Tag: Exclusive

AI voice startup Vapi hits $500M valuation after winning Amazon Ring over 40 rivals

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Amazon Ring, facing a surge in customer-support calls during last year’s holiday season, evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before choosing startup Vapi to handle its inbound phone traffic. Today, Ring routes 100% of its inbound calls through Vapi’s platform.

That deployment helped Vapi raise a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a valuation of around $500 million after investment, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ring turned to Vapi in mid-Q4 last year, when it was weighing whether to expand call-center capacity, rely more heavily on traditional automated phone systems, or deploy AI agents that could respond more naturally to customers, Vapi Chief Executive Jordan Dearsley (pictured above, left) told TechCrunch. Dearsley believes Ring chose Vapi because if offered Ring engineers granular control over how the AI agents behaved in live customer interactions.

Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon Ring, said Ring’s customer satisfaction scores improved after deploying Vapi’s platform and that the company’s teams were able to tune the AI agent experience without depending on engineering. “A lot of AI tools promise great outcomes — Vapi has delivered on them,” he said.

Founded by Dearsley and his University of Waterloo classmate Nikhil Gupta (pictured above, right), Vapi grew out of an AI therapist Dearsley built in 2023 for conversations during his daily walks. The pair, who had gone through Y Combinator with productivity startup Superpowered, found that while few people wanted the therapy product itself, startups were increasingly interested in the low-latency voice infrastructure underneath it. This led them to pivot to Vapi and launch the platform publicly in 2024.

Vapi provides tools for companies to build, deploy, and manage voice agents across customer support, lead qualification, appointment scheduling, and outbound sales.

Image Credits:Vapi

The startup says it has now handled more than 1 billion calls through its platform, with usage accelerating as enterprises move more customer interactions onto AI systems. Vapi, Dearsley said, currently processes between 1 million and 5 million calls a day, with enterprise customers accounting for the bulk of that volume.

In addition to Amazon Ring, Vapi’s enterprise customers include Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit. The startup also operates a self-serve developer platform that has been used by more than 1 million developers.

“Because we started from self-serve and had such a wide developer footprint, we were already battle-tested at significant scale before we signed our first major enterprise customer,” Dearsley said.

Other investors participating in the Series B round included Microsoft’s M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing Vapi’s total funding to $72 million. The startup is currently at an annual recurring revenue run rate in the “healthy” eight figures, an investor source told TechCrunch.

Vapi is part of a growing wave of AI voice startups that includes Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Bland, Retell, and ElevenLabs, as companies race to build systems capable of handling customer conversations with minimal human involvement. Dearsley said Vapi differentiates itself by focusing less on pre-packaged applications and more on the infrastructure and orchestration layer behind voice agents, particularly for enterprises that want greater control over reliability, compliance, and model behavior.

The startup currently has around 100 employees and plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market teams.

“The golden problem is taking this indeterminate beast that is a model and taming it,” Dearsley said. “If you can do that, then you can provide value to the world.”

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How one venture firm is investing in an increasingly fragmented world

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The world today is riven by cultural differences, political divisions, and geopolitical disputes — a challenging environment for any investor hunting for startups that can grow large enough to deliver venture-scale returns.

Kompas VC has developed a regionally sensitive strategy to help it navigate, and invest in, this fragmented world. And it’s putting fresh capital towards this approach with a new €160 million fund ($187.5 million), the firm told TechCrunch.

“We see the world really falling into three main spheres of economic activity, of political activity — the U.S., Europe, and China,” Sebastian Peck, partner at Kompas VC, told TechCrunch. “We certainly see today that these three domains follow very, very different trajectories.”

Kompas has staked its reputation on backing startups that tackle core industrial competitiveness challenges, from manufacturing and supply chains to critical infrastructure and sustainability. Those themes haven’t disappeared, but different regions emphasize them to varying degrees.

“There was a lot of enthusiasm around these themes back in 2021,” Peck said. “In 2026, we’re in a very, very different paradigm. It’s all about AI, it’s all about fast growth, very explosive growth. A lot of big topics that we partially play to but also are not really part of what we stand for.”

“Our focus is in the physical world, anything around producing physical goods,” he added, saying that Kompas focuses on startups working on decarbonization, productivity, and risk management. “We’ve found our niche.”

Three people standing on a stone stairway.
Kompas VC partners, from left: Talia Rafaeli, Andreas Winter-Extra, and Sebastian PeckImage Credits:Kompas VC /

That niche turns out to be pretty broad. Reshoring is en vogue in nearly every market, and depending on the startup, those markets typically have more than enough scale for a firm like Kompas.

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Though dwarfed by some venture funds these days, Kompas’s newly raised second fund should give it ample opportunity to lead early stage rounds with checks ranging from €3 million to €5 million. 

As a European fund, Kompas has access to a range of founders and startups in the region. But it must weigh how global fragmentation might limit the potential for some to deliver venture returns. Peck cites prefab housing as an example. The approach is widely used in Scandinavian countries, but it isn’t as common in Germany or the rest of Europe, let alone the United States.

