Tech
Prince Andrew advisor pitched Jeffrey Epstein on investing in EV startups like Lucid Motors
Electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors was scrambling to raise a Series D funding round in 2017. It had courted Ford as a potential investor, but Jia Yueting, the founder of rival EV startup Faraday Future, had quietly amassed around a 30% stake and was essentially blocking new investors.
David Stern, a mysterious businessman and close advisor to former Prince Andrew, saw an opportunity to break the logjam: bring in Jeffrey Epstein.
“Ford will likely be lead in $400m Series D in Lucid. Big strategic move,” Stern wrote to Epstein in emails released last week as part of the Department of Justice’s latest disclosure of 3 million documents related to Epstein. Jia “has massive cash issues” at Faraday, he wrote, and needs to “sell now to make payroll for his other business.”
It wasn’t the first EV startup Stern pitched Epstein, and it wouldn’t be the last, according to hundreds of documents reviewed by TechCrunch.
At the time, legacy automakers and newly minted startups, fueled by the breakthrough success of Tesla and progress by Google’s self-driving project, were jumping into electric and autonomous vehicles. And Stern was apparently hungry to take advantage of the resulting deal flow. The documents show he also pitched investments in Faraday Future and in another EV startup, Canoo.
It’s unlikely Epstein invested in any of them. Lucid didn’t close its Series D until late 2018, when it raised more than $1 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Faraday ultimately received a major investment from Chinese real estate conglomerate Evergrande in late 2017. Epstein said in a 2018 message included in the Justice Department’s files that he had no “direct” or “indirect” interest in Canoo.
These discussions instead provide greater insight into the many connections Epstein, a convicted sex offender, had to Silicon Valley startups up until his arrest and death in 2019. They also provide a snapshot of a relationship that has not been explored in previous reporting.
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By the time of the Lucid emails, Epstein and Stern had been working together closely for nearly a decade, the newly released documents show. To Epstein, Stern was “my china contact.” To Stern, Epstein was “my mentor, and I do what he tells me.”
A ‘ghost’ of a businessman
Stern is a mostly digital ghost with little information available about him on the internet prior to the release of the files.
He is perhaps best known as the director of Prince Andrew’s Pitch@Palace startup contest, which ran for a few years until Andrew’s connections to Epstein were exposed. Andrew even referred to Stern as a “ghost” in one 2010 email.
Stern appears to have first approached Epstein in 2008, according to the emails released by the DOJ — just one month before the financier pled guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida. Stern was creating a fund, called AGC Capital, to take advantage of the economic boom in China, and he wanted Epstein to invest.
It’s not clear how Stern was introduced to Epstein. Stern did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this article.
Stern, who is German, attended the University of London and Shi-Da University in China in the late 1990s, and served as chairman of China Millennium Capital, the Chinese arm of Millennium Capital Partners, according to the bio section of the AGC Capital pitch deck, which is in the DOJ’s files.
Stern also worked for Siemens, negotiating “industrial Joint Ventures with Chinese State Owned enterprises,” before joining the Shanghai office of Deutsche Bank. He started a company called Asia Gateway in 2001 that “advised blue chip companies, Chinese enterprises as well as the Chinese government in growth strategies and investments.”
These jobs appear to have helped Stern make connections with powerful and wealthy Chinese businessmen, including Li Botan — the son-in-law of the fourth-most senior leader in China under Xi Jinping’s predecessor Hu Jintao. (Li would eventually go on to become a founding investor in Canoo with Stern.)
It’s not clear if Epstein invested in AGC Capital; the financier spent the next year serving his sentence. But Stern and Epstein remained in touch, and in 2009 Stern started pitching other ideas.
The documents reveal a relationship that starts off formal and terse, with Epstein at one point excoriating Stern for not having properly prepared a potential business deal.
“[I]f you want to do real deals you have to be precise and careful„ every error is a fortune,” Epstein wrote. “[Y]our first grade is an F.”
One of the first big projects the two men collaborated on was helping the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, with her miserable finances, according to the emails.
The relationship deepened over the following decade. The two men got close enough that Stern felt comfortable asking Epstein in 2016 to become the godfather of one of his children. (Epstein wrote that he was “flattered” but declined because he “made a promise to my goddaughter that I would not be godfather to anyone else.”)
It’s hard to say how fruitful the relationship was on the business side. But between 2009 and 2019, Stern brought Epstein a number of potential deals across various industries.
Early on, he seemed dead set on starting a “secret” new fund with Epstein to invest in Chinese businesses together, which he referred to as JEDS — the two men’s initials combined. (It was also referred to in some emails as “Serpentine Group.”) Stern later pitched buying farmland in Russia, suggested purchasing the news organization Al Jazeera and taking it public, discussed buying troubled music publisher EMI, and considered acquiring an apparently distressed (and unnamed) undersea cable company.
