Startups

Here’s what’s happening on day 1 of TC Sessions: Mobility

Comment

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Attention mobility enthusiasts! It’s been three long years since our last in-person mobility event, but the day has finally come. Welcome to Day One of TC Sessions: Mobility 2022! Get ready for two days of programming dedicated to taking a deeper dive into the future of transportation and to meet the people who are shaping it.

Mobility’s a rapidly evolving revolution, and we’re thrilled to have the community’s best founders, investors and technologists standing by ready to help you build your startup, expand your portfolio or take your career to the next level.

Here’s a brief taste of today’s events — speakers, interviews and breakout sessions. Visit the TC Sessions: Mobility agenda, plan your day and don’t forget about the world-class networking — we built time for it into the schedule.

Are you an early-stage mobility startup looking to better understand current trends in mobility investment? Look no further than the panel How to Land Early-Stage Funding featuring three investors on the main stage: Yoon Choi (partner, Muirwoods Ventures), Mar Hershenson (co-founder and managing partner, Pear VC) and Gabriel Scheer (director, Innovation, Mobility & Energy, Elemental Excelerator).

What will it take to execute urban air mobility operations in cities? We’ll sit down with Gary Gysin, president and CEO of Wisk Aero, Cyrus Sigari, co-founder and managing partner at UP.Partners and Bonny Simi, head of air operations and people at Joby Aviation, and talk about both the challenges and opportunities in the urban air mobility space and what it will take to not just launch in cities, but to actually be of value to residents.

Love vehicle debuts? Join Jesse Levinson (co-founder & CTO, Zoox) for a Vehicle Spotlight.

If autonomous vehicles drive you wild, don’t miss the conversation with Laura Major (CTO, Motional) and Oliver Cameron (VP, Product, Cruise) as they discuss turning an AV innovation into a product and the technical and deployment challenges to creating a product people can and will want to use.

Looking for something interactive and topic focused? Make time to join one of the many roundtable discussions we’ll have taking place throughout the day. These smaller, intimate sessions are designed to allow industry experts and attendees the time and forum to get to the heart of various topics across the mobility spectrum.

We haven’t even touched on the TC Sessions: Mobility Pitch-off and the early-stage startups you’ll find on our expo floor. You don’t want to miss out on what the future of mobility holds. The next great unicorn might be out there waiting to be found.

As with all of our TC Sessions events, we also have some fantastic breakout sessions. Three sessions are spread out throughout a jam-packed Day One: How Pony.ai Navigates Diverse Traffic Scenarios and Inclement Weather Globally with Shuyang Cheng (Tech lead manager, Perception, Pony.ai) and Yimeng Zhang (VP of Engineering & U.S. Site Lead, Pony.ai), Data: Your Key to Successful Autonomous Mobility with Wilson Pang (chief technology officer, Appen) and Rachel Kellam (product manager, Appen) and A New Sensing Paradigm: How GPR Uses Subterranean Maps to Enable Automated Driving in Any Condition with Tarik Bolat (CEO and co-founder, GPR).

There you have it folks — just a smattering of the fascinating interviews, breakout sessions and discussions taking place on Day One. Don’t forget to explore the outstanding early-stage startups exhibiting in the expo. Connect, converse and collaborate at TC Sessions: Mobility!

No FOMO allowed: Didn’t get a ticket? Don’t fret, you can still buy a pass for as little as $65. See you there!

More TechCrunch

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI payments rail by one to two years, sources familiar with the…

India weighs delaying caps on UPI market share in win for PhonePe, Google Pay

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?

Google has found a way to bring a variation of its clever “Circle to Search” gesture to iPhone users. The new interaction, launched in January, allows Android users to search…

Google brings a variation on ‘Circle to Search’ to iPhone users

A new sculpture going live on Wednesday in the Flatiron South Public Plaza in New York is not your typical artwork. It combines technology, sociology, anthropology and art to let…

Always-on video portal lets people in NYC and Dublin interact in real time

Apple’s iPad event had a lot to like. New iPads with new chips and new sizes, a new Apple Pencil, and even some software updates. If you are a big…

TechCrunch Minute: When did iPads get as expensive as MacBooks?

Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced…

Bye-bye bots: Altera’s game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt

Google DeepMind has taken the wraps off a new version of AlphaFold, their transformative machine learning model that predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. AlphaFold 3 is not only…

Google DeepMind debuts huge AlphaFold update and free proteomics-as-a-service web app

Uber plans to deliver more perks to Uber One members, like member-exclusive events, in a bid to gain more revenue through subscriptions.  “You will see more member-exclusives coming up where…

Uber promises member exclusives as Uber One passes $1B run-rate

We’ve all seen them. The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a building, ticking off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked, or if all the lights are working.…

Checkfirst raises $1.5M pre-seed to apply AI to remote inspections and audits

Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become…

Controversial drone company Xtend leans into defense with new $40 million round

Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash…

Mycocycle uses mushrooms to upcycle old tires and construction waste

Monzo has raised another £150 million ($190 million), as the challenger bank looks to expand its presence internationally — particularly in the U.S. The new round comes just two months…

UK challenger bank Monzo nabs another $190M as US expansion beckons

iRobot has announced the successor to longtime CEO, Colin Angle. Gary Cohen, who previous held chief executive role at Timex and Qualitor Automotive, will be heading up the company, marking a major…

iRobot names former Timex head Gary Cohen as CEO

Reddit — now a publicly-traded company with more scrutiny on revenue growth — is putting a big focus on boosting its international audience, starting with francophones. In their first-ever earnings…

Reddit tests automatic, whole-site translation into French using LLM-based AI

Mushrooms continue to be a big area for alternative proteins. Canada-based Maia Farms recently raised $1.7 million to develop a blend of mushroom and plant-based protein using biomass fermentation. There’s…

Meati Foods bites into another $100M amid growth to 7,000 retail locations

Cleaning the outside of buildings is a dirty job, and it’s also dangerous. Lucid Bots came on the scene in 2018 with its Sherpa line of drones to clean windows…

Lucid Bots secures $9M for drones to clean more than your windows

High interest rates and financial pressures make it more important than ever for finance teams to have a better handle on their cash flow, and several startups are hoping to…

Israeli startup Panax raises a $10M Series A for its AI-driven cash flow management platform

The European Union has deepened the investigation of Elon Musk-owned social network, X, that it opened back in December under the bloc’s online governance and content moderation rulebook, the Digital Services Act…

EU grills Elon Musk’s X about content moderation and deepfake risks

For the founders of Atlan, a data governance startup, data has always been at the heart of what they do, even before they launched the company. In fact, co-founders Prukalpa…

Atlan scores $105M for its data control plane, as LLMs boost importance of data

It is estimated that about 2 billion people, especially those in lower and middle-income countries, lack access to quality and affordable essential medicines. The situation is exacerbated by low-quality or even killer…

Axmed raises $2M from Founderful to streamline drug supply chains in underserved markets

For decades, the Global Positioning System (GPS) has maintained a de facto monopoly on positioning, navigation and timing, because it’s cheap and already integrated into billions of devices around the…

Xona Space Systems closes $19M Series A to build out ultra-accurate GPS alternative

Bankruptcy lawyers representing customers impacted by the dramatic crash of cryptocurrency exchange FTX 17 months ago say that the vast majority of victims will receive their money back — plus interest. The…

FTX crypto fraud victims to get their money back — plus interest

On Wednesday, Google launched its digital wallet in India with local integrations, nearly two years after the app was relaunched as a digital wallet platform in the U.S. As TechCrunch exclusively reported last month,…

Google Wallet is now available in India