Tech
Uber’s product chief on hotels, robotaxis, and why the company doesn’t want to be “everything for everyone”
Uber has spent the last year quietly pushing beyond the two businesses most people associate it with. There’s ride-hailing, of course, and delivery, but spend time in the app and you’ll now find hotel bookings powered by Expedia, “shop for me” concierge features, and boat rentals in Europe.
Under the hood, so to speak, there’s also a lot happening. Think debit cards for drivers, a data-labeling side hustle for these same earners looking to make more moolah, and a six-month-old, business unit called AV Labs, which is developing a fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles that’s separate from Uber’s regular driver network and designed to gather ever-larger amounts of driving data. Uber frames the initiative as a way to strengthen its relationships with autonomous vehicle partners, several of which it also holds equity in, but it sure looks like a hedge, as well. Uber competes directly with some of those same partners, with Waymo chief among them, and owning the data layer gives Uber both some leverage and optionality.
Whether Uber becomes a full-blown “everything app” similar to some Asian super-apps like Grab, remains an open question. But in this conversation, Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company’s financial-services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways riders and drivers will actually notice.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TC: You unveiled hotels, boat rentals, and more shopping features earlier this year. How did that list get made, and what didn’t make the cut?
SK: Every year our teams are obviously building a lot of stuff, and a subset of that we decide is worth sharing with the world on the biggest stage. This year the theme that we gravitated towards was really travel. 1.5 billion trips on the Uber platform every year actually happen outside of a user’s home city, so we know that travel is something that’s a very common use case for Uber users. Our headline announcement this time was actually introducing hotels on Uber as a partnership with Expedia. But travel is so much more than that — you need rides to go from the airport to the hotel, and you need food. We heard from a lot of our users that a lot of them had stopped using room service and were just using the Uber Eats app. With “shop for me,” the goal was for us to enable you to shop from any local store even if that store is not available on Uber Eats with the entire catalog. Travel really is, in my opinion, the third leg of the stool — we had rides, then we added eats, and now we are adding travel.
Is Uber moving toward offering its own financial services, the way “everything apps” in Asia do?
Financial services for us cuts across multiple different entities — consumers, but also drivers and couriers, and merchants. We have multiple products today focused mostly on drivers and couriers, where we have what we call the Uber Pro card, which they can use as a debit card and transfer all their earnings onto. We are starting to experiment with some of those products for merchants in certain parts of the world right now. As far as consumers are concerned, we’ll see if that makes sense for us in the long term. Right now there is a currency for consumers to use — we call them Uber credits — and this ties to our membership program. On hotels, for example, members get 10% cash back on a $1,000 transaction, that’s $100 back as credit that you can then use on rides and eats.
Would Uber ever offer its own buy now, pay later product?
I’m not sure, because we want to make sure that the experts do what the experts do. We already have announced partnerships with others in the industry who are already providing that service, so that at checkout you have the ability to do that. In terms of our general product strategy, we’re not trying to be everything to everyone.
With boat rentals, in Europe, tapping the tab hands users off to a partner’s own booking flow rather than checking out inside Uber. Is that handoff model a template for what’s coming?
Definitely there are some instances, especially when we are doing something new, for us to rely on our partners, because a two-way integration just does take a lot of time, and in some cases it’s good for us to try before we integrate deeply. In the case of Expedia, we decided it just makes sense to integrate deeply — we built the entire UI on our own in partnership with Expedia. But in some cases it may make sense for us to hand off the rest of the experience to the experts in that field, and if you get great traction, we can always integrate them deeply.
Your Uber One membership product now has 51 million members and accounts for roughly half of bookings. Do you have data showing the cross-sell actually works — that a delivery user later starts taking more rides?
On the delivery side, it takes you two to three orders for you to break even the monthly fee that you pay. As members get more habituated to the program, it’s increasing their frequency within the line of business they are already using. And it’s also leading to more usage of the other sides of the business — we are seeing people who are mobility only also start to use delivery, and people who are delivery only also start to use mobility.