“It feels like such an intuitive solution. It’s a product that is effectively an industrial product. It should be highly scalable,” he said. Ultimately, the reason it doesn’t resonate outside Scandinavia has more to do with “cultural conditioning” than the technology itself, he said. “In that industry, if the U.S. isn’t the market you can go to, you need to look very, very carefully at whether there’s a large enough addressable market.”

The fragmentation extends beyond housing. For example, in Europe, sustainability is still broadly attractive, in contrast to the U.S., where the theme doesn’t have the cachet it did several years ago. 

Still, a lot can change quickly, Peck acknowledges. “We are investing over 10-, 15-year horizons. That’s a few legislative periods to bridge, and sometimes things swing in unexpected directions.”

The shifting landscape poses a challenge, but also an opportunity for a smaller investor like Kompas. “I think there’s a great space for highly focused, highly specialized, smaller funds like ours to be the first check-in and bring sweep up certain themes and certain founders,” Peck said. 

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Redwood Materials lays off 10% in restructuring to chase energy storage business

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Redwood Materials has laid off around 135 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce, as it restructures to better accommodate its growing energy storage business, TechCrunch has learned.

The cuts come just five months after Redwood cut 5% of its workforce, and three months after it closed a $425 million funding round that boosted the battery recycling company’s valuation to north of $6 billion, as TechCrunch previously reported.

It’s been a difficult time in the battery industry lately. Earlier this month, battery recycler Ascend Elements filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing “insurmountable” financial challenges. Some battery-makers have also restructured or gone out of business as the automotive industry in the U.S. has backed away from its most optimistic and ambitious plans to transition to electric vehicles.

But Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel told employees that this new round of cuts is not a sign that the company is heading down the same path.

“Redwood today is the strongest it’s ever been,” Straubel wrote in an email to the workers who weren’t laid off, according to a copy viewed by TechCrunch. “The materials business is well on its way to profitability and has an exciting roadmap ahead.”

Straubel noted that Redwood “continue[s] to dominate the US battery recycling market” but also touted the company’s “great momentum” in its new energy storage business. Redwood has recently announced deals with Crusoe AI and, most recently, electric automaker Rivian to provide recycled batteries that can be used to power those companies’ facilities. The company declined to comment beyond the contents of Straubel’s email.

In his message, Straubel wrote that “parts of the company have expanded faster than needed to support the direction” of Redwood. As a result, he said Redwood is making cuts across multiple divisions, including the engineering and operations organizations, according to an employee who was granted anonymity to discuss the layoffs.

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“We are confident that we can deliver on our critical projects with a smaller team that is more focused,” he wrote. “We have successfully adapted to changes in the market that have bankrupted many of our competitors.”

Straubel went on to write that he is “more excited than ever with our path ahead as we build the most integrated and cost-effective critical materials and energy storage business in the world.”

“This is a self-sustaining business and will continue to make this company more valuable over time. We have the team and the technology to do what no other company can,” he wrote.

Workers who were laid off were told by Redwood’s chief HR officer that the layoffs were made “to sharpen our focus, our work and the size of our teams to support the direction Redwood is going in the future,” according to a copy of her email, which was viewed by TechCrunch.

Employees who were laid off are receiving severance and paid health benefits, according to Straubel’s email, as well as “career transition assistance.”

“I am grateful to the approximately 135 employees who we say goodbye to today — they’ve all contributed to building Redwood,” he wrote.

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Cracks are starting to form on fusion energy’s funding boom

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It happens in every emerging industry: founders and investors push toward a common goal, until the money starts to roll in and that shared vision begins to diverge.

Cracks are emerging in the fusion power world, which I saw firsthand at The Economist’s Fusion Fest in London last week. It didn’t dampen the overall buoyant mood, lifted by fusion startups’ fundraising haul of $1.6 billion in the last 12 months. But people had differing opinions on two key questions: When should fusion startups go public? And are side businesses a distraction?

Going public was at the top of everyone’s minds. In the last four months, TAE Technologies and General Fusion have announced plans to merge with publicly traded companies. Both stand to receive hundreds of millions of dollars to keep their R&D efforts alive, and investors, some of whom have kept the faith for 20 years, finally see an opportunity to cash out.

Not everyone is in agreement. Most of those who I spoke to were worried these companies were going public far too early and that they hadn’t achieved key milestones that many view as vital in judging the progress of a fusion company.

First, a recap: TAE announced its merger with Trump Media & Technology Group in December. Though the deal isn’t yet completed, the fusion side of the business has already received $200 million of a potential $300 million in cash from the deal, giving it some runway to continue planning its power plant. (The remainder will reportedly land in its bank account once it files the S-4 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.)

General Fusion said in January that it would go public via a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company. The deal could net the company $335 million and value the combined entity at $1 billion. 

Both companies could use the cash.

