Tech
Robotaxis drive miles just to get cleaned and charged; this new startup wants to fix that
Take a stroll around San Francisco and it won’t take long to spot an empty autonomous vehicle cruising the city’s streets, waiting to be hailed by a rider or heading off to a distant depot to be charged and cleaned. These deadhead miles — an industry term for miles driven without a paying passenger — are one of the biggest barriers between robotaxi companies and profitability.
Redwood City, California-based startup Aseon Labs thinks it has a fix: parking space-sized automated pods that can be scattered throughout cities to inspect, clean, and charge robotaxis. The company, co-founded by the team behind battery-swapping startup Pushme, calls them robotic pit stops for the robotaxi industry. And the idea has caught the attention of investors.
Aseon Labs has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners, TechCrunch has learned. Y Combinator, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s venture firm Expa, Robin Hood Ventures, and Founders Capital also participated, along with angel investors such as serial entrepreneur and former Google executive Adrian Aoun, Mercury founder and CEO Immad Akhund, Zimride co-founder Rajat Suri, and operators and founding team members from Anthropic, Nuro, Turo, and Revolut.
Aseon Labs is still in the early stages. The seed funds will be used to build five prototypes of these pods, grow its six-person robotics and engineering team to about a dozen, and secure the real estate needed to build out its network, according to Aseon Labs co-founder and CEO George Kalligeros.
“In order to reach economic parity with ride-hailing — which is where we need to get with self-driving cars — and to stop really subsidizing the cost, you need the utilization to go up,” Kalligeros told TechCrunch. “You need the robotaxi in continuous operation during the entirety of the demand curve of the day.”
Aseon’s pitch is that a network of distributed autonomous pods would slash deadhead miles, and inevitably turn robotaxi services into profitable enterprises.
Kalligeros and co-founder and COO Dan Keene come from outside the autonomous vehicle world. But they bring experience developing and scaling a hardware-and-real estate company. Kalligeros worked as a mechanical design engineer at Bentley Motors and Tesla before he and Keene founded Pushme in 2016 to build battery-swapping infrastructure for micromobility fleets. Pushme was building a battery-swap network in Europe when it was acquired in January 2020 by Tier Mobility.
“The parallel I’ll draw is we were basically tasked by SoftBank to put this across as many markets where it made sense for Tier within a very short and compressed period of time,” Kalligeros said. “The playbook became, how do we sprinkle the locations across the center of the city, where it makes sense, but at the same time, make it easy to deploy as non-permanent infrastructure?”
Aseon Labs is applying the same thinking to autonomous vehicles.
As they researched the industry, the pair visited AV depots, where fleets of robotaxis are inspected, maintained, cleaned, and charged. The cost of real estate often prompts companies to locate these depots outside the city center, where most of the ride-hailing activity occurs.
“Depot infrastructure is the key requirement for the launch of a new city for any AV operator,” he said. “And what happens in the depot right now — the operational backbone of autonomy, really — is not fully baked.”
The founders settled on the idea of creating smaller, independently powered autonomous pods that could be dispersed throughout a city but as importantly, they could also be moved as needed. The units, which include cameras to inspect vehicles and robotic arms to retrieve lost items and clean interiors, are considered temporary structures. That classification helps Aseon Labs avoid a lengthy permitting process and allows the company to relocate units if a location underperforms.
The units are designed to run on a propane generator or other mobile sources for power or can connect to an existing power source through partnerships with EV charging companies. They are meant to operate autonomously, although early versions will be staffed, according to Kalligeros.
Aseon Labs isn’t trying to tackle every edge case, either. Instead, it leans on computer vision and AI — specifically vision-language-action models common in modern robotics — to detect problems the pod shouldn’t try to solve. For example, if a camera detects melted chocolate on a backseat, the robotic arm stands down since attempting to clean it could make the stain worse. Instead, the vehicle will be charged and dispatched directly to that company’s central depot for a human to handle.
Aseon Labs hasn’t signed contracts with any robotaxi companies yet, but Kalligeros said there is widespread interest in the concept. “Pretty much everyone wants to try it,” he said.
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Tech
Trump Admin releases Anthropic Mythos to be used by more than 100 US companies, agencies
Two weeks into the ban that caused Anthropic to pull its powerful cybersecurity-oriented models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, from the market, the Trump administration is softening its stance.
It is now allowing Anthropic to make Mythos 5 available to more than 100 specific U.S. government agencies and companies, including allowing the non-American employees at those organizations to access to the model, both Semafor and Reuters report. This list also includes Anthropic’s own non-American employees, who were included in the original ban that forbade non-Americans from accessing the models.
“I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic’s chief compute officer Tom Brown on Friday, according to the missive seen by Semafor.