Delivery has been one of the hardest businesses in tech to make profitable. Is Uber Eats still leaning on ride-hailing to stay healthy?
During the early years of Uber Eats it was not profitable yet, but over the last several quarters, Uber Eats has been independently a profitable business for us, and generating a lot of profit.
A story I wrote this spring framed Uber as unexpectedly competing more directly with Airbnb, which is now offering airport transfers through a partner. Do you see it that way? Who are you most focused on?
There’s no dearth of competitors — Lyft in the U.S., Didi and 99 in Latin America, Bolt, Ola around the world, and on delivery, DoorDash, Delivery Hero. But I only spend a very small percentage of my time thinking about that. The bigger percentage of my time, or what keeps me up at night, is are we providing our users all the value that we can provide.
You recently wound down the Waymo pilot in Phoenix while scaling elsewhere. How do you keep the experience coherent when you’re partnering with — and in some cities competing with — the same supplier?
Phoenix was the first city that we launched with Waymo, with about a dozen cars, but our scale launches have been in Austin and Atlanta, where we have hundreds of cars with them. When we recently looked at the Phoenix pilot, we mutually decided that it doesn’t make sense for us to continue. Waymo is an excellent partner of ours, but in many cities they’re also a competitor. We are not in the race to be an L4 autonomy provider — what we are focusing on is laying down the race tracks so we can work with multiple players. We believe in the hybrid network, human drivers as well as autonomous vehicles in the same city, because it allows us to balance demand and supply.
Regarding AV Labs, what can Uber offer autonomy partners that they don’t already have?
We are going to be equipping hundreds of cars with sensors, deployed through our fleet partners, and through that we’ll be collecting millions of miles worth of driving data. That really helps with the long-tail problem — you want to see all the edge cases, not just the P95, P99 level. Beyond the data itself, there’s so much know-how from our 10 million earners in terms of how pickups and drop-offs work. We handle 25 million lost items every single year — how do you operationally handle that in the world of autonomy? That’s the kind of operational expertise we can bring.
Is Uber selling driver and rider data to Gen AI companies?
I would divide this into two parts. In terms of Gen AI companies, we are able to label data for them using our earner base, or through audio collection, and yes, we have commercial relationships with them and we are selling it to them — that’s a part of the business that is new, and we are extremely bullish about it. AV Labs is separate, and we are still figuring those models out for sharing that data with partners. It’s a little early.
Are drivers recording conversations with riders for this data work?
No, no, no — I want to be very clear, there’s no conversation being recorded as part of that while they’re on a ride. When they’re not on a trip, they’re not driving, they’re not delivering, they’re just talking, or they’re listening to a piece of audio and transcribing it. They get paid for doing that, by the way.
Where has AI actually shown up in ways a rider or driver would notice?
If you are an earner on our platform, we have an earner assistant — the number one question on their mind is how do I make more money, and it will say, look, it’s actually pretty light in the South Bay, but you may want to go five miles away where there’s a lot of demand. On the Eats side, there’s a grocery cart assistant where you can say “I want milk, eggs, bread” and it creates the cart very quickly. And on rides, you’re able to use voice to request a ride — say “I’m looking for a ride to the airport, I have six pieces of luggage, six people.”
So a fully agentic Uber — “plan and book my whole trip” — is on the horizon?
I can’t put a date on it, and I can’t tell you exactly what the feature set will be, but I think AI is going to be a huge enabler of that, where I can leave the complexity to the platform and just tell an agent what exactly I want. Easier said than done — we want to make sure we’re not just checking a box by shipping an agent that maybe doesn’t work that well.
As CPO, how do you personally prioritize with so many ideas in flight?
I would say I spend 70% to 80% of my time making sure that our existing products, or the products we are about to launch, are as solid as possible. All the new ideas are like shiny objects — if you have 100 ideas, maybe five of them are good, and those five then need a lot of cultivation and conviction. So probably 20% of the time is on new ideas — including, by the way, I go out and drive and deliver myself, just to see our product from the other side firsthand.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
A SpaceX vet raised $65M to pull wire harnesses out of the Cold War era
When Senra CEO Jordan Black was a SpaceX engineer, he took on the job of scaling up the company’s wire harnesses to support production of Starship, the company’s next-generation rocket.