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Before the merger announcement, General Fusion was struggling to raise funds, and around this time last year it laid off 25% of its staff as CEO Greg Twinney posted a public letter pleading for investment. It received a brief reprieve in August when investors threw it a $22 million lifeline, but that sort of money doesn’t last long in the fusion world, where equipment, experiments, and employees don’t come cheap.

TAE’s position wasn’t quite as dire, but it still required some funds. Pre-merger, the company raised nearly $2 billion, which sounds like a lot, but keep in mind the company is nearly 30 years old. What’s more, its valuation pre-merger was $2 billion, according to PitchBook. Investors were breaking even at best.

Neither company has hit scientific breakeven, a key milestone that shows a reactor design has power plant potential. Many observers doubt they’ll hit that mark before other privately held startups do. One executive told me, if they were in those shoes, they’re not sure how they would fill time on quarterly earnings calls if the companies didn’t hit scientific breakeven soon.

If TAE or General Fusion doesn’t deliver results, several people feared the public markets would sour on the entire fusion industry.

Now, not all may be lost. TAE has already started marketing other products, including power electronics and radiation therapy for cancer. That could give the company some near-term revenue to placate shareholders. General Fusion, though, hasn’t revealed any such plans.

And therein lies another divide: fusion companies remain split on whether they should pursue revenue now or wait until they have a working power plant.

Some companies are embracing the opportunity to make money along the way. Not a bad strategy! Fusion is a long game, so why not improve your odds? Both Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Tokamak Energy have said they’ll be selling magnets. TAE and Shine Technologies are both in nuclear medicine.

Other startups are worried that side hustles could become a distraction. Inertia Enterprises, for example, told me that they’re laser-focused on their power plant. That jibes with what another investor told me months ago: — they were worried that fusion startups could get distracted by profitable, but tangential businesses and fall off the lead. 

There wasn’t consensus on the right time to go public either. I heard a few proposed milestones. Some believe startups should first reach that scientific breakeven milestone, in which a fusion reaction generates more energy than it needs to ignite. No startup has achieved that yet. The other possibilities are facility breakeven — when the reactor makes more energy than the entire site needs to operate — and commercial viability — when a reactor makes enough electrons to sell a meaningful amount to the grid.

We may have an answer to that question sooner than later. Commonwealth Fusion Systems expects it will hit scientific breakeven sometime next year, and some think the company might use that as an opportunity to go public.

The final days of the Tesla Model X and S are here. All bets are on the Cybercab.

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It’s been looming for weeks, but now the end is near: Just a few hundred Tesla Model S and Model X vehicles remain unsold. Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed this week in a post on X that custom orders of the Model S sedan and Model X SUV are over. “All that’s left are some in inventory,” he wrote.

Musk first announced Tesla’s plan to end Model S and Model X production back in January. And the data helps explain why.

Sales of the Tesla Model X and Model S have fallen steadily over the years as the company’s high volume and cheaper entries — the Model 3 and Model Y — took over. Tesla doesn’t separate S and X sales, instead combining them under “other models,” a category that now includes the Cybertruck. And those combined figures show S and X sales peaking in 2017 at 101,312 vehicles before declining to 50,850 vehicles (including Cybertruck) in 2025 — a fraction of the 1.63 million vehicles it delivered globally last year.

In other words, their deaths were inevitable. What comes next is a bit more complicated.

Musk isn’t filling the void left by the Model X and Model S with a traditional EV; he ditched plans to produce a lower-cost EV that was expected to be priced around $25,000. Instead, Musk is placing his bets on the Optimus robot, which has yet to go into production, and the Cybercab, an all-electric two-seater autonomous vehicle that was first shown as a concept in 2024.

Tesla plans to build Optimus robots at its Fremont, California, factory once production of the Model S and Model X end, which could be any day now that final orders have been taken. Musk has said Tesla will begin producing the Cybercab this month at its factory in Austin, Texas. 

A look back

The Model S and X EVs have taken a backseat to the more affordable Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. But their debuts, and initial sales, marked two critical moments in Tesla’s colorful and often volatile history. The Model S launched in 2012 as its first volume EV. Its popularity not only changed how consumers viewed EVs, it prompted legacy automakers — long dismissive of the value of electric vehicles — to take notice.

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The Model X followed in fall 2015 and was famously described by Musk as the faberge egg of EVs.

“I think we got more carried away with the X,” Musk said in a September 2015 press interview attended by this reporter just an hour before Tesla’s Model X delivery event began. “I’m not sure anyone should make this car.”

The Model X was often delayed, and initially criticized for its complexity. But it ultimately introduced the company to a new market: women.

The Model X raised Tesla’s profile, and it set the company up for its next big move: an affordable mass produced EV. The Model 3 had a difficult start, but it ended up catapulting Tesla into the mainstream. The Model Y clinched its status, helping Tesla widen the gap as the top-selling EV producer globally until China’s BYD took over that top global EV sales spot in 2025 when it delivered 2.26 million EVs.

