Last Ride 🤖

☀️ Morning!

📈 December isn’t turning out an easy walk for the markets. Sensex ended flat yesterday, unable to crack through. The S&P crawled back 0.3%.

🚀 Only thing that’s running is GOOGL, thanks to that Quantum chip.

News wise, quite a light day, which isn’t surprising for the year end vibe.

Let’s hit it!

1 Big Thing: Cruise ends Robotaxi pursuit 🤖

San Francisco based Cruise, once regarded a leading contender in the robotaxi races, announced it will shut shop due to mounting losses.

Context: Cruise was acquired by General Motors, the major Detroit-automaker, for roughly $1 billion back in 2016. For nearly a decade, GM continued to fund the company’s experiments, against every single instinct it had as an automaker to remain cost disciplined.

GM had even brought in external backers like Microsoft, Walmart, Softbank, the best of the best to provide outside capital.

But the company struggled to give Cruise a free hand, and far underestimated how much money it would actually take until autonomy could be perfected.

An accident and a decade later, GM finally bucked under the pressure. GM will instead fold Cruise into its in-house autonomy unit which makes ADAS systems.

Why care: what started as a competitive arena for self-driving is now left with only 2 credible players, Google’s Waymo and Elon’s Tesla.

Macro theme: but autonomy is just around the corner. Just last week, Sundar Pichai disclosed Waymo now does 175,000 rides, every single week, across 5-6 major US cities. It’s all about how quickly regulations clear up for mass deployment.

2. What’s the hottest from venture town 💸

• Entrackr reports that Netrasemi, a young semi-chip design company based out of Kerala raised ₹10 crore in a pre-Series A round from Unicorn India Ventures. The company is building a couple of SOC microchips for edge AI applications, which are expected to be more power efficient and cost effective than current industry solutions.
• Education loan company Varthana secured $15 million from BlueOrchard Microfinance Fund. The company works with private schools across India to deploy loans for a wide range of activities, such as helping schools get the capital to fund facility expansions.
• Application and website testing platform, LambdaTest, raised $38 million in a round led by Avataar Ventures. The round will value the business at $400M. Founded in 2017, the company enables app testing across 3,000+ browser and device combinations. Fresh money will go towards doubling down on AI offerings as well as market expansion.

3. Two ad giants are merging 🤝

One of the world’s largest ad agencies, Omnicom Group, will pursue a $13 billion deal to buy it’s rival Interpublic, creating one of the largest ad agencies in the business.

Why care: with the growing influence of big tech and now the advent of AI, the creative and advertising industry continues to transform. The merger is expected to help both companies join forces and retain market dominance.

The deets: the combined group will have revenues of over $25 billion, making it the 3rd largest ad agency in the world, right behind Publicis and WPP.

Big picture: the incoming Trump administration is expected to be extremely friendly to mergers and acquisitions, so a lot of large companies are tempted to consider these moves.

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

🛵Amazon debuts Tez: Amazon has launched a pilot for its quick commerce service, delivering groceries and essentials in 15 minutes or less in Bengaluru.

💡Green leap: Google has partnered with Intersect Power and TPG Rise Climate to invest $20 billion in renewable energy projects. The investment is part of Google’s efforts to enhance its AI infrastructure.

That’s a wrap! Don’t let the Weekday blues get to you.

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