Wire harnesses are what they sound like: the internal electrical cabling that runs through a rocket ship, car, plane, or tractor and becomes increasingly important the smarter those vehicles get. They’re bespoke, put together by technicians who are, functionally, experienced craftspeople.
“I traveled all over the world to go visit wire harness companies,” Black told TechCrunch last month. “It really hasn’t changed since the Cold War era of wooden tables [and] manual processes.”
Black and co-founder Benjamin Shanahan started Senra in 2023 to offer a more modern solution to vehicle manufacturers. Today, the startup is announcing a $65 million Series B round, co-led by Lowercarbon and Interlagos with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founders Fund, among others.
Senra isn’t looking to take humans out of the handmaking process — at least not while robots find manipulating wires a challenge and relevant training data remains scarce. Instead, it’s turning to software tools and other forms of automation to modernize aspects of the traditional manual work.
The company is benefiting from the surge of money into U.S. manufacturing, particularly the defense industrial base. While Black couldn’t disclose customers, he said they include builders of “anything from submarines and maritime vehicles, to defense vehicle systems on land, to launch vehicles, to satellites.”
If it doesn’t sound immediately important, consider a recent wire harness disaster. In 2023, Boeing discovered that its Starliner spacecraft’s wiring was held together with flammable tape, forcing an expensive delay while the entire wiring system was redone.
Black points to that experience as a reason to raise the standards for wire harnessing, using automated systems to track materials and engineering changes. “Having it all in the same software is probably the most important thing, because it’s all the little inputs that happen that can make a catastrophic change down the road,” he said.
Senra uses Amp, a proprietary software platform, to standardize the inputs throughout the wiring process and produce a digital twin to guide its technicians, who are trained by the company in what Black says is the only federally certified wire harness training program. The company is also, as it scales, finding ways to automate more of the process.
“It goes back to the Elon principle of, ‘automation is last,’” Black told TechCrunch. “We’re working on it now, but a lot of it the standardization and the foundation building that made SpaceX be able to scale something like rockets, which you could only build one a year if you were lucky, and now they do hundreds a year.”
Senra — which, by the way, is “harness” spelled backwards, minus the “h” and “s,” because Black says the company takes the “horsesh*t” out of harnesses — produces 1,000 each month across two different factories and plans to increase production to 10,000 a month in 2027.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Backed by $60M in funding, Oak steps out of stealth to fix the identity mess that AI agents are making worse
Physical badges used to be all you needed for identity management at a company. But with humans now working alongside machines and AI agents in digital environments, even the identity tools built for the cloud era are proving inadequate.
That’s the gap Israeli startup Oak is stepping out of stealth to fill, it says. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, the company has been quietly building a unified control plane that governs identity across an organization, and is now emerging publicly with its product generally available and already deployed by enterprise clients, backed by $60 million in seed funding that it raised late last year.
The company didn’t disclose client names, but said its solution is already generally available and deployed by enterprise clients.
Outdated credentials and poor identity access management — or IAM, the systems that control who and what can access company data — are a common security vulnerability, one that AI is expected to make even easier for attackers to exploit. Oak also calls itself AI-native, positioning itself as a replacement for legacy tools that were already showing their limits but had no consolidated alternative.
According to Oak’s other co-founder, chief product officer Tal Marom, the startup spent months talking to 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before building its product: an AI connector framework that maps access to actual app usage and removes permissions that are no longer needed in real time, rather than only during periodic reviews.
“Right now, the whole process is too manual, and it’s operations-based, not risk-based — for instance, there’s no trigger when an employee logs in from an unusual location,” said Morag, a former army major who spent more than two decades in cybersecurity. During that time, he had three exits, including selling cyber startup Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018.