Apparently, the administration did not address the release of Fable 5 in this directive. This is a version of Mythos 5 that was widely released a couple of days before the ban because it was said to have more protections. Both models were pulled after those guardrails were allegedly bypassed easily by security researchers. Anthropic did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
Anthropic on Friday publicly acknowledged the progress in a post on X, writing: “Since June 12, we’ve been working closely with the US government to restore access to Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5. Today, the government notified us that Mythos 5, our strongest cybersecurity model, can be redeployed to a set of US organizations that operate and defend critical infrastructure. We’re restoring access for these organizations quickly, and we’re continuing to work with the government to expand access to Mythos 5 and make Fable 5 available for general use again.”
Tech
Instagram is testing more ways to customize ‘Your Algorithm’
Instagram users could soon see more ways to tune their content, according to a recent post from Instagram head Adam Mosseri.
Specifically, Mosseri was showing off new ways that users might access Your Algorithm, a feature that allows them to specify which topics they want to see more of, and less of. Instagram launched Your Algorithm last year and has been introducing it to more areas of the app.
“We want to evolve Your Algorithm from a setting to something that feels central to your experience on Instagram,” Mosseri said. He also noted, “Some of this is testing now, some is coming soon, some might not work.”
The examples in his post include one where pulling down in your Instagram feed eventually brings up the Your Algorithm menu, and another where swiping up from a Reel could bring up a similar customization prompt. A third shows buttons beneath each Reel to indicate whether or not you want to see more Reels like it.
The most popular comments on Mosseri’s post all make the same request. As one user put it, “WE JUST WANT OUR ALGORITHM TO SHOW THE PPL WE FOLLOW.”
Tech
Indian payments chief thinks AI will be heavily involved in next era of digital payment growth
India’s digital payment share has increased over the years, with the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) growing to over 750 million daily transactions. With an aim to reach over a billion daily transactions, Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees UPI, thinks AI would be heavily involved in the next phase for user growth, fraud prevention, and credit distribution.
During an interview with TechCrunch at Mumbai Tech Week (MTW) 2026 last month, Asbe said AI could drive the next half a billion users with NPCI, India’s central bank, and the government working together.
“AI will be used very effectively when we look at the next wave of UPI, and that includes all aspects, including reaching new users. We must use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud, and to find mules. AI must also be used to provide credit to all the users and merchants who have digital footprints,” he said. “We must use AI to look at the voice and multilingual solutions to make onboarding simpler.”
Many companies have talked about voice as an interface being important in India for chatting with companies or systems. Asbe believes that it is early days for that, as voice models will need to be more accurate. NPCI launched a voice assistant-based interactive system in 2023. Asbe noted that adoption for that yet to take off, and with the right use case, voice can become a critical component in the payment ecosystem.
AI in finance and regulations
In the U.S., startups and public companies are racing to add AI to finance. Coinbase and Robinhood now allow agents to trade on users’ behalf, and OpenAI lets you load personal account data into ChatGPT to get financial advice. NPCI has shown some demos around agentic commerce and payments with Razorpay last year. However, there hasn’t been a wider rollout of some of these capabilities.
NPCI’s CEO thinks that with robust regulations and a framework, India can also adopt AI-powered finance. He said that there should be enough protection for users and mitigation for risk — and in case something goes wrong, the system should be able to look at the instructions and consent given by the user to an agent.
Besides the usage of models, Asbe thinks that the Indian finance ecosystem has an opportunity to build small language models.
“We believe that the models will differentiate from each other based on the data sets that are made available to them,” he said. “We have a very rich data set in our ecosystem. I think there is a big opportunity for Indian companies — the banks, FinTechs, and the ecosystem — to create small language models which are sharp, specific, and as deterministic as possible.”
Last year, NPCI launched a model called FIMI to solve user disputes. Asbe noted that it is serving over a million users to cancel mandates and resolve issues, and is scaling fast.
UPI competition
NPCI has long sought healthy competition between UPI apps, but data suggests that Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay have over 80% of the market share. The regulator’s plan to cap an app’s market share at 30% is set to take effect on December 31, 2026, unless it defers the deadline date again.
During the conversation, Asbe said that UPI apps have very low switching costs and most core features are shared. He noted that PhonePe and Google have poured millions into their apps to attain their market position. He said that if new apps find viable business models within the fintech ecosystem, their share will rise.
“I believe that there are multiple issues why we see this concentration risk exist, and one of the important reasons is the availability of a viable commercial model. The moment we see the commercial model being available to the ecosystem, I believe newer players will start investing very heavily,” Asbe said.
In 2024, the payment body spun off its BHIM UPI app to make it more competitive and grow its usage. While its transaction volume has grown, its overall market share is around 1%. Asbe said that with BHIM, there is no particular target market share NPCI is eyeing. But it wants to make it a sovereign and secure alternative to other apps, Asbe said.
India is one of the biggest digital economies, and investors around the world will be looking at the regulatory landscape to put money into newer fintech solutions and make the market more competitive.
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