Tesla continues to sell thousands of Model 3 and Model Y, but its growth has stalled, and even reversed. The company reported in January that it sold 1.69 million vehicles in 2025, a decrease for the second year in a row. Its efforts to boost sales with cheaper, stripped-down versions of the Model 3 and Model Y that were introduced in October have had a modicum of success, according to first-quarter 2026 figures that were reported April 2.

Tesla delivered 358,023 EVs globally in the first three months of the year, about 6% more than the same period in 2025, which also happened to be the company’s worst quarter in years. The figure was below analysts’ expectations of around 368,000.

But never mind that. In Musk’s view — one which he is well compensated for — Tesla isn’t an automaker or a sustainable energy company, as he has described it before. Tesla is an AI company and his new gambit goes all in on that mission.

Cybercab risks

The Optimus robot is one part of the Tesla AI effort. But its perhaps the Cybercab that best embodies, and exposes the risks of, the company’s AI-first campaign.

The Cybercab was designed to be used as an autonomous vehicle without traditional controls like a steering wheel or pedals — meaning once it launches it will be without the initial backup of human safety operator.

The first Cybercab rolled off the Tesla factory assembly line in February and is supposed to go into mass production this month. Although that date could slip, as so many have in Tesla’s history.

Unlike Tesla’s previous vehicles, the challenges aren’t in its production (who can forget the production hell of the Model 3). Instead, it faces a major regulatory hurdle before it can ever hit the road. Federal motor vehicle safety standards place requirements on vehicles such as having a steering wheel and pedals. There is no evidence that Tesla has applied for an exemption, according to publicly available files with the Federal Register and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The vehicles will also rely on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software to navigate public streets and safely shuttle passengers to their destination. Despite improvements to FSD and limited driverless robotaxi tests in Austin, Tesla has not yet demonstrated that its software can operate reliably at scale.

And that piece requires more than technical mastery. Robotaxi operations are also tricky. And in states like California, they also require permit to deploy and charge for rides in driverless vehicles.

Zoox, the autonomous vehicle company owned by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, may end up clearing a path for Tesla and its Cybercab. Zoox received an exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that allows the company to demonstrate its custom-built robotaxis, which lack pedals or a steering wheel, on public roads. Zoox is now going through a public process to have that exemption extended to commercial operations.

Musk tried to sell shareholders on why the risk was worth it during the company’s earnings call in January.

“The vast majority of miles traveled will be autonomous in the future,” Musk said at the time, later noting that the CyberCab is super optimized for minimum cost per mile and also for a much higher duty cycle. “I would say probably less than I’m just guessing, but probably less than 5% of miles driven will be where somebody’s actually driving the car themselves in the future, maybe as low as 1%.”



Meet the former Apple designer building a new AI interface at Hark

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A secretive AI lab founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock shared new details about what it believes is a novel marriage of model-building and hardware design that will change how humans interact with intelligent software.

The company said in a statement it would design multi-modal end-to-end models, their hardware, and their interfaces in tandem to deliver a “seamless end-to-end personal intelligence product.” The system will have a persistent memory of your life and can listen, see, and interact with the world in real time.

How that will be executed remains unclear outside the company, but Hark’s ambition is representative of Silicon Valley’s ongoing hunt for the killer app that will make AI a desired consumer product, not features kludged dubiously into existing digital platforms.

“My view is simple: today’s AI models aren’t nearly intelligent enough, they feel quite dumb, and the devices we use to access them are fundamentally pre-AI,” Adcock wrote in a January internal memo shared with TechCrunch. “We’re moving toward a world that looks more like sci-fi characters Jarvis or Her, with systems that anticipate, adapt, and genuinely care about the people using them.”

Details are intentionally sparse, but Hark points to Director of Design Abidur Chowdhury as a key hire. Previously an industrial designer at Apple credited with leading the design team behind the iPhone Air and other recent models, London-born Chowdhury left last fall after meeting with Adcock and buying into his vision for updating the way humans automate their lives.

In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Chowdhury declined repeated invitations to spill the beans on Hark’s roadmap, only saying that the public can anticipate a first release of the company’s AI models this summer. Asked about different approaches to working and living alongside AI, the designer did offer a few clues. 

 

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“What was very clear for me at the time is that the world is clearly changing, but we’re using the same devices…everything’s been designed around these existing platforms,” Chowdhury told. “Very few people are really going after what the future is. There’s so much that we could be doing if intelligence was at the base layer of everything we touched instead of becoming an app or a website at that upper layer.”

Chowdhury points to the awkwardness of everyday tasks of filling out forms, sharing information between devices, or the mundane tasks of booking travel or planning home renovation.

“Those are entire evenings of time where I have to plan…the anxiety of, you know, I spend my work day thinking about this in the back of my head, oh, I have to do this,” Chowdhury said. “We genuinely believe that all of the small tasks that pile up to be kind of gargantuan things today can be sort of automated from our lives.”

Chowdhury says the company knows what it is building, but can’t yet say how users will experience it. His comments suggest that wearables, like Meta’s Glasses, seem unlikely.

