As the cybersecurity world changes rapidly, VCs are placing bets on what they think will be the most important cyberdefenses of tomorrow.

Funding in the space hit a record-high $26.6 billion in 2021, according to data from CB Insights—and although the pace of investment is slowing from last year, VCs had still poured nearly $11 billion into the sector as of Q2 this year.

Big picture: Cybersecurity startups are popular in part, thanks to a spike in cyberattacks.

• Last year may have been the biggest year for data compromises in US history per Statista, and nearly nine in 10 company boards now view cybersecurity as a “business risk” rather than solely a technical or IT issue, according to Gartner research.

“What’s happened over the last two, three years—which is Covid and [the] pandemic, as well as the war…as well as the ongoing threats from China—that has led to digitization and automation of every industry, which has completely, multifold, exposed our infrastructure to cybersecurity attacks,” Bilal Zuberi, a general partner at Lux Capital, told us. “The attack surface has become much, much larger.”

Click here to read about three of the fastest-growing sectors in cybersecurity, according to VCs we spoke with.—HF

Just as Uber once bet big on driverless vehicles for rideshare, now the company is betting the same on autonomous delivery—and it’s committing with a capital C.

On Thursday, the company announced a 10-year partnership with Nuro, the SoftBank-backed autonomous-vehicle company, for robotic deliveries of Uber Eats orders.

• The program will begin in Houston, Texas, and Mountain View, California, with plans to eventually expand around the Bay Area.

Electric and (autonomous) feel

Nuro’s fully self-driving EVs travel via public roads, and their compactness—with no seats or steering wheels—makes them prime for small-scale deliveries of food and goods. Nuro declined to disclose the size of its current fleet or share financial details about the partnership.

Quick recap: Founded by two former Google engineers in 2016, Nuro has raised over $2.1 billion to date. The company obtained California’s first-ever autonomous-vehicle deployment permit in 2020, and it has partnered with FedEx, Kroger, Domino’s, Walmart, and more.

• Last month, on Uber’s Q2 earnings call, the company reported $2.6 billion in losses, but it beat analyst expectations on revenue, bringing in $8.1 billion, a 105% jump year over year.

The revenue increase continues a two-year trend—Uber invested heavily in its delivery arm to bolster business amid the pandemic, and now, even as ride-hailing picks back up, the company is expanding delivery to increase customer stickiness. The recently announced Nuro commitment is part of that push.

“What we’re seeing with new verticals customers is that Uber Eats customers who also order from new verticals tend to stay with us,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on the August earnings call.

View this story on-site.—HF

A few weeks ago, an AI program did something most humans will never achieve: It won an art contest.

In late August, the Colorado State Fair gave first place in its digital art category to a piece by Colorado resident Jason Allen, who crafted his submission using an increasingly popular AI image-generation program called Midjourney.

Our question: Last week we asked all of you to weigh in on the fundamental question: Should AI-generated art be allowed into traditional art contests?

• Just over one-quarter (27%) of you said yes, while the remaining 73% said nope.
• In other words, the majority of you seem to have been on the side of the artists that were…miffed…about Allen-via-Midjourney’s victory.

FWIW, the Colorado State Fair is now pondering this very question with respect to its submission guidelines.

Zoom out: Whether or not the art world welcomes advanced image-generation tools like Midjourney, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion, AI-generated art is becoming a cottage industry. The Verge published a great piece about this last week, which you can read here.

This week’s poll: Do you think it should be legal to mine the seabed for critical minerals like lithium?

Yes
No

Stat: Global spending on AI systems could hit $300 billion by 2026, per an IDC forecast, a massive leap from $118 billion today.

Quote: “They just aren’t ready for mass production.”—A battery expert to Reuters about Tesla’s next-gen batteries, which Elon Musk previously said would be produced at scale by the end of this year

Read: Top takeaways from 227 Y Combinator pitches.

Protecting tech-savvy cities: Smart cities collect tons of data ranging from standard to sensitive. The more they accumulate, the higher their risk of a cybersecurity breach. Find out how cities protect their petabytes in this report, sponsored by Cisco.

What do cellularly cultivated foods, autonomous vehicles, and Mark Cuban all have in common? They’re all going to be featured at our first-ever Emerging Tech Brew virtual summit!

Get the inside scoop on how today’s tech is addressing the most pressing issues across food, energy, and health from some of the best and brightest in the industry. Secure your free ticket today and join us on the screen on September 29.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Checking in on SpaceX’s first acquisition, one year later
• Clean hydrogen has a leak problem
• The smarter the city, the scarier the cyber risk