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Bolt’s range of services including ride-hailing, car-sharing, food delivery and electric scooter and bike rentals.
Bolt

LONDON — European ride-hailing firm Bolt said Tuesday that it has raised 600 million euros ($713 million) in fresh funding to push into the rapidly growing online grocery delivery industry.

The new investment round values Bolt at about $4.75 billion, more than double its last private valuation of $2 billion.

Venture capital firm Sequoia and fund managers Tekne and Ghisallo backed the financing, while existing investors G Squared, D1 Capital and Naya increased their holdings.

“Bolt’s mission is to make urban travel affordable and sustainable,” said Markus Villig, Bolt’s CEO and founder. “We are building a future where people are not forced to buy cars that cause traffic and pollution, but use on-demand transport when they actually need it.”

Bolt, formerly known as Taxify, started out as a taxi-hailing app in Estonia. The company has since branched out into several new services, including food delivery, car sharing and electric scooter and bike rentals, hoping to become what’s known as a “super app.”

Now, Bolt is making a big drive into grocery delivery. The company, which promises to deliver groceries in 15 minutes, plans to roll out the service to 10 European countries over the next few months, including Sweden, Portugal, Croatia and Romania.

Grocery delivery is a fiercely competitive sector, particularly in Europe, where several new on-demand shopping apps are emerging with billions of dollars in venture capital behind them.

One of the leading players in the market, Turkey’s Getir, was valued by investors at $7.5 billion in June.

The bump in Bolt’s market value is a boon to early backers like German automaker Daimler and Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi. The company also counts the World Bank and the European Investment Bank as investors.

Like other ride-hailing companies, Bolt was hit with a severe drop in revenues early in the Covid-19 pandemic. It has rapidly grown in recent months as several countries have emerged from lockdowns, and now has more than 75 million users in 45 countries across Europe and Africa.

However, Bolt now faces another source of uncertainty in the U.K. after the country’s Supreme Court ruled Uber drivers should be treated as workers entitled to benefits like a minimum wage and holiday pay.

The case sets a precedent for competing ride-hailing services such as Bolt, Ola and Free Now, which operate a similar business model to Uber.

Uber subsequently reclassified all 70,000 of its U.K. drivers as workers, rather than independent contractors, and is now calling on other operators to do the same.

“It just doesn’t make sense drivers are taking a trip with us in which they are entitled as workers to holiday pay and pensions, and five minutes later because many drivers are multi-app they’re taking a separate trip where they’re not eligible for benefits,” Jamie Heywood, Uber’s regional general manager of Northern and Eastern Europe, told CNBC.

For its part, Bolt has said it has no plans to change its driver arrangements.

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Trump’s willingness to let TikTok go dark motivated China to make deal, says Bessent

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Trump's willingness to let TikTok go dark motivated China to make deal, says Bessent

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer hold a press conference, following a meeting with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, on the day of U.S.-China talks on trade, economic and national security issues, in Madrid, Spain, September 15, 2025.

Louiza Vradi | Reuters

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday that President Donald Trump was willing to let TikTok go dark, and it was “what turned the tide” in the deal framework with China.

“President Trump made it clear that he would have been willing to let Tiktok go dark, that we were not going to give up national security in favor of the deal,” Bessent told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

TikTok parent company ByteDance is still looking at a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the app’s U.S. operations or potentially be shut down in the country.

The Trump administration hasn’t yet formally extended the deadline, though U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that more time may be needed for the deal to be finalized and signed.

Bessent said Tuesday that the commercial terms of the deal between ByteDance and the new investors had been done “in essence” since March or April.

After Trump’s massive tariff announcement on April 2, the Chinese put the deal on hold, he said.

Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to speak Friday to finalize the deal.

“We were able to reach a series of agreements, mostly for things we will not be doing in the future that have no effect on our national security,” Bessent said Tuesday.

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Meta Connect 2025: AI-powered smart glasses take center stage

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Meta Connect 2025: AI-powered smart glasses take center stage

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tries on Orion AR glasses at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S., September 25, 2024. REUTERS/Manuel Orbegozo

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta spent billions of dollars unsuccessfully trying to make virtual reality catch on with consumers. As it shifts its metaverse bet toward smart glasses, investors will be watching to see how the public responds.

