Looks like Amazon’s getting back into the smartphone game. More than 11 years after the e-commerce giant pulled the plug on its failed first effort, the Fire Phone, the company is now developing a new smartphone codenamed “Transformer,” Reuters reported, citing anonymous sources.

The device is being developed by the company’s Devices and Services division, and it would feature personalized features that would make it easier to use Amazon’s suite of apps, including Amazon Shopping, Prime Video, and Prime Music, the report said.

The smartphone would also support Alexa, the smart home assistant that Amazon has been investing heavily in, adding AI chops and expanding support to work with most of the company’s devices. AI features are said to be a big focus for the smartphone, which is being seen internally as a way to encourage Amazon customers to use its AI products, Reuters reported.

The smartphone is said to be developed by a relatively new unit within the Devices division called ZeroOne, which is led by J Allard, a former Microsoft executive who helped create the Xbox.

The news comes as Amazon has been going all-in on AI, investing $50 billion into OpenAI recently, and projecting $200 billion in capital expenditures toward its AI, chips, and robotics efforts in 2026.

The company spent more than a year revamping its Alexa assistant with generative AI features, finally launching it this February as Alexa+. The assistant keeps its smart home chops, and can now do most things that other AI chatbots can — like planning an itinerary for a trip, updating a shared calendar, finding and saving recipes to a library, making movie recommendations, helping with homework, exploring a topic, and more.

Amazon declined to comment.

A cyberattack on a U.S. vehicle breathalyzer company has left drivers across the United States stranded and unable to start their vehicles.

The company, Intoxalock, says on its website that it is “currently experiencing downtime” after a cyberattack on March 14. Intoxalock sells breathalyzer devices that fit into vehicle ignition switches, and is used by people who are required to provide a negative alcohol breath sample to start their car.

Intoxalock spokesperson Rachael Larson confirmed to TechCrunch that the company had been hit by a cyberattack. Larson said the company took steps to “temporarily pause some of our systems as a precautionary measure.”

These breathalyzer devices need to be calibrated every few months or so, but the cyberattack has left Intoxalock unable to perform these calibrations. The company said customers whose devices require calibration may experience delays starting their vehicles.

Drivers posting on Reddit say that cars are unable to start if they miss a calibration, effectively locking drivers out of their vehicles.

According to local news reports across Maine, drivers are experiencing lockouts and some have been unable to start their vehicles. One auto shop in Middleboro told WCVB 5 in Boston that it has had cars parked in its lot all week due to the cyberattack.

News reports from across the United States show drivers are affected from New York to Minnesota, and drivers have been unable to drive because their vehicle-based breathalyzers cannot be immediately calibrated.

Intoxalock would not say what kind of cyberattack it was experiencing, such as ransomware or if there was a data breach, or whether it had received any communications from the hackers, including any ransom demands. The company’s technology is used in 46 states, its website says, and it claims to provide services to 150,000 drivers every year.

Intoxalock did not provide an estimated timeline for its recovery.

Well, the data is out. AI startups accounted for 41% of the $128 billion in venture dollars raised by companies on Carta last year — a record-high annual share. In a sense, though, we knew that. Investors last year were voracious in deploying capital to AI startups, to the point that 10% of startups accounted for half of the funding. 

Those startups included Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, which raised double-digit billions last year at sky-high valuations. Actually, they are still raising at an even more astounding velocity. In January, xAI raised a $20 billion Series E. In February, OpenAI snagged a $110 billon round, one of the largest private rounds ever raised, bringing the company closer than ever to a $1 trillion valuation. 

Size-wise, in between OpenAI and xAI was Anthropic, which raised a $30 billion Series G last month at a $380 billion valuation. OpenAI and Anthropic accounted for a heavy chunk of the $189 billion in global venture capital raised last month and, alongside xAI, have teased IPOs for later this year that have left investors foaming at the mouth. 

The state of the venture market is now K-shaped — or bifurcated — in which capital remains concentrated in a select few firms that then back a handful of companies, while everyone else is, well, kinda just there. 

“While funding rounds have gotten slightly harder to raise, the capital for each round has increased,” Peter Walker, head of insights at Carta, told TechCrunch. “So fewer bets, but more capital. AI startups are raising bigger rounds not because they have lots of employees — they don’t — but because the cost of running AI models is high.” 

The latest Carta data also shows that funds raised in 2023 and 2024 (after the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022) have posted the highest internal rate of return (IRR), compared with the declining IRR of funds raised between 2017 and 2020. The report views the increased IRR over the past few years as a positive indicator for the funds backing some of the leading startups emerging from this AI moment. 

“It’s promising that the younger funds have seen IRR start strong,” Walker said, adding, however, that there were a few factors to consider. For one, he said, newer funds might look like they are doing well on paper because if they invested in a seed round, for example, and that company went on to raise a Series A at a higher valuation, then on paper it looks like the investor made high returns in a short time period. 

“This pushes IRR up,” Walker said. “It is also likely that the portfolios of the more recent vintage funds are full of AI-native startups in a way that the portfolios of 2021/2020 funds are not.” 

Time will tell if this early enthusiasm will translate into real returns for investors via exits like blockbuster IPOs or big-dollar acquisitions, or if we are merely in the hype phase of a bubble that will eventually pop.