“I’m not the biggest believer in a lot of the wearable AI platforms that people are talking about right now,” Chowdhury said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to put a layer between humanity and the interfaces we use in the world. I have similar discomfort with pins, or that kind of stuff that is going around with cameras.”

When generative AI first arrived on the scene, Chowdhury at first saw it as a flash in the pan, but successive generations of models convinced him that it would change his work. Hark, the word, means to pay attention, which Chowdhury says offers a thoughtful framing for the company’s mission.

“Traditional user experience always is about finding the simplest thing for everyone,” he told TechCrunch. “The future user experience will be finding the right thing for each individual. And I believe that can happen. But it requires a lot of work.”

The focus on elegance and simplicity for users echoes the high points of Apple’s product design, and naturally brings to mind Jony Ive, the legendary former Apple designer who is now developing AI native-hardware at OpenAI. A comparison that a Hark’s spokesperson declined to explore. 

Another parallel that comes to mind is how Elon Musk’s xAI work on advanced models dovetails with Tesla’s work on autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

There is similar corporate synergy between Adcock’s humanoid robotics company Figure and the new AI labs. Hark’s models are already being trained on Figure’s robots, although it is not clear to what end. A person familiar with the companies’ plans says there is no intention to combine them.

Hark employs 45 engineers and designers, including former Meta AI researchers and designers from Apple and Tesla, all of whom are working on the same campus that hosts Adcock’s other companies. Hark expects to begin using a new cluster of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs in April.

Now Hark, backed by $100 million in personal seed money from Adcock, will join the scramble for talent as the world’s biggest companies try to figure out the format that brings deep learning models into daily life — and at a time when frustration with the existing models for digital life is hitting a fever pitch.

“It just feels like there’s an opportunity for better, and I’ve not felt like that since the iPhone came up,” Chowdhury said.

The SEC drops its four-year-old investigation into EV startup Faraday Future

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The Securities and Exchange Commission has closed its investigation into electric vehicle startup Faraday Future, despite SEC staff on the case recommending an enforcement action last year, TechCrunch has learned.

Four sources familiar with the investigation, who were granted anonymity to speak about the government case, told TechCrunch that the SEC informed the company and people involved in the probe about the closure this past week.

The dismissal of the case comes amid a historic drop in enforcement actions by the SEC, which only initiated four cases against publicly-traded companies in its 2025 fiscal year, a recent report shows. The SEC did not respond to an after-hours request for comment.

The investigation into Faraday Future lasted for nearly four years. The SEC was looking at whether the EV startup made “false and misleading statements” when it went public in a 2021 merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), and was also probing whether Faraday Future faked the sales of its first electric vehicles in 2023 — a claim that’s been made by at least three former employee whistleblowers.

The financial regulator sent the startup multiple subpoenas, regulatory filings from Faraday Future show. The SEC also took depositions of multiple former employees and executives in 2024 and 2025, three of the people familiar with the case have told TechCrunch.

In July 2025, Faraday Future revealed the SEC had sent the company and multiple executives — including founder Jia Yueting — letters known as “Wells Notices.” The SEC sends Wells Notices when staff working a case have decided to recommend the agency take enforcement action.

“We can now put all our energy into strategy execution. Over the past five years, we had to spend a great deal of time, effort, and money on cooperating with the investigation,” Jia said in a statement Sunday. Faraday Future said the SEC informed the company that it won’t take action against any of its executives, either.

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It’s not clear if Faraday Future ever responded to the Wells Notices sent last year. As recently as February, the company disclosed in regulatory filings that it had not. “The Company and executives plan to engage with the SEC to explain why enforcement action is not warranted,” Faraday Future wrote in such a filing last month.

The Department of Justice also sent Faraday Future requests for information after the SEC opened its investigation in 2022. Faraday Future has referred to this as an “investigation” in regulatory filings; the DOJ has never confirmed if it opened a full probe, and it did not respond to an after-hours request for comment.

It is rare for the SEC to not pursue an enforcement action after sending a Wells Notice. One study done at the Wharton School in 2020 showed that around 85% of targets who receive a Wells Notice wind up in court with the SEC.

The SEC investigated nearly every electric vehicle startup that went public in a SPAC merger over the last six years. In almost all of those cases, the agency reached a settlement with the startups. It dismissed an investigation into Lucid Motors in 2023, and as TechCrunch first reported in February, the SEC ended a probe into bankrupt EV startup Fisker late last year.

Origins of the investigation

Faraday Future was founded in California in 2014 by Jia, a businessman who at the time was running a booming tech conglomerate in China known as LeEco. It was one of many new companies trying to become the “next Tesla” or, optimistically, a “Tesla killer.”

Faraday snapped up talent from Tesla, other automakers, and also tech companies like Apple, and at one point employed as many as around 1,400 employees. But things got bumpy quickly. The company turned heads, in both good and bad ways, at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, with a flashy concept car and the lofty goal of being as disruptive as the iPhone.