They also had their eyes on banks. Stern and Epstein attempted to buy Luxembourg-headquartered private bank Sal. Oppenheim, the emails show. In 2016, they even discussed a buyout of Deutsche Bank, which had for years transacted with Epstein.
Stern repeatedly flaunted his connections with high-profile businessmen and politicians in his emails to Epstein and his other contacts. In February 2012, Stern suggested Epstein introduce Jes Staley — the head of J.P. Morgan’s investment bank at the time — to Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim.
“I know Anwar well,” Stern wrote. “If he becomes prime minister of malayisa [Staley] will clean up and it could be a gold mine for JPM.” (Ibrahim lost a contested election in 2013 but became prime minister in 2022.)
Stern also claimed to have had dinner with Jack Ma, had a planned meeting “alone” with UAE president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and said he was “friends” with the grandson of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.
Going electric
By 2017, Stern was apparently eyeing the rush to build new mobility companies.
He tried to get Epstein to meet Faraday Future founder Jia to discuss an investment. It’s not clear if that ever happened; the company and Jia did not respond to requests for comment.
But former BMW and Deutsche Bank CFO Stefan Krause, who had been brought in to save Faraday Future, made a direct appeal to Epstein in April 2017.
“Faraday Future (FF) is a great story in itself, regretfully surrounded by a lot of noise around Jia Yueting (YT) and his other enterprises (LeEco, LeMall, LeSports, to name a few). These businesses are not working, so he run out of cash. FF is starving,” Krause wrote to Epstein. “Great chance to build a better Tesla.”
(Krause is described as a “friend” and a business partner of Stern’s in the documents. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
It appears those conversations petered out. Soon after, Stern suggested the Lucid Motors investment.
In May 2017, a pitch deck landed in Epstein’s inbox. It was put together by a fund called Monstera that Stern had created. “Monstera can gain a 32% shareholding in Lucid through the acquisition of the stake currently controlled by Yueting Jia,” one slide reads. Other emails show that Stern expected to spend around $300 million to acquire the 32% stake.
He referred to it as a “fire sale” in emails. Monstera could either hold the position or “[o]ffload” it “when Ford comes in.”
Ford ultimately pulled out, and Lucid had to wait to close its Series D until August 2018, when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund invested more than $1 billion. (SEC filings show the Saudi sovereign wealth fund repurchased Jia’s shares over the next few years. Lucid did not respond to a request for comment.)
When Krause left Faraday Future to start a new EV company in late 2017 — first called Evelozcity and later, Canoo — Stern was one of the original backers. He contributed just $1 million alongside larger sums from Li, the CCP-connected Chinese businessman, and Michael Chiang, a billionaire who runs Taiwanese electronics giant TPK. (Li’s involvement later triggered a national security review when Canoo went public in 2020.)
In June 2018, Stern sent Epstein a document about the startup, to which Epstein responded: “fun.”
But Epstein never invested in Canoo, either. He did, however, pitch powerful people on Stern’s behalf. Epstein emailed Deepak Chopra in May 2018 and told the self-help guru that “david has a new electric car co in los angeles.” He told Chopra “they are going to build the next gen health sensors into the car. you guys should talk.”
In June 2019, Epstein sent a message to Eduardo Teodorani, an Italian businessman who is a senior vice president of agriculture machinery giant CNH. “My friend David stern… has a electric car co that I think you should explore before he sells it to another co,” Epstein wrote. Epstein also connected Stern with Sheikh Jabor al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, on June 29 so he could “hear more about your car co.”
One week after he sent that message, Epstein was arrested. He died in prison a month later.
It’s not clear when Stern last spoke to Epstein. But in March 2019, he forwarded a story to Epstein titled: “Warren Buffet: Electric Cars Are Very Much in America’s Future.” In the body of the email, Stern wrote: “How do we get him ??”
Tech
Marc Lore says that AI will soon enable anyone open a restaurant
Marc Lore, the veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans to infuse AI into his current venture, Wonder.
The centerpiece of those plans is Wonder Create, an initiative that would let anyone — from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers — use AI to design and launch their own restaurant brand in under a minute. The virtual restaurant would then go live across Wonder’s growing network of tech-enabled kitchen locations, currently numbering 120 and expected to reach 400 next year.
Lore’s startup, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has evolved from food trucks to fast casual restaurants with 10 to 20 seats. These are not normal restaurants, though; they are “programmable cooking platforms” capable of operating as 25 different types of restaurants based on cuisine, within their all-electric kitchens that are increasingly becoming robotic.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Lore said these kitchens have a 700-ingredient library. The “restaurants” they house actually consist of many different brands that operate from within these locations.