The social media company is set to unveil its most advanced smart glasses yet on Wednesday at its Connect annual event. The glasses, internally codenamed Hypernova, feature a small display that can be controlled via hand gestures through a wristband that utilizes neural technology, CNBC reported in August.

A promotional video of the device reportedly appeared on Meta’s YouTube page on Monday but was later removed.

The device, expected to cost $800, builds upon Meta’s partnership with EssilorLuxottica, which spawned the AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in 2023 and the Oakley Meta HSTN smart glasses unveiled in June. Those glasses contain cameras, speakers and microphones, allowing users to command the Meta AI voice assistant to take a photo, shoot video or play music.

Wall Street has been concerned about the spending by Reality Labs, the company’s division in charge of developing consumer hardware products like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and the Quest VR headsets. Meta revealed in July that its Reality Labs division recorded an operating loss of $4.53 billion during the second quarter, and has totaled nearly $70 billion in losses since late 2020.

Investors understand that Meta’s Reality Labs spending won’t significantly pay off for years, but they also “want to see progress” that indicates they will “see potential returns on investment,” said Justin Post, a Bank of America Securities internet research analyst. For now, smart glasses seem like a more sound investment than VR headsets, which are still niche and could take years to blossom, he said.

“I’ve definitely seen the company’s focus shift from VR headsets to glasses,” Post said. “At this point, the glasses are going to be much more impactful and more mass market.”

Meta declined to comment.

In Hypernova, Meta is selling smart glasses with a display to consumers for the first time. Though that display is expected to be small and limited in what it shows to users, the release of Hypernova represents a middle ground between the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and the experimental Orion augmented reality glasses that Meta showed off during last year’s Connect event.

Meta’s Orion AR glasses are displayed during a viewing in Menlo Park, California, U.S., Sept. 26, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

The Orion AR glasses, working in tandem with a wireless computing “puck,” can project 3D visuals onto the physical world that people can interact with using a wristband. But while the Orion AR glasses can produce dazzling visuals, it’s still experimental and costly to make, said Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

“Delivering something like Orion at scale will take time, which is why they are still a prototype,” Sag said. “I think a single display is a move in the right direction and would help build an ecosystem of apps.”

Connect presents Meta with an opportunity to build off the unexpected success of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, said Leo Gebbie, a CCS Insight analyst and director. EssilorLuxottica said in July, during the company’s most recent earnings report, that Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses sales more than tripled year over year.

“It really feels like a chance to break through with a really new product category,” Gebbie said.

Analysts will also be watching for any signs that Meta’s recent artificial intelligence-related strategy shifts, which kicked off in June when the company invested $14.3 billion into Scale AI, can help its hardware efforts. The glasses could be the right hardware form factor for AI features, Post said.

“If they get the integration right with devices, it really could be a better portal for AI than even phones,” he said.

But although Meta has the money and technical talent to build its smart glasses, it needs to cultivate an ecosystem of developers who will build compelling apps and software that captivate consumers, Sag said.

The risk for Meta is that consumers ultimately reject the Hypernova and potentially the broader market of smart glasses with displays, Gebbie said. At $800, the glasses are expected to cost more than twice as much as the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which start at $299. Already, Meta is setting low internal expectations for sales of the Hypernova glasses, CNBC reported in August, but the company will want the unveiling to at least generate some buzz.

Meta’s ambition is for smart glasses to become the next major personal computing platform. For now, Apple and Google remain on top with the iOS and the Android mobile operating systems, respectively.

Apple declined to comment. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear if Meta’s glasses will ever usurp the smartphone’s standing with consumers, but there’s enough of a threat that both Apple and Google are working on their own competitive products. Apple is reportedly working on its own glasses project, and Google in May announced a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker to build smart glasses

“The fact that everyone is now developing glasses suggests that Meta’s Reality Labs concept was well conceived, and they’re out in front at this point on glasses,” said Post. “The question for the competition is, can they leverage their mobile operating systems to get people to buy their glasses?”

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Tesla’s stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

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Tesla's stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.

Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters

Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.

After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.

The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.

It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.

In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.

Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.

Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.

Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.

However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.

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