22 Days Ago
Investors have plowed tens of billions of dollars into ride-hailing and scooter services that mostly cater to people taking trips shorter than 10 miles.  Yet the frenzy hasn’t changed the way most Americans get to work: driving in cars, alone, for longer stretches. 

25 Days Ago
WeWork’s announcement Monday that it had filed to go public took many employees by surprise.  WeWork confidentially submitted the filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in December, it said, and on Monday updated the document, which it drafted mostly with an internal team and without an investment bank, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

30 Days Ago
A new breed of real-estate focused startups is attracting a sudden flood of venture money.  The group includes Sonder, a travel rental firm which is finalizing a deal to raise more than $200 million from investors such as Fidelity Investments, according to people familiar with the matter. 

57 Days Ago
In early 2018, urban transportation upstarts Uber, Lyft, Jump and Lime all considered the possibility of buying or merging with New York–based Motivate.  The potential suitors saw blemishes in the bike-rental firm: outdated technology, persistent losses and a business that relied significantly on sponsors, and not just paying customers, according to people familiar with the discussions at the companies. 

62 Days Ago
Major League Baseball’s season is getting started, so baseball is on my mind—including the parallels between baseball and tech.  For instance, Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels last week signed the biggest contract in North American professional sports, worth $430 million over 12 years. 

66 Days Ago
Tired of bad traffic and have money to spare?  A growing cadre of venture capital–backed startups are launching services to ferry people on short-distance trips by small planes and helicopters. 

67 Days Ago
Airbnb is contemplating another big step into the hotel business, this time in India and China.  The travel giant is in discussions to invest in Indian hotel management startup Oyo, two people familiar with the matter said. 

71 Days Ago
Bird, the pioneer of the electric scooter sector, laid off 4% to 5% of its full-time staff on Thursday, in an effort to contain costs.  About 40 employees of the roughly 900-person company were let go. 

78 Days Ago
Airbnb for the past year has talked about its intentions to expand its presence in hotel bookings.  On Thursday, the company made it official, acquiring HotelTonight for what two people familiar with the matter said was $440 million. 

80 Days Ago
The two top executives leading policy and government relations at scooter startup Lime are leaving, less than a year after they joined.  The departures add to the turnover at the fast-growing company as it faces mounting safety problems and a need to win approval to expand into new cities. 

101 Days Ago
Thomas Cute, a former bus driver, will be among the first to take a ride this spring in Providence, R.I.’s new, self-driving shuttle.  He and other local bus drivers will survey how the small, driverless bus makes its way from the downtown train station, over the Woonasquatucket River, to a neighborhood where few public buses currently run. 

114 Days Ago
Mexico City’s Grin and Sao Paulo’s Yellow, which each took in tens of millions of dollars from Silicon Valley investors to run scooter rental businesses last fall, have merged and raised $150 million in fresh capital, according to executives at both firms. 

115 Days Ago
Last spring, after Dallas officials raised concerns with scooter-rental firms that riding scooters at night could be dangerous, officials thought they had won a promise from Lime that it would remove scooters from the streets every evening. 

120 Days Ago
The two leaders in electric scooter rentals, Bird and Lime, saw significant declines in ridership in November and December—the first wintry months they’ve had to navigate with large fleets, new data show. 

133 Days Ago
Executives from self-driving carmakers and software companies who gathered this week at CES, the giant annual electronics show in Las Vegas, appeared to agree on at least one thing: It’s time to lower expectations about autonomous vehicles. 

141 Days Ago
If Uber, Lyft, Pinterest and Slack go public later this year, as is expected, it will be the culmination of months of work.  Executives will have to do everything from preparing financial statements for release to editing revisions to their prospectuses. 

157 Days Ago
Airbnb is expected to lead a group of investors that would put about $75 million into Lyric, a startup that turns new apartment buildings into hotel-like properties for business travelers, people familiar with the matter said. 

169 Days Ago
As Airbnb prepares to go public, its strengths and weaknesses are coming into focus.  A previously shorthanded executive team has been reinforced with veterans from Amazon, creating new power centers inside the company, as our new org chart shows. 

192 Days Ago
Vacasa became the largest vacation rental management company in North America this year, operating homes in beach and mountain towns.  Now, backed by more than $200 million from tech investors on the road to a potential public offering, Vacasa wants to move into the big city. 

199 Days Ago
After officials in the San Francisco mayor’s office launched a new fund three years ago to attract corporate donations for low-income housing, they spent months trying to convince the region’s largest tech firms including Alphabet to contribute tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, two people familiar with the matter said.