Tech
Radian Aerospace completes ground tests of prototype space plane
Radian Aerospace has moved one step closer to achieving the “holy grail” of spaceflight: a reusable space plane that can take-off from an airfield and land on a runway like a conventional airplane. The startup just announced completion of a series of ground tests in Abu Dhabi earlier this summer.
The tests were completed with a sub-scale prototype flight vehicle that the company is calling PFV01. The main purpose of the testing was to generate data on how the vehicle would fly and handle, and to compare this data to simulations the company’s been doing over the last several years. While the vehicle did not fly, it did perform a series of small hops on the runway, executives told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
PFV01 is much smaller than the final vehicle at around 15 feet long, but the data still helps inform key pieces of the final design and flight control systems, like where the landing gear should be located, or where the center of gravity should be to maximize stability midair, cofounder CTO Livingston Holder explained.
“This vehicle gives us the ability to adjust the center of gravity forward and aft, up and down, it gives us the ability to adjust the location of the landing gear. Those adjustments give us real world feedback into what our analytical data says,” he said. “Wherever there’s ambiguity… that’s one of the things that the PFV really gives us the opportunity to do, is drive uncertainty down so that we have better fidelity with our analytical processes as we go faster with the vehicle and do more flights.”
The plan is for the Radian One space plane to take off from a roughly two mile-long rail sled, ignite engines on orbit, then return to Earth back on a normal runway. The concept is considered a holy grail because removing the necessity for a launch vehicle makes space, in a way, as accessible to space vehicles as the upper atmosphere is to airplanes.
The economics are promising, too: a reusable space plane could take trips to and from space on a daily basis or even more frequently, and with better margins to boot. It’s been tried before; one of the most notable examples is NASA’s X-33 program to develop a suborbital space plane. Holder led Boeing’s X-33 effort.
“The least interesting thing this system has the potential to do is launch satellites,” Radian cofounder and CRO Jeff Feige said. “What’s really impressive about Radian is that it’s a system that can do a wide, wide range of missions so it basically accesses a much larger market than a traditional rocket. Not only could you potentially launch something, but you can service it, you can recover it. We can bring entire payloads or satellites down from space. We can carry people up. We can dip in the atmosphere and theoretically, either drop things or observe things on the planet. So there’s just a much wider range of capability.”
The design is dramatically different from a vertical rocket, and this means the development process differs as well, noted Feige: “You have to retire a lot of risk early.” So while rocket companies must build full-scale vehicles, the stepwise fashion of spaceplane development more closely resembles how an airplane is developed.
The Seattle-based startup isn’t disclosing any technical specs of the tests, like the top speeds of the vehicle or how long it was taxiing for, but Holder did say PFV01 “reached its velocity for takeoff.” Now the company will spend some time analyzing all the data it collected from the tests before embarking on a series of higher-speed taxi tests and the start of actual flight testing. Parallel to that, the company will be working on getting regulatory approval to operate out of a different UAE-based airport and fly there.
Company executives say they are hoping to start full scale flights of the Radian One space plane in 2028. The company has raised $27.5 million to date in known funding from investors including Fine Structure Ventures, EXOR, The Venture Collective, Helios Capital, SpaceFund, Gaingels, The Private Shares Fund, Explorer 1 Fund, and Type One Ventures.
Tech
Cathie Wood’s ARK makes its first lead investment in startup Lucra — and it isn’t AI
ARK Invest Venture Fund has made its first-ever lead investment in an early-stage startup called Lucra, firm founder Cathie Wood told TechCrunch.
“We feel pretty excited about it,” Wood (pictured above) said in the recent interview regarding the investment in the startup.
Lucra developed a software platform that reimagines corporate loyalty programs into interactive, esports-like events such as tournaments where customers can play each other, even betting or winning cash or company giveaways. The startup said its customers include Five Iron Golf, Chess Kings, and Dave & Buster’s.
Lucra announced on Wednesday that it raised a $20 million Series B, led by the ARK fund, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Astralis Capital, Harlo Equity Partners, Simplex Ventures, SeventySix Capital, and WTI.
There are a few reasons why the famed financial company has never led a startup deal before. For one, the ARK Invest Venture Fund is not a typical VC fund. It’s an SEC-regulated interval fund (also known as a closed-end mutual fund), meaning anyone can invest in it, for as little as $500. However, it is not traded on a public exchange, so investors cannot sell shares at will. They can sell limited shares on specific dates, quarterly.
Wood also noted that the person running the fund, director of research Nick Grous, “is a tough sell,” leaving startups with the difficult task of getting him excited enough to advocate to lead a deal.
What’s even wilder is that ARK was particularly gun-shy about this sort of business because it got burned after investing in a somewhat similar company a few years ago.
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“We had actually owned a company called Skillz, which kind of operated in this space,” Grous said. “It didn’t work out well for us and many other investors.”
Skillz was a once-hot public company that later became mired in troubles and lawsuits. The big difference, the investor said, is that Lucra is a B2B platform, selling interactive esports as a loyalty program, rather than trying to license and run games directly to consumers.