The company revealed its first vehicle the following year: a luxury electric SUV called the FF91. By the end of 2017, though the company was nearly out of cash and had laid off or furloughed hundreds of workers. Jia’s company in China had collapsed, and he self-exiled to California as the government in his home country placed him on a debtor blacklist. (It was at this time that a close business associate to Jeffrey Epstein pitched the sex criminal on investing in Faraday Future, as well as other EV startups, as TechCrunch recently revealed. Epstein never invested.)

Faraday Future was rescued by an investment from major Chinese real estate conglomerate Evergrande. But that relationship fell apart quickly, too, with Evergrande walking away by the end of 2018 and Faraday Future laying off even more employees.

Jia nominally stepped aside as CEO in 2019 and also filed for personal bankruptcy to settle billions of dollars of LeEco debt he had personally guaranteed. But behind the scenes, he was still largely in charge of the company.

This became an issue when Faraday Future went public in 2021 and raised about $1 billion. Members of the newly-appointed public company board believed that Faraday’s executives had misrepresented Jia’s control over the day-to-day operations — especially after a short seller report was published that scrutinized Faraday Future — and formed a special committee to investigate.

That committee hired an outside law firm and a forensic accounting firm, and within the first few months it started reporting its findings directly to the SEC, the three people familiar with the investigation told TechCrunch.

Between January and April 2022, Jia was sidelined as a result of the board’s investigation, a senior VP named Matthias Aydt (who is now co-CEO with Jia) was placed on probation for six months, and another VP named Jerry Wang (who is Jia’s nephew) was suspended. (Wang ultimately resigned after “failure to cooperate with the investigation,” according to company filings, but is now back with Faraday Future.)

The committee’s work also showed that Faraday Future had, in the two years before it went public, survived in part on multi-million-dollar loans made to the company by low-level employees with connections to Jia — known as “related party transactions” in legal parlance.

On March 31, 2022, Faraday Future disclosed that the SEC had opened its investigation. The startup revealed the requests for information from the DOJ in June.

Dodging another bullet

Through the rest of 2022, and amid the early stages of the SEC investigation, employees and people close to Jia waged a campaign to regain control of the board and his company. This eventually resulted in death threats against some directors, who ultimately resigned, paving the way for people close to Jia to run the company once more.

Faraday Future finally delivered the first few FF91 SUVs in early 2023. Former employees have sued the company alleging that these were not true sales, and that the company had misled investors. The SEC investigators working the case subpoenaed Faraday Future about issues related to these sales, filings show.

Former executives and employees were initially deposed by the SEC in 2024, according to the people familiar with the investigation. The SEC sat some of them for longer depositions in the first half of 2025, the people said.

The Wells Notice sent in July 2025 said SEC staff had made “a preliminary determination to recommend that the Commission file an enforcement action against the Company alleging violations of various anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws.”

Specifically, the Wells Notice referenced “purported false or misleading statements” made during the SPAC merger process about “related party transactions” and Jia’s “role in the Company.” Jia, his nephew Wang, and two other unnamed employees also received Wells Notices.

Faraday Future is still trying to sell the FF91, but it has also recently changed its business in a few ways. The company is importing more affordable hybrid and electric vans from China. It also appears to be selling re-badged versions of Chinese robots, and turned a publicly-traded biotechnology company into a firm focused on crypto.

Those efforts have not stopped the company’s struggles. On Friday, the company announced it had received a warning from the Nasdaq that its stock price was under the minimum of $1, which could eventually lead to the company being de-listed.

This story has been updated with a statement from Faraday Future.

Mistral bets on ‘build-your-own AI’ as it takes on OpenAI, Anthropic in the enterprise

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Most enterprise AI projects fail not because companies lack the technology, but because the models they’re using don’t understand their business. The models are often trained on the internet, rather than decades of internal documents, workflows, and institutional knowledge. 

That gap is where Mistral, the French AI startup, sees opportunity. On Tuesday, the company announced Mistral Forge, a platform that lets enterprises build custom models trained on their own data. Mistral announced the platform at Nvidia GTC, Nvidia’s annual technology conference, which this year is focused heavily on AI and agentic models for enterprise.

It’s a pointed move for Mistral, a company that has built its business on corporate clients while rivals OpenAI and Anthropic have soared ahead in terms of consumer adoption. CEO Arthur Mensch says Mistral’s laser focus on the enterprise is working: The company is on track to surpass $1 billion in annual recurring revenue this year.

A big part of doubling down on enterprise is giving companies more control over their data and their AI systems, Mistral says. 

“What Forge does is it lets enterprises and governments customize AI models for their specific needs,” Elisa Salamanca, Mistral’s head of product, told TechCrunch. 

Several companies in the enterprise AI space already claim to offer similar capabilities, but most focus on fine-tuning existing models or layering proprietary data on top through techniques like retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These approaches don’t fundamentally retrain models; instead, they adapt or query them at runtime using company data.

Mistral, by contrast, says it is enabling companies to train models from scratch. In theory, this could address some of the limitations of more common approaches — for example, better handling of non-English or highly domain-specific data, and greater control over model behavior. It could also allow companies to train agentic systems using reinforcement learning and reduce reliance on third-party model providers, avoiding risks like model changes or deprecation. 

