A former Apple employee who swindled the company out of more than $17 million with a scheme that double-billed for parts was sentenced to three years in federal prison and ordered to pay nearly $33 million, prosecutors said.
Dhirendra Prasad pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States in 2022.
Prasad, 55, of Mountain House, California, worked at Apple from 2008 to 2018 as a buyer in the company’s Global Service Supply Chain unit. Along with two co-conspirators, who owned two companies that were Apple suppliers, Prasad conspired to double-bill Apple for parts it already owned or had purchased.
Prasad said the scheme began as far back as 2011. It netted him more than $17 million and ran for eight years. Prasad also engineered “sham invoices” that allowed one of his co-conspirators, Don Baker, to take unjustified tax deductions valued at more than $1.8 million.
“Prasad was given substantial discretion to make autonomous decisions to benefit his employer,” federal prosecutors and Internal Revenue Service investigators said in a statement Wednesday. “Prasad betrayed this trust, and abused his power to enrich himself at his employer’s expense.”
In addition to his prison sentence, Prasad will forfeit $5.5 million worth of assets, pay a money judgment of $8.1 million, and restitution of $17.4 million to Apple and $1.9 million to the IRS.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Waymo self-driving cars with roof-mounted sensor arrays traveling near palm trees and modern buildings along the Embarcadero, San Francisco, California, February 21, 2025.
Smith Collection/gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Waymo on Tuesday announced it is expanding its service to include another 27 square miles of coverage around the San Francisco Bay Area.
With the expansion, Waymo will now take passengers around Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto and parts of Sunnyvale, California. The Alphabet-owned company opened its robotaxi service to the general public in San Francisco in June.
Waymo will initially limit the availability of its Silicon Valley service to users of the Waymo One app who are residents with ZIP codes in the area, the company said. Waymo plans to serve more riders across the region over time. The fleet of vehicles that will be in use in the new coverage areas are fully electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles with Waymo’s fifth generation of self-driving sensors, software and other technology.
“Opening our fully autonomous ride-hailing service in Silicon Valley marks a special milestone in our Bay Area journey,” Waymo product chief Saswat Panigrahi said in a statement. “This is where Waymo began and where we’re headquartered.”
Waymo expanded its San Francisco Bay Area robotaxi service last summer into Daly City, Broadmoor and Colma. Its robotaxis do not yet carry passengers to San Francisco International Airport.
A spokesperson told CNBC that Waymo is in “active discussions with SFO,” and added that the company is “working to connect” Silicon Valley and San Francisco to “provide seamless autonomous rides across more of the Bay Area in the future.”
Waymo also recently launched a commercial robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, just in time for the city’s annual South by Southwest festival.
While would-be competitors including Elon Musk‘s automaker Tesla, and Amazon-owned Zoox, are continuing their own robotaxi testing and development, Waymo has pulled far ahead of self-driving companies in the U.S.
Before Tuesday’s expansion, Waymo said it was serving more than 200,000 paid trips per week across San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Alphabet doesn’t disclose financial results for the autonomous vehicle business, but Waymo is part of its “Other Bets.” That business unit generated $400 million in the fourth quarter of 2024 and incurred operating losses of $1.17 billion, according to the company’s most recent financial filing.
Trust & Will founders, Cody Barbo (CEO), Brian Lamb, and Daniel Goldstein.
Courtesy: Trust & Will
Legal technology company Trust & Will said Tuesday that it has raised $25 million in a Series C funding round. The San Diego-based firm, ranked No. 41 on last year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has now raised $75 million to date.
Trust & Will aims to shake things up in the arcane estate planning industry and make these key wealth preservation and wealth transfer services more accessible to families. Relying on a mix of technology and human oversight, Trust & Will provides legally valid documents that adhere to state guidelines.
The company says the funding will be used to double down on artificial intelligence.
“AI enables families and advisors to plan with greater clarity and confidence,” co-founder and CEO Cody Barbo said in a statement announcing the funding. “By combining technology with human compassion, we’re transforming how people protect and preserve their legacies.”
The new round was led by Moderne Ventures, and includes Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, UBS Next and Erie Insurance. The most recent publicly available valuation figure for Trust & Will was $169 million, according to PitchBook data as of June 2022. The company told CNBC its valuation is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and has increased by more than 5x from its 2020 Series B valuation to its new Series C, but declined to be more specific.
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Trust & Will started when two friends wondered why there weren’t more online options to create a will. Most of their financial lives were already online — banking, taxes, insurance — but wills would require thousands of dollars and talking to a lawyer. Or a barebones online template that doesn’t leave room for customization or questions.
Its closest competitors, LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, focus on a broader variety of services. There’s also FreeWill.com, which offers free templates for people to fill out.
A recent annual report from Trust & Will found that although 83% of Americans believe estate planning is important, only 31% have a will, and 55% have no plan at all. Today, the company says it has helped hundreds of thousands of families create estate plans and settle probate to solve for that problem, and over one million Americans have started their legacy planning on the platform.
The company works directly with individuals and through partnerships with financial institutions. Trust & Will’s partnerships include Bank of America, USAA and Navy Federal. To get the word out to the general public, the company recently hired its first celebrity brand ambassadors, Super Bowl Champion Matthew Stafford and his wife, podcaster Kelly Stafford, to talk about their estate planning experience in a national TV commercial. It also recently became the official estate planning partner to two professional sports teams, the Los Angeles Kings and San Diego Wave.
“Every family deserves access to estate planning, and every professional deserves tools that simplify the process while delivering exceptional results,” Barbo stated in the release. “This Series C funding is more than a company milestone — it’s a step toward transforming estate planning into an essential service that touches every family’s life and legacy.”
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Hinge Health, a provider of digital physical therapy services, filed to go public on Monday, the latest sign that the IPO market is starting to crack open.
Hinge Health uses software to help patients treat musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. The company’s revenue last year increased 33% to $390 million, according to its prospectus, and its net loss for the year narrowed to $11.9 million from $108.1 million a year earlier.
The IPO market has been quiet across the tech sector for the past three years, but within digital health it’s been almost completely silent, as companies have struggled to adapt to an environment of muted growth following the Covid-19 pandemic. No digital health companies held IPOs in 2023, according to a report from Rock Health, and last year the only notable offerings were Waystar, a health-care payment software vendor, and Tempus AI, a precision medicine company.
“We have many decades of work ahead,” Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez said in the filing Monday. “We hope you join us on this journey.”
The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”
Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg, Hinge Health’s chairman, co-founded the company in 2014 after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation, according to the company’s website.
Members of Hinge Health can access virtual exercise therapy and an electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso. The company claims its technology can help users improve their pain, reduce the need for surgery and cut down health-care costs.
The San Francisco-based company has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Tiger Global and Coatue Management, and it boasted a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021. The biggest outside shareholders are venture firms Insight Partners and Atomico, which own 19% and 15% of the stock, respectively, according to the filing.
Hinge Health’s dual class stock structure gives each share of Class B common stock 15 votes. Almost all of the Class B shares are owned by the founders and top investors.
Employees across more than 2,250 organizations, including Morgan Stanley, Target and General Motors, can access Hinge Health’s offerings. The company had more than 532,000 members as of Dec. 31, and more than 20 million people are eligible to enroll, the filing said.