What’s that? We’re hearing it’s…Follow Friday? In that case, here's our Twitter account, which you should toss a follow, if you haven’t already.
Allow us to sweeten the pot further: We’re hosting the next installment of our Twitter Spaces series on climate tech on Tuesday at 3pm ET, and our guest will be Amy Chen, COO of cultivated meat company Upside Foods.
As we note later in this very newsletter, last month, Upside raised the biggest-ever funding round for a lab-grown meat company. Amy left her role as a marketing exec at PepsiCo last year for the startup, and we’ll chat all things cultivated-meat-at-scale with her on Tues.
Add it to your calendar here or…follow us on Twitter and keep an eye out.
In today’s edition: Want an EV? Too bad Venture funding in April
—Grace Donnelly, Dan McCarthy
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Ford
Gas prices are up, and the good news for automakers is that more Americans than ever are searching for EVs. The bad news is that automakers are having a hard time keeping up with demand.
What’s going on? EV availability has been constrained since the second half of 2021, due in part to supply-chain issues that are affecting all cars, such as the semiconductor shortage.
Tesla wait times stretch into 2023 for some models. While Ford says it’s beginning deliveries of its electric pickup trucks, and EV startups like Lucid and Fisker are planning to ramp up production later this year, expanding the manufacturing volume won’t happen fast enough to meet growing demand.
Reservations for these vehicles show promising interest, but updates over the last few weeks reveal just how long customers may have to wait to receive an EV.
One example: Ford started production of its F-150 Lightning on April 26. It’s the first automaker to bring a full-size electric pickup truck to the mainstream market, according to the company, and it has 200,000 interested buyers in the queue.
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When Ford stopped taking reservations for the F-150 Lightning in December, that list represented as much as a three-year wait to purchase the truck.
- Last month, the automaker announced plans to increase its production target from 40,000 trucks per year to 150,000 per year by the middle of 2023.
Big picture: “If you want an electric vehicle today, the fact is you should have signed up for one six months ago,” Ram Chandrasekaran, head of road transport at Wood Mackenzie, told Emerging Tech Brew in April. “Nobody’s looking at the price at the gas station and immediately getting their hands on an electric vehicle.”
Read the full story here, with updates on Nikola, Fisker, Lucid, and Rivian.—GD
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Francis Scialabba
After the climb, the descent.
Following a record-smashing 2021, a private market downturn has, by at least one measure, arrived.
By the numbers: In April, global venture funding hit its lowest point in over a year, falling to $47 billion, per Crunchbase. That’s 10% lower than the March total of $52 billion, and 12% lower than a year ago, and marks the second month in a row of year over year declines.
- In other words, this may be the start of a broader buttoning-up trend.
But let’s zoom out for some perspective. Whether or not the money machine gets turned off from here, April’s monthly total of $47 billion was still higher than any single monthly total in 2020.
And the slowdown didn’t prevent several megarounds from materializing:
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The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunneling venture, raised an eye-watering $675 million Series C. The company will use the cash to plow ahead with hiring “across engineering, operations, and production.”
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Anthropic, an AI research company that focuses on “AI safety” work, raised a $580 million Series B. The company, founded just a year ago by OpenAI alums, plans to spend the money building out “experimental infrastructure” so it can “improve the safety properties of computationally intensive AI models.” It will also hire a team around policy and social implications of these models.
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Upside Farms raised the biggest-ever funding round for a lab-grown meat company: a $400 million Series C. As we reported at the time, most of that money will go to building out a brand-new facility that can produce tens of millions of pounds of cultivated meat. The company expects construction to take at least a year…during which time it’s also crossing its fingers that regulators will greenlight the sale of cultivated meat in the US. TBD on that.
Looking ahead…Some investors and analysts say we’re on the brink of a deeper tech downturn.
Click here to read on-site.—DM
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Give yourself and your team a boost of security, productivity, and peace of mind. Try Dashlane for free.
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Auxin Solar is the small, mysterious solar company that sparked the Commerce Department investigation that has ground US solar to a halt.
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Clearview AI has agreed to not sell its facial recognition tech to most private organizations in the US, though it can still sell to state and federal agencies.
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Tesla paused most of its Shanghai manufacturing operations due to difficulty sourcing EV parts.
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Intel announced an AI-focused chip, aka: a Nvidia competitor.
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Google I/O happened over the last two days—here’s a recap of major announcements.
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Good things come in bundles. Smart Portfolios from eToro let you combine several crypto assets into one low-maintenance investment. Choose from five bundled asset collections, all of which come with automatic rebalancing. Sign up now and you’ll get $50 from eToro when you invest your first $500. Invest here.
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Pm Images/Getty Images
Stat: In 2021 alone, the amount of electronic waste discarded could weigh more than 57 million metric tons, the BBC reports.
Quote: “Until society prices carbon—no, there’s no way to make money on carbon capture other than through voluntary markets. It’s the Wild West.”—Eric Toone, technical lead investor for Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, to CNBC
Read: The 50 most interesting and effective AI companies, per Forbes.
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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?
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China will have a robot-built, 3D-printed dam ready in two years.
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Researchers have designed a microgrid for a future moon base.
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Hawaiian Airlines wants to roll out electric island-hoppers.
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Tiger Global, one of the most active venture investors in recent years, says it will “triple down” on its aggressive strategy despite market headwinds.
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Meatless Monday→Mycoprotein Monday?
A study published in Nature last week found that replacing just *20%* of beef demand with mushroom-based alt-beef could result in a *50%* reduction in deforestation. Call it the climate elasticity of beef.
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Of course, simply eliminating 20% of demand for beef could have a similarly positive effect, but beef demand is only expected to continue growing.
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This study specifically focused on mycoprotein, which is made by fermenting a type of fungus in a steel tank. As of the end of 2021, there were 88 companies working on fermentation-based alt proteins, per Good Food Institute.
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Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:
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Tiger Global, which has suffered $17 billion in losses, has not, to our knowledge, decided to triple down.
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Written by
Grace Donnelly and Dan McCarthy
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