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Forge customers can build their custom models using Mistral’s wide library of open-weight AI models, which includes small models such as the recently introduced Mistral Small 4. According to Mistral co-founder and chief technologist, Timothée Lacroix, Forge can help unlock more value out of its existing models. 

“The trade-offs that we make when we build smaller models is that they just cannot be as good on every topic as their larger counterparts, and so the ability to customize them lets us pick what we emphasize and what we drop,” Lacroix said. 

Mistral advises on which models and infrastructure to use, but both decisions stay with the customer, Lacroix said. And for teams that need more than guidance, Forge comes with Mistral’s team of forward-deployed engineers who embed directly with customers to surface the right data and adapt to their needs — a model borrowed from the likes of IBM and Palantir. 

“As a product, Forge already comes with all the tooling and infrastructure so you can generate synthetic data pipelines,” Salamanca said. “But understanding how to build the right evals and making sure that you have the right amount of data is something that enterprises usually don’t have the right expertise for, and that’s what the FDEs bring to the table.” 

Mistral has already made Forge available to partners, including Ericsson, the European Space Agency, Italian consulting company Reply, and Singapore’s DSO and HTX. Early adopters also include ASML, the Dutch chipmaker that led Mistral’s Series C round last September at a €11.7 billion valuation (approximately $13.8 billion at the time).

These partnerships are emblematic of what Mistral expects Forge’s main use cases to be. According to Mistral’s chief revenue officer Marjorie Janiewicz, these include governments who need to tailor models for their language and culture; financial players with high compliance requirements; manufacturers with customization needs; and tech companies that need to tune models to their code base.

Stripe, PayPal Ventures bet on India’s Xflow to fix cross-border B2B payments

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Xflow, an Indian fintech startup, has secured backing from both Stripe and PayPal Ventures in a $16.6 million funding round. The investment comes as the company works to carve out a position in cross-border B2B payments, a market still dominated by banks and manual processes.

The Series A round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from existing investors Square Peg, Stripe, Lightspeed, and Moore Capital, while PayPal Ventures joined as a new backer. The all-equity round values the Bengaluru-based startup at $85 million post-investment and brings its total funding to more than $32 million to date.

Despite rapid digitization in domestic payments, cross-border B2B transfers for Indian exporters remain heavily reliant on banks, often with limited visibility into fees, settlement timelines, and the final amount received in rupees. The friction is particularly acute for larger exporters moving millions of dollars into India to fund salaries and local operations, creating an opening for fintech infrastructure players such as Xflow that promise greater transparency and speed in international money movement.

Founded in 2021, Xflow provides cross-border payment infrastructure for businesses ranging from exporters and SaaS firms to platforms and freelancers, enabling them to collect international payments, manage foreign exchange, and settle funds in India.

“Cross-border B2B payments were stuck in a different age compared to UPI,” co-founder Anand Balaji (pictured above, center) said in an interview, referring to India’s widely used instant domestic payments network, the Unified Payments Interface.

Balaji, who previously helped build out Stripe’s India business, founded Xflow with former Stripe colleagues Ashwin Bhatnagar (pictured above, right) and Abhijit Chandrasekaran (pictured above, left).

Last year, Xflow said it enabled Indian businesses to collect payments from more than 100 countries in over 25 currencies. It processed close to $1 billion in annualized cross-border payment volume last year, marking roughly 10-fold growth from the same period in 2024, Balaji told TechCrunch.

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According to the company, its customer base has expanded to about 15,000 businesses spanning SaaS firms, global capability centers (which are offshore units that multinationals operate in India), IT services exporters, freelancers, and fintech platforms.

Transaction sizes vary widely by segment, with global capability centers averaging about $1 million to $2 million per transaction, goods exporters around $30,000 to $40,000, and freelancers roughly $3,000, according to Balaji.

Xflow is positioning itself as a payments infrastructure provider rather than a direct payments application, offering APIs that allow platforms and exporters to embed cross-border money movement into their own products.

“We didn’t want to build the next Wise — we want to power the next thousand Wises,” Balaji said.

The startup has also introduced an AI-based foreign exchange tool to help finance teams optimize the timing of currency conversions. Xflow says the feature has generated incremental gains for some customers through data-driven foreign exchange decisions.

The tool allows businesses to set target conversion rates rather than accepting prevailing bank quotes. Balaji likened the feature to limit orders in trading — instructions to buy or sell only at a specified price.

“What we’ve added is the prediction layer and the ability to actually set a limit order,” he said. The model currently provides a three-day forecast with about 92% confidence, Balaji said, though TechCrunch could not independently verify that figure.

Xflow faces competition from banks that still dominate large cross-border B2B transfers, as well as fintech players such as Wise, Payoneer, and Skydo at the lower end of the market. But Balaji said the startup’s focus on high-value transactions and API-led infrastructure differentiates it from many rivals.