In addition to a staff of up to 12 people in these kitchens, cooking tech, like conveyors and robotic arms, are involved in the cooking process. The company also just bought Spice Robotics, a maker of an automatic bowl-making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, it plans to offer an “infinite sauce machine” that can make bout 80% of all the sauces found in recipes on the internet today.
Wonder Create was announced earlier this year as a way for anyone to use Wonder’s software to launch their own restaurant brand and recipes.
Lore offered more details as how this would work by leveraging AI technology, describing the plan as something like a “Shopify front-end with an AI prompt.”
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“You type in what kind of restaurant you want to build. It builds the restaurant — AI does — in under a minute. It does the name, branding, description, pictures, pricing, health information, and all the recipes for your restaurant,” Lore explained during an interview at the WSJ event. The would-be restaurateur could then refine the prompt if changes were needed. When ready to go live, the restaurant would launch across all of Wonder’s locations.
The company currently has 120 of these “programmable cooking platforms” in operation, a number that’s expected to grow to 400 next year. As it adds robotics to the equation, the company won’t necessarily reduce headcount, Lore noted. Instead, it will increase the number of meals a kitchen can produce in a given period.
“We have about 7 million throughput capacity with 12 people,” he said. “We see a path to getting to 20 million throughput out of 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. The goal also is…I guess by 2035, to have 1,000 unique restaurants operating out of the 2,500 square feet,” Lore added.
The goal with these AI-created “restaurants” is to allow people to experiment with food in new ways. A restaurateur could test recipes to gauge customer reaction before adding dishes to his own brick-and-mortar locations, for example.
Lore sees other use cases for the platform, too, like letting influencers connect with their audience through their own “restaurant” brands without having to actually launch their own chains.
“It could be a mega-influencer, a micro-influencer — anyone that wants to monetize their following,” Lore said. “Or it could be a private trainer that wants to make specific bowls. It could be a not-for-profit. It could be Disney for [marketing] their new movie. Anybody can make a restaurant.”
Whether that many people actually want to is an open question. Ghost kitchens — a similar concept that promised to let brands sell food without owning a restaurant — had a rocky run in the early 2020s, with several high-profile operators scaling back or shutting down after struggling to build customer loyalty. Wonder’s added layer of automation and AI may address some of those pitfalls, but the model is still unproven at scale.
MrBeast Burger, a famous ghost kitchen experiments, vividly illustrated the challenge. The brand faced widespread complaints over inconsistent food quality — a consequence of relying on dozens of different contracted kitchens and staff. Wonder’s programmable, increasingly automated kitchens are designed to solve exactly that problem.
There are still limits to this idea, Lore admitted. Wonder’s team (including its robots) can’t do things like toss and stretch pizza dough or slice and roll sushi. Instead, Wonder’s focus is on simpler basics like burgers, chicken wings, fried chicken, and bowls.
The whole plan comes together with Lore’s other acquisitions — Grubhub for its 250 million-deliveries-per-year business and Blue Apron for its meal kit business. Now, Wonder is focused on buying restaurant brands, like New York City-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, which it snapped up for $6.5 million in February.
“When you buy a brand — and you can buy a brand that has 10 locations, or even 50 locations — and then overnight put it in 1,000, there’s just an incredible arbitrage there,” Lore noted.
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Tech
Peter Sarlin’s QuTwo reaches $380M valuation in angel round
QuTwo, the Finnish AI lab founded by former AMD Silo AI CEO Peter Sarlin, is now valued at €325 million (approximately $380 million) after raising a €25 million angel round ($29 million). It’s a sign of enduring tailwinds for AI, quantum computing, and sovereign tech, especially for Europe-made companies.
QuTwo’s name is a nod to quantum computing, but it hasn’t gone all-in on quantum. Its core product, QuTwo OS, is an orchestration layer that directs tasks to classical, quantum or hybrid architectures — with the idea that enterprise use cases are often best served by “quantum-inspired” computing, which uses classical chips to simulate quantum behavior on more reliable hardware.
Enterprise AI will be QuTwo’s bread and butter. The company already secured some $23 million in committed revenue thanks to design partnerships with the likes of retail giant Zalando, for which it helped develop AI assistants. “AI is the North Star that we will continue to aim for. Quantum is just a new type of compute,” said Sarlin, who is adamant that QuTwo is an AI company.
Momentum has been building around Europe-based AI labs, and several of them have become overnight unicorns. Just last week, former DeepMind researcher David Silver secured $1.1 billion for his new endeavor, Ineffable Intelligence. QuTwo’s valuation and round size are somewhat modest in comparison but will let it pursue its roadmap under less pressure.
According to Sarlin, who serves as QuTwo’s executive chairman, this was a decision he also made for his previous company, Silo AI, which AMD acquired for $665 million in 2024. “I had a lot of investors who would have wanted to pour a lot of money into making Silo into Europe’s OpenAI, but I didn’t believe in that play,” he told TechCrunch.