“Overcoming our initial hurdle, especially given our experience with Skillz, overcoming our reticence, having Nick overcome it, that was our first screen,” Wood said of how this startup convinced her company to write a big check.
In this case, ARK Invest had participated in Lucra’s previous Series A round, and had grown familiar with its business model, its trajectory, and its founder and CEO Dylan Robbins, Grous told TechCrunch.
“We had been in constant communication,” Grous said, adding that his venture-esq fund attempts to have quarterly conference calls with the startups in the portfolio, similar to how public companies report to investors quarterly. ARK mostly works in the public market, offering a slate of publicly traded EFT funds.
Despite already being in the portfolio, Lucra’s founder was grilled numerous times when it came time to buy more shares — first by Grous and then ARK’s investment committee, both he and Wood described.
During those calls, Robbins “had thought about all the things that went wrong” with similar companies like Skillz, as well as with Lucra, and had answers, Wood said. “No matter how many times we went at him, his conviction, there was just no let up,” she described.
It also helped that this company’s financials were promising, it was in an area that ARK knew well, and this was not AI, aka the most hyped, most expensive area these days.
“We’ve been underwriting the sports-betting space, understanding the gamification aspects of entertainment,” Grous said, meaning that the investment firm could “really understand the opportunity here.”
The ARK Invest Venture Fund holds shares of companies like Epic Games, Kalshi, and Discord, for instance. It also holds OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, Grok, and Perplexity, so it knows the AI scene well.
“We are all over AI, just like everyone else, because it is a massive revolution,” Wood explained. “But in the process, a lot of companies are being neglected.” This means that spotting such potentially neglected companies is “our opportunity because we are doing research in many other areas than AI,” she said.
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Tech
Cosmetics giant Rituals confirms data breach of customer membership records
Netherlands-based cosmetics giant Rituals has confirmed a data breach affecting customers’ personal information after hackers stole reams of data from its membership database.
The company disclosed the breach on Wednesday, according to an email sent to customers that TechCrunch has viewed and verified.
Rituals said it identified an “unauthorized download” of members’ data in April that contained customers’ full name, date of birth, gender, postal and email address, and phone number, as well as their preferred Rituals store and account type.
When reached by TechCrunch, Rituals spokesperson Eline van Malssen said the hacker stole membership data about customers in Europe and the United Kingdom.
TechCrunch has learned that some customers notified by Rituals are based in the United States. The spokesperson confirmed the incident also affects some U.S. customers.
Rituals did not describe the nature of the cyberattack and the company said its investigation was underway to understand how the data breach happened.
The cosmetics giant is the latest retailer to have customer membership data stolen in the past year, following a string of intrusions at U.K. grocery and shopping chain Co-op and Marks & Spencer, among others. Customer records can be attractive targets for hackers who steal the data and extort the company for a ransom in exchange for not publishing the information online.
When reached with questions about the incident, a Rituals spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company received any communication from the hackers, to share a more precise timeline of the breach, or to provide the exact number of affected members, citing unspecified “security reasons.”
According to its website, Rituals has over 41 million customers in its membership database. The retail giant made €2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in revenue in 2025.
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Tech
Rivian R2 production has started despite tornado damage to factory
Rivian has rolled the first customer-ready R2 SUVs off the production line at its factory in Normal, Illinois, just days after it was hit by an EF-1 tornado that tore off part of the roof.
Despite the damage, founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday morning that Rivian doesn’t expect any delays to the R2’s rollout, which is crucial to the company’s survival.
“The tornado went through the south end of the plant, and ripped the roof off the building, and knocked down some of the plant as well, and so the last 72 hours have been around the clock,” he said. Scaringe explained that Rivian has had to change how and where it brings some materials into the factory to build the R2.
But “we’re not making any changes to the plan,” he said, referring to the company’s production roadmap.
Scaringe wasn’t asked when Rivian will make the first R2 deliveries during the interview. The company has previously said it will start shipping R2 SUVs before the first half of 2026 comes to an end.
Getting the R2 into production is a major milestone for the company. It’s the first production vehicle Rivian has made that has a chance to reach mass-market customers, as it costs far less than the company’s current R1 EVs. It’s also supposed to help the company finally reach profitability after years of losing money on every vehicle it sold.
The company has big expectations for the R2. Rivian told investors earlier this year that it expects to deliver between 20,000 and 25,000 of the SUVs by the end of 2026. If Rivian achieves that, it would become one of the fastest-scaling new EVs ever launched in the U.S., second only to Tesla’s Model Y.
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That said, Rivian is launching with a version of the R2 that costs nearly $13,000 more than the $45,000 price tag the company spent years promoting. The launch edition R2 starts at $57,990, with a slightly cheaper $53,990 variant coming by the end of this year. Rivian won’t sell an R2 for under $50,000 until the first half of 2027, and a true base model starting at $45,000 won’t hit the market until late 2027.
And that’s if the $45,000 R2 ever arrives at all. When Rivian announced pricing for the SUV in March, the company said the base model price will start “around $45,000” — not “at $45,000” as it had promoted on its website as recently as February.
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