The startup plans to deploy the new capital toward building additional products on top of its core payments infrastructure and securing regulatory licenses in new markets, Balaji said. Xflow is preparing to roll out import capabilities in the coming months and is pursuing licenses in markets including Singapore, while already holding a payments license in Canada, even as it remains focused on India as its primary market.

Xflow said it has also received final authorization from the Reserve Bank of India for a Payment Aggregator–Cross Border (PA-CB) license covering both exports and imports. The startup has signed platform partnerships with Easebuzz and Drip Capital to embed its cross-border capabilities into their offerings.

Backing from Stripe and PayPal Ventures, Balaji said, has helped strengthen the startup’s credibility with banking and regulatory partners, even as it continues to work with multiple payment providers commercially.

The startup currently has about 65 employees as it scales its cross-border infrastructure business.

Qualcomm backs SpotDraft to scale on-device contract AI with valuation doubling toward $400M

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As demand grows for privacy-first enterprise AI that can run without sending sensitive data to the cloud, SpotDraft has raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B extension to scale its on-device contract review tech for regulated legal workflows.

The extension values SpotDraft at around $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly double its $190 million post-money valuation following its $56 million Series B in February of last year.

Across regulated sectors, enterprises have moved quickly to test generative AI, but privacy, security, and data governance concerns continue to slow adoption for sensitive workflows — especially in legal, where contracts can include privileged information, intellectual property, pricing, and deal terms. Industry research has consistently flagged data security and privacy as key barriers to wider GenAI deployment in professional services, pushing vendors like SpotDraft to pursue architectures that keep core contract intelligence on the user’s device rather than routing it through the cloud.

At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2025, SpotDraft demonstrated its VerifAI workflow running end-to-end on Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops, executing contract review and edits offline while keeping the document on the local machine. SpotDraft said internet connectivity is still required for login, licensing, and collaboration features, but contract review, risk scoring, and redlining can run fully offline without sending documents to the cloud.

SpotDraft sees legal as an early proving ground for on-device enterprise AI, arguing that sensitive contracts often cannot be routed through external cloud models due to privacy, security, and compliance constraints.

“The future of how enterprise AI is going to be — right now, there’s got to be AI that is close to the document, which is privacy critical, latency sensitive, [and] legally sensitive, and those are the things that will move on device,” said Shashank Bijapur (pictured above, left), co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, in an interview.

SpotDraft says VerifAI’s on-device capability extends beyond simply generating summaries, with the tool designed to apply playbooks and recommendations directly inside Microsoft Word, the way legal teams already work. “VerifAI will compare a contract against your guidelines, your playbooks, your prior policies,” said Madhav Bhagat (pictured above, right), co-founder and CTO of SpotDraft.

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SpotDraft's VerifAI in Microsoft Word
SpotDraft’s VerifAI works in Microsoft WordImage Credits:SpotDraft

Bijapur told TechCrunch that the demand for on-device AI is emerging most clearly in tightly regulated sectors, including defense and pharma, where internal security reviews and data residency requirements can slow or block the use of cloud-based AI tools for sensitive documents.

On-device models have rapidly closed the gap with cloud-based systems, both in output quality and response times, Bhagat said. “Now we’ve come to a place where, in terms of eval, we are seeing as little as 5% difference between the frontier models, and some of these fine-tuned on device models,” he said, adding that speeds on newer chips are now “one-third of what we get in the cloud.”

Since its launch in 2017, SpotDraft said it has reached more than 700 customers, up from around 400 in February last year, and counts Apollo.io, Panasonic, Zeplin, and Whatfix among its users. The company said adoption is rising on its contract lifecycle management platform, with customers now processing over 1 million contracts annually, contract volumes growing 173% year-over-year, and nearly 50,000 monthly active users. It also expects 100% year-over-year revenue growth in 2026, after growing 169% in 2024 and posting a similar growth rate in 2025, though it did not share specific revenue figures.

SpotDraft plans to use the new capital to deepen its product and AI capabilities and expand its enterprise presence across the Americas, the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), and India, Bijapur said, adding that Qualcomm’s involvement extends beyond financing into joint development and go-to-market efforts for on-device deployments. The startup’s on-device workflow is currently available to a limited set of customers, and the founders expect it to expand more broadly as compatible AI PC hardware becomes more widely available.

“SpotDraft’s ability to deploy their proprietary models securely on-device using Snapdragon platforms represents a meaningful advancement for a privacy-critical industry,” said Quinn Li, senior vice president, Qualcomm Technologies, and global head of Qualcomm Ventures.

Bengaluru- and New York-based SpotDraft said it has a team of 300-plus employees, including 15–20 in the U.S., where COO Akshay Verma is based, and four to five in the UK, with the rest of the workforce in Bengaluru.

To date, the startup has raised $92 million, including the latest Qualcomm Ventures investment. Its earlier investors include Vertex Growth Singapore, Trident Growth Partners, Xeed VC, Arkam Ventures, and Prosus Ventures.