The main difference is that QuTwo wants the freedom to think long term, with a five- to ten-year horizon. “We are on a mission to build the globally leading AI company for the next paradigm, given that Europe did not succeed in building the AI company for this era,” Sarlin said.
It’s not that Sarlin is bearish on European AI, of which he is a prolific backer. Nor is he necessarily critical of extra-large rounds — he volunteered that he is also an investor in Yann LeCun’s Ami Labs, which raised $1.03 billion, and in British-American venture Recursive Superintelligence, which is rumored to be following the same path. But he didn’t see a billion-dollar round as the right fit for QuTwo — nor VC money, at least for now.
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Until recently, QuTwo was solely funded through Sarlin’s family office, PostScriptum, which also incubated NestAI, the other company where he serves as executive chairman. But whereas NestAI raised some $115 million in a funding round led by Finland’s sovereign fund and Nokia, QuTwo wasn’t seeking to raise external funding.
However, when the lab’s soft launch generated significant interest earlier this year, Sarlin decided he would say no to checks from VCs and strategic investors, but yes to an angel round in part due to the geopolitical moment Europe is currently navigating.
With Europe increasingly looking to favor local alternatives to U.S. tech providers, there are tailwinds for AI made in Finland. But there is also investor appetite for a company that promises to facilitate more ambitious R&D initiatives in the fields where the region already has strong players, such as the automotive, life sciences and gaming sectors.
Conversely, Sarlin expects that QuTwo’s angel investors could open doors across Europe. There are definitely quite a few introductions he could request from this group, which includes Yuri Milner, Xavier Niel, Nico Rosberg, Dieter Schwarz and Niklas Zennström, and as well as many startup founders from Hugging Space, Legora, Miro, Skype, Supercell, Wolt, and more.
This will also support QuTwo’s growth. It recently expanded into Sweden, and has been hiring. According to Sarlin, some 50 quantum and AI scientists have joined the team, which includes two other second-time entrepreneurs: his former cofounder at Silo, Kaj-Mikael Björk; and Kuan Yen Tan, a cofounder at IQM, the Finnish quantum company that is set to go public.
QuTwo’s connection with IQM is also a reminder that the company believes we are about to enter the quantum era — it just can’t wait. “The question for repeat founders like [us] is how can we have even a larger impact. In the long term, it’s important for Europe that we build the AI company for the next paradigm out of Europe. But, in the short term, we can have a significant impact in driving ambitious R&D moon shots in Europe,” Sarlin said.
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Tech
reMarkable’s new Paper Pure tablet goes back to basics with a monochrome screen
After exploring the bigger market for productivity tablets featuring color displays with the Paper Pro and the smaller Paper Pro Move, E Ink tablet maker reMarkable is returning to its roots with a new monochrome device called the Paper Pure.
The new, $399 Paper Pure succeeds the monochrome reMarkable 2 after six years, and comes with more powerful hardware as well as modern software features that make it competitive in today’s tablet market.
The Paper Pure has a 10.3-inch display when measured diagonally, the same as the reMarkable 2, but the new one is wider, which, the company says, makes it easier to take notes and read text. Notably, the resolution hasn’t changed between the two tablets, staying at 1872 x 1404 pixels with a pixel density of 226 PPI.
The tablet also comes with 32GB of storage, four times the amount you got on its predecessor, and is also about 40 grams lighter, weighing 360 grams.
ReMarkable said the Paper Pure is 50% more responsive than the reMarkable 2, and offers 30% more battery life with its 3,820 mAh battery.
The company has added a slew of new features to the tablet to bring it up to par with modern productivity tools, including support for a web app. The Paper Pure lets you sync your calendar, as well as take and share notes for a particular meeting. And if you import documents from cloud storage services, the online sync service will automatically convert them into a notebook suited for reading and annotating on the tablet itself. The company said it also comes with better handwriting search capabilities.
The Paper Pure integrates with Slack, too, so you can convert handwritten notes into typed text that you can share. It also integrates with collaboration tool Miro, letting you share sketches and the like.
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The Norwegian company said it now plans to sunset production of the reMarkable 2, but will still offer software updates and support to existing customers.
The Paper Pure’s base model comes bundled with a stylus, and the costlier $449 version gets you a fancier stylus, dubbed Marker Plus, that includes an eraser function, plus a sleeve folio in various colors. Users can order the device starting today, and shipping is expected to start in early June.
The company said it has sold more than 3.5 million devices so far, and that it has 1.2 million subscribers for its Connect service, which offers unlimited cloud storage, exclusive templates, and the ability to create links to share notes or sketches.
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OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT 5.5 Instant as the new default model for everyone
Marc Lore says that AI will soon enable anyone open a restaurant
