An EHang all-electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) two-passenger multicopter aircraft, performs an unmanned display flight at a Korean government event at Yeouido island in Seoul on November 11, 2020.
Ed Jones | Afp | Getty Images
BEIJING — Self-driving air taxis are one step closer to reality in China.
Guangzhou-based Ehang on Friday said it received an airworthiness “type certificate” from the Civil Aviation Administration of China for its fully autonomous drone, the EH216-S AAV, that carries two human passengers. The regulator is the equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S.
The certificate will also significantly simplify the company’s ability to get similar certificates for commercial operation in the U.S., Europe and Southeast Asia, CEO Huazhi Hu told CNBC in a video conference interview.
“Next year we should start to expand overseas,” he said, noting those regulators still need to establish a process for mutual regulation of the Chinese airworthiness certification. That’s according to a CNBC translation of his Mandarin-language remarks.
Ehang shares have nearly doubled in price this year, before trading was temporarily halted Monday “in anticipation of an upcoming announcement concerning a very significant development regarding its business operations.” Trading was set to resume Friday.
The company has a market capitalization of about $1 billion.
Global regulatory action
The U.S. FAA in July released a plan that provides a path toward allowing similar autonomous flying vehicles, but initially still requires pilots to sit on board.
California-based Joby Aviation, one of the leading industry players in the U.S., announced earlier this month it expanded its flight test program from remote piloting to include a pilot on board — but it didn’t mention any passengers. Joby has a contract with the U.S. Air Force the company claims is worth up to $131 million.
Regulators in China have been paving the way for autonomous flying vehicles to gain certification. In June, China released new rules for unmanned aircraft flight — vehicles without a pilot on board. It is set to take effect Jan. 1, 2024.
Hu said Ehang is still evaluating which city in China the company will launch its first air taxi passenger flight in, and declined to share a specific date. Hu is also Ehang’s founder and chairman of the board of directors.
He noted that China is the fastest-growing and largest market — with the biggest demand — for such flying vehicles.
In the second quarter, Ehang said it set up a joint venture with Shenzhen-listed Xiyu Tourism and delivered five EH216-S units. The venture aims to develop low-altitude tourism with at least 120 Ehang vehicles in the next five years, the company said.
Ehang said it has overseas pre-orders for more than 1,200 units, including from customers such as Japan AirX, Malaysian Aerotree and Indonesia’s Prestige.
Hu said the company would roll out deliveries rather than filling orders all at once given the industry is still in an early stage of development.
Still, he predicts that in about five years, air taxis will be a common sight in many cities.
Safety track record
Friday’s certification news comes as local Chinese governments, including in Beijing, have allowed fully driverless robotaxis on public streets, and in some cases charge fares to the public.
A significant difference between self-driving taxis and self-piloting drones is that while cars on the road must make turns at intersections, a drone flight is between two points in the air, Ehang’s CEO said.
Hu said Ehang started doing autonomous aerial flight testing in 2017. There were some vehicle incidents during the early experimentation period, he said, but no big accidents have occurred during subsequent tens of thousands of flights, including overseas.
“Whenever carrying humans, until now, we have maintained a very good safety track record,” he said.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.