Nuview’s lidar satellites hit $15M in funding with Leonardo DiCaprio among investors

Nuview’s lidar satellites hit $15M in funding with Leonardo DiCaprio among investors

Nuview, a startup that wants to map the entire landmass of Earth on an annual basis using space-based light detection and ranging (lidar) technology, has raised $15 million so far, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. That capital includes a $3 million seed round and an in-progress Series A, of which $12 million has closed so far, […]

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Fresh off its merger, Ouster-Velodyne make a bet on smart infrastructure

Fresh off its merger, Ouster-Velodyne make a bet on smart infrastructure

With lidar companies Ouster and Velodyne officially merged, CEO Angus Pacala has identified the next phase of growth. And it’s not self-driving cars or even advanced driver assistance systems. It’s smart infrastructure. “I keep saying this and people think I’m crazy, but there’s a good chance that smart infrastructure becomes our biggest vertical by a long […]

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Dispatches from the conference room

Dispatches from the conference room

Greetings on a brisk New England morning. I’m finally here on my long threatened trip to Boston. I was planning to be here in early July ahead of our robotics event, but SARS-CoV-2 and its many variants had different ideas. I narrowly avoided another reschedule on my third time around with COVID, but now I’m […]

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Real driverless cars are now legal in Shenzhen, China’s tech hub

Real driverless cars are now legal in Shenzhen, China’s tech hub

There are plenty of autonomous driving vehicles testing on the roads of Shenzhen today: Pony.ai, Baidu, DeepRoute, AutoX, you name it. But these vehicles are not really the unmanned vehicles that tech upstarts envision for the future, as they have been required to operate with a safety driver behind the wheel. A set of provisions […]

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IKEA rolls out an AI-powered interactive design experience for shoppers

IKEA rolls out an AI-powered interactive design experience for shoppers

Today, IKEA is launching a new AI-driven interactive design experience called IKEA Kreativ for IKEA.com and the IKEA app. With the new feature, U.S. customers can design and visualize their own living spaces with digitalized furniture on their smartphones instead of traveling to the brick-and-mortar store where they are likely to be distracted by the […]

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Lidar exposes the remnants of an overgrown ancient civilization in the Amazon

Lidar exposes the remnants of an overgrown ancient civilization in the Amazon

It’s Friday and the world is falling apart, so let’s just take a short mental health break with some interesting news out of the field of archaeology, where tech is enabling some fascinating new discoveries. A new lidar-powered analysis of land in the Amazon basin has provided evidence of a previously unknown urban center of […]

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Aeva and NASA want to map the moon with lidar-powered KNaCK pack

Aeva and NASA want to map the moon with lidar-powered KNaCK pack

As humanity prepares to return to the moon (“to stay,” as they remind us constantly), there’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built to make sure astronauts are safe and productive on the lunar surface. Without GPS, navigation and mapping is a lot harder — and NASA is working with lidar company Aeva […]

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