This track record helped Oak raise what is a very big round by local standards, one that matches its plans to invest heavily in R&D and growth, Morag said. “Our vision is to be born as a giant,” he told TechCrunch.
Morag’s résumé already includes a stint at a giant organization. After public cyber company Tenable acquired his cloud identity and security startup Ermetic for $265 million in 2023, he stayed on as CPO. But after CEO Amit Yoran became ill and passed away, Morag left and told his wife he’d retire.
Instead of stepping back, though, Morag co-founded Oak with Marom, a product team lead he’d met at Tenable who’d previously held similar roles at Salesforce and in the Israeli military. While in stealth, the two also built a team of 50 people and are actively hiring, particularly in the U.S., where a majority of Oak’s staff will soon be based, Morag said.
Oak’s $60 million round was co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors. Morag told TechCrunch that VC interest was strong from the outset.
Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said Morag’s track record alone was a strong argument. Accel had led Ermetic’s Series A when it was pre-revenue; when Tenable acquired it, Accel gave Morag an informal standing offer to back whatever he built next, Brasoveanu said. “I knew he had it in him to build another company, but this time even bigger and even better.”
With AI as “a democratizing force,” Accel has been backing founders right out of high school, Brasoveanu said. But when it comes to identity management, experience still counts. “There’s complexity in the product, and there’s also complexity in the organizations you have to navigate to figure out how to sell something like this,” he said.
Both Brasoveanu and Morag expect Oak will face plenty of competitors trying to use AI as a catalyst for change in a space where vendor lock-in runs deep. That makes it critical for Oak to scale fast. Morag, who told his wife this will be his last company, says he won’t retire until he’s given it everything he’s got: “I will go big or go home.”
Pictured above, from right to left: Shai Morag and Tal Marom.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Why Realta Fusion is building a fusion reactor at an old hot dog factory
Realta Fusion has spent the last two years looking for somewhere to build its research and development facility. In the end, it chose the old Oscar Mayer factory in Madison, Wisconsin.
“From sausages to fusion,” Kieran Furlong, co-founder and CEO of Realta Fusion, told TechCrunch with a chuckle. The new center, called Forge, will create its first plasma in 2029, he said. Realta recently showed that it could convert energy from fusion reactions directly into electricity, potentially easing the path to a commercial power plant.
The Oscar Mayer site’s ample power was attractive, as was its proximity to Realta’s existing headquarters in Madison. But what ultimately pushed the startup to stay was bipartisan support from the state’s government, including the governor and the legislature.
“Wisconsin really decided they want to throw their weight behind fusion,” Furlong said.
For the state, the timing could be fortuitous. Fusion power has been on an upswing as demand for electricity surges on the back of economy-wide electrification and proliferating AI data centers. This year alone, fusion power startups have raised over $1.5 billion.
Realta Fusion will receive an estimated $55 million in incentives from the state of Wisconsin and the city of Madison. The startup also has deep roots in the city, having been spun out of an experiment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And the university graduates a number of talented plasma physicists annually, providing a deep pool of talent. Shine, another fusion company, is located in a nearby suburb.
Realta’s decision to stay in Wisconsin is also surprising given that most fusion startups have located themselves near a national laboratory or on one of the coasts. Another Wisconsin-grown fusion startup, Type One Energy, decamped to Tennessee in 2024.
Since then, Wisconsin has embraced fusion power. Republicans and Democrats supported a sales tax exemption for the fusion industry, which was signed into law in April. That one measure alone will save Realta an estimated $37.5 million, a significant chunk of the total $55 million package. The state is kicking in another $15 million in enterprise zone tax credits, while the city of Madison has offered $2.8 million in tax increment financing.
While other states might have pitched similar amounts, Furlong said that there were other, intangible benefits to remaining in Wisconsin.
“It’s also advantageous to be the state champion,” he said. “We get the attention of people who matter, who can help us, who want to see Realta succeed and want to see Wisconsin be a major hub for fusion.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Hinge founders AI matchmaker coming later this year
Bryson DeChambeau to debut set of 3D-printed irons at The Open
