the vehicle order to 35,000. 

The details about Uber’s investment in Nuro, a privately held startup based in Silicon Valley, have been slim — until now. At the time, we only knew that Uber invested an undisclosed “multi-hundred-million-dollar” amount into Nuro. One little bird has shared more details. 

Uber’s total financial commitment to Nuro, which includes its participation in the startup’s Series E round last year and future milestone-based investments, is nearly $500 million, per a source familiar with the deal. 

My educated guess is that Nuro just unlocked one of those milestones. The company is testing the Lucid vehicles in autonomous mode with a human safety operator in the driver’s seat. And last month it expanded testing to allow Uber employees to request an autonomous ride in a Lucid robotaxi with a human safety operator still on board. But the company just received two critical permits — a driverless testing permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles and a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission.

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!

Kodiak AI’s first-quarter earnings offers a case study for how challenging it is to commercialize frontier tech. The company announced a number of deals that showed progress. It locked in a commercial contract with Roehl; launched a pilot program to test Kodiak-equipped autonomous trucks at West Fraser Timber Co.’s log-hauling operations in Alberta, Canada; and announced a collaboration with the military vehicle maker General Dynamics Land Systems to create autonomous ground vehicles for defense applications.

But investors were not happy with the terms of its $100 million capital raise. The company sold shares at $6.50 each — a steep discount from its closing share price of $9.10. The raise also included warrants — instruments that give investors the right to buy additional shares later at a set price, in this case as low as $6.

The financing came from existing backer Ares Management and several unnamed institutional investors.

Kodiak’s stock price fell 37% in after-hours trading moments after the financing and Q1 earnings were released. Shares have recovered a bit since, perhaps as shareholders digested the news and looked at it from a glass-half-full perspective.

Kodiak will likely need more capital as it continues to burn cash as it pushes toward its big goal: driverless trucking operations on public highways.

Other deals that got my attention this week …

Moment Energy, a startup that’s developed a novel approach to repurposing EV batteries, raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Canadian VC firm Evok Innovations, with additional funding from grocery retailer fund W23, joining existing investors like Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund and In-Q-Tel, the CIA-funded VC firm.

Rocsys, a startup that has developed hands-free depot solutions for autonomous electric vehicles, raised $13 million in an extended Series A round led by Capricorn Partners, with participation from Scania Invest, Forward.One, SEB Greentech Venture Capital, and Graduate Venture.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Aurora has started hauling loads in driverless trucks in Texas for distribution giant McLane. The commercial contract shows some progress by the self-driving trucks company. Disclaimer: These driverless trucks still have human observers in the cab, and the company tells us they cannot operate the vehicle. 

Lucid’s first-quarter earnings revealed a company still feeling the effects of a supplier issue earlier this year that caused it to recall its Gravity SUV and pause deliveries. The company, which is also going through a leadership transition, changed its guidance and said it was no longer sure how many EVs it will build or sell this year. 

In 2024, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration updated the New Car Assessment Program and added four new pass-fail tests to assess the performance of advanced assistance systems, starting in 2026. And we’re finally seeing the results. The later-release 2026 Tesla Model Y is the first vehicle to meet the agency’s new benchmark.

Ouster is launching a new lineup of color lidar sensors that CEO Angus Pacala believes will replace cameras.

EV startup Slate has lost a notable board member. The head of Jeff Bezos’ family office left the board, according to numerous state filings reviewed by TechCrunch.

Volkswagen is now Rivian’s largest shareholder, pushing Amazon out of the top spot.

One more thing …

Well, maybe two more. 

Senior reporter Rebecca Bellan interviewed Aurora founder and CEO Chris Urmson recently for the Equity podcast. Listen to the episode here. 

And, finally, we had a poll last week! Here was what I posed to readers: “The California DMV issued new rules for AVs. Self-driving trucks can now test and deploy in the state. Reporting, data collection, and operations requirements have been expanded and law enforcement can issue traffic violations. These rules: go too far, hit the mark, or aren’t restrictive enough.” 

About 41% picked “hit the mark,” while 27.6% said the rules go too far, and 31% said they aren’t restrictive enough.

To participate in our polls, sign up to get the Mobility newsletter in your inbox!