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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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Alibaba to split into 6 units and explore IPOs; shares pop 9%

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Alibaba to split into 6 units and explore IPOs; shares pop 9%

Alibaba has faced growth challenges amid regulatory tightening on China’s domestic technology sector and a slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy. But analysts think the e-commerce giant’s growth could pick up through the rest of 2022.

Kuang Da | Jiemian News | VCG | Getty Images

Alibaba said Tuesday it will split its company into six business groups, each with the ability to raise outside funding and go public, in the most significant reorganization in the Chinese e-commerce giant’s history.

Each business group will be managed by its own CEO and board of directors.

Alibaba said in a statement that the move is “designed to unlock shareholder value and foster market competitiveness.”

Alibaba’s shares popped more than 9% in pre-market trade in the U.S.

The move comes after a tough couple of years for Alibaba which has faced slowing economic growth at home and tougher regulation from Beijing, resulting in billions being wiped off its share price. Alibaba has struggled with growth over the past few quarters.

Alibaba is now looking to reinvigorate growth with the reorganization.

The business groups will revolve around its strategic priorities. These are the groups:

  • Cloud Intelligence Group: Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang will be head of this business which will house the company’s cloud and artificial intelligence activities.
  • Taobao Tmall Commerce Group: This will cover the company’s online shopping platforms including Taobao and Tmall.
  • Local Services Group: Yu Yongfu will be CEO and the business will cover Alibaba’s food delivery service Ele.me as well as its mapping.
  • Cainiao Smart Logistics: Wan Lin will continue as CEO of this business which houses Alibaba’s logistics service.
  • Global Digital Commerce Group: Jiang Fan will serve as CEO. This unit includes Alibaba’s international e-commerce businesses including AliExpress and Lazada.
  • Digital Media and Entertainment Group: Fan Luyuan will be CEO of the unit which includes Alibaba’s streaming and movie business.

Each of these units can pursue independent fundraising and a public listing when they’re ready, Zhang said.

The exception is the Taobao Tmall Commerce Group, which will remain wholly-owned by Alibaba.

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The company sees the creation of the six businesses as a way to be nimbler.

“This transformation will empower all our businesses to become more agile, enhance decision-making, and enable faster responses to market changes,” Zhang said in a statement.

The reorganization also comes at a time when there are signs that Beijing is warming back up to technology businesses, as the government seeks to revive economic growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

Jack Ma, Alibaba’s outspoken and charismatic founder who was out of the public eye and travelling abroad for several months, has returned to China, in a move perceived as an olive branch from Beijing.

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4G internet is set to arrive on the moon later this year

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4G internet is set to arrive on the moon later this year

Nokia hopes to install a data network on the moon sometime in 2023, an executive told reporters.

Thomas Coex | AFP via Getty Images

Nokia is preparing to launch a 4G mobile network on the moon later this year, in the hopes of enhancing lunar discoveries — and eventually paving the path for human presence on the satellite planet.

The Finnish telecommunications group plans to launch the network on a SpaceX rocket over the coming months, Luis Maestro Ruiz De Temino, Nokia’s principal engineer, told reporters earlier this month at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.

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The network will be powered by an antenna-equipped base station stored in a Nova-C lunar lander designed by U.S. space firm Intuitive Machines, as well as by an accompanying solar-powered rover.

An LTE connection will be established between the lander and the rover.

The infrastructure will land on the Shackleton crater, which lies along the southern limb of the moon.

Nokia says the technology is designed to withstand the extreme conditions of space.

The network will be used within Nasa’s Artemis 1 mission, which aims to send the first human astronauts to walk on the moon’s surface since 1972.

The aim is to show that terrestrial networks can meet the communications needs for future space missions, Nokia said, adding that its network will allow astronauts to communicate with each other and with mission control, as well as to control the rover remotely and stream real-time video and telemetry data back to Earth.

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The lander will launch via a SpaceX rocket, according to Maestro Ruiz De Temino. He explained that the rocket won’t take the lander all the way to the moon’s surface — it has a propulsion system in place to complete the journey.

Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said that 2023 was an “optimistic target” for the launch of Nokia’s equipment.

“If the hardware is ready and validated as it seems to be, there is a good chance they could launch in 2023 as long as their launch partner of choice doesn’t have any setbacks or delays,” Sag told CNBC via email. 

Nokia previously said that its lunar network will “provide critical communication capabilities for many different data transmission applications, including vital command and control functions, remote control of lunar rovers, real-time navigation and streaming of high definition video.”

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Elon Musk says only verified users will show up in Twitter’s recommendation feed in further shake-up

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Elon Musk says only verified users will show up in Twitter's recommendation feed in further shake-up

Elon Musk Twitter account seen on Mobile with Elon Musk in the background on screen, seen in this photo illustration. On 19 February 2023 in Brussels, Belgium.

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk said that only verified accounts will appear in Twitter’s recommendation feed, as the billionaire further shakes up the social media platform.

Twitter’s “For You” tab shows users tweets from people they don’t follow, but that are recommended to them by the social media firm’s algorithm. To date, this has showed accounts from any Twitter users, whether they are verified or not. 

But Musk announced in a tweet late Monday that, going forward, only verified accounts will show up in the “For You” section of the site.

Musk claims the move “is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over.”

Musk also said that only verified users will be able to vote in polls.

Since buying Twitter last year, Musk has sought to shake up the way the company does verification. Before Musk’s acquisition, Twitter used to verify users with a blue check mark as a way to identify the account matches the person or company it says it is. This process was free and applied to celebrities, journalists, government officials and organizations.

Musk introduced a subscription service last year called Twitter Blue that allows a user to pay $8 per month to be verified and obtain the blue check mark.

Twitter said last week that it would begin to wind down its “legacy verified program” and remove “legacy verified” check marks on Apr. 1. The company is prompting people with the legacy checkmarks to sign up for the Twitter Blue subscription service.

Musk has been trying to find ways to generate new revenue streams at Twitter, with paid verification being a flagship policy. But the company has reportedly lost a huge amount of value.

Musk told employees last week that Twitter is now valued at $20 billion, according to an email sent to employees and seen by the New York Times. That is down more than 50% from the $44 billion Musk paid for company last year.

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