On top of groceries, electronics, and clothes, Walmart also wants to be the place where you charge your EV.

Walmart announced that it will dramatically expand its EV charging network; it plans to install chargers at “thousands of Walmart and Sam’s Club locations” throughout the country by 2030.

Walmart’s EV fast charging network will expand its already operating ~1,300 EV charging stations located at 280 facilities nationwide.

Keep reading here.—JM

Mental health is a massively untapped $100b opportunity in an estimated $4.8t global wellness market.

After seeing their mother struggle with depression, brothers and Forbes “30 Under 30” winners Steve and Daniel Lee started Aura Health, the all-in-one mental wellness marketplace with 7m users and 100k+ paying subscribers.

They quickly attracted investments from well-known Silicon Valley investors such as Cowboy Ventures and Berkeley SkyDeck, as well as executives from Spotify, Facebook, MasterClass, and Apple. And they’re just getting started.

For the first time, you can invest in Aura alongside these legendary investors and build the future of mental wellness together.

This is your last call to join Aura before it’s too late! Their first public funding round closes in less than two weeks (April 28).

Twitter’s ad business doesn’t seem to be recovering from Elon Musk’s acquisition last fall.

$$$: The platform’s ad revenue is expected to decline 27.9% in 2023, a drop from $4.14 billion to $2.98 billion, according to estimates from Insider Intelligence. Ad sales had previously made up 92% of Twitter’s revenue, according to its Q2 2022 earnings report.

“The biggest problem with Twitter’s ad business is that advertisers don’t trust Musk,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, wrote in the report. “Twitter needs to unravel Musk’s personal brand from the company’s corporate image to regain advertiser trust and bring back ad dollars.”

Keep reading here.—RB

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

As the chief product officer at Thumbtack, I partner with the product management, design, and analytics teams to set a vision for the value we want to deliver to our customers and pros. Our goal is to build an experience that delivers peace of mind for homeowners and fuels economic growth for the businesses we serve. A large part of my role as CPO is scaling our teams and creating an environment where people feel challenged but also supported.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

It’s exciting to work on the launch of Thumbtack’s first-ever home-care experience, which provides homeowners with personalized guidance to care for their home. Homes, often our largest and most complex investment, don’t come with a manual. With Thumbtack’s home-care offering, we’ve created prioritized maintenance guides informed by data from millions of projects started on Thumbtack to help homeowners know what to do, when to do it and who to hire.

We’re constantly getting better at understanding the homeowner, their home, and their goals so that we can guide them on every step of their home-care journey, from move-in to move-out and all the moments in between.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

While AI has recently gained more buzz for flashy consumer-facing experiences, I’ve enjoyed a front-row seat over the last decade watching how it’s quietly driven efficiencies in our daily lives behind the scenes, whether that be better fraud prevention at banks, smarter ranking in ad systems, or enforcing hate speech and abuse policies in online forums at scale.

I am really excited about scaling AI’s impact at Thumbtack through everything from our customer-to-pro matching algorithms to ensuring we have the right services for customers’ ever-changing needs.

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

I enjoy reading thoughts from some of my favorite product leaders, in particular Deb Liu, CEO of Ancestry, Ami Vora, CPO of Faire, and Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta. All three of these leaders have managed and mentored me in my own career, so I enjoy keeping up with their insights and perspectives on different topics in the tech and product management space.

Stat: It can take 24 million lines of code to operate a modern fighter jet, according to the announcement of a new strategic agreement between BAE Systems and Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.

Quote: “I could write an entire letter on LLMs and generative AI as I think they will be that transformative, but I’ll leave that for a future letter…Let’s just say that LLMs and generative AI are going to be a big deal for customers, our shareholders, and Amazon.”—Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in a letter to shareholders

Read: AI is coming to Hollywood, and some entertainment industry professionals (artists) seem more ready than others (lawyers).

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

• What businesses can learn from this year’s Stanford AI Index
• Apple to open its first two stores in India
• Most higher-income workers report interacting with AI in their jobs, survey says