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Chinese EV maker Xpeng says its X9 MPV could be the 'top seller in its category'

Chinese electric vehicle company Xpeng told CNBC on Friday that its newly launched X9 model could be a “game changer” for the industry.

Xpeng launched the X9 large 7-seater EV on Jan. 1, a car built on its SEPA2.0 architecture for the Chinese market. The X9 series are priced between 359,800 yuan to 419,800 yuan (about $50,360 to $58,760) with immediate deliveries.

“For X9, we actually anticipate this to be a game changer for the battery electric vehicles segment for MPVs (multi-purpose vehicles),” Brian Gu, vice chairman and co-president of Xpeng, told CNBC’s Emily Tan in an exclusive interview.

“We believe this could be the top seller in its category … because I think it has some very innovative technology and design as well as superior handling, industry leading smart driving technology – packed into a very beautifully designed product,” said Gu.

Xpeng’s new launch comes as several domestic EV players such as Nio, Huawei and Zeekr recently revealed new electric vehicles. Even Chinese consumer electronics company Xiaomi is launching its first EV to compete in the market.

We anticipate in 2024, we will be growing much faster than the industry growth which means that we can expand our market share.

Brian Gu

Vice Chairman and Co-President, Xpeng

Xpeng has laid out ambitious plans to roll out driver-assist technology in China by end of last year and in Europe by the end of 2024.

The Chinese EV maker also entered into a cooperation framework agreement with Guangdong Huitian on Jan. 2 to manufacture, develop and sell flying vehicles, where Xpeng will provide research and development, technology consulting services and sales agent services to Guangdong Huitian.

“We anticipate in 2024, we will be growing much faster than the industry growth which means that we can expand our market share,” said Gu, adding that the firm will be looking to increase profit margins with greater scale and better product mix.

“The X9 will be a very high margin product for us,” said Gu.

Stiff competition

Competition is intensifying in the Chinese EV market, with BYD, Li Auto and Geely among the small number of players that have hit their annual sales targets.

Xpeng and Nio were among those that missed their targets.

Xpeng delivered a total of 141,601 units in 2023, a 17% increase from a year ago. This fell short of the firm’s target of delivering 200,000 vehicles for the year as reported by local media.

“The focus of investors [for 2024] is whether the company can maintain decent delivery momentum with new launches and improve profitability in a challenging pricing environment, in our view,” said Morningstar analyst Vincent Sun in a Nov. 16 note on Xpeng.

2024 will be a very competitive year with obviously a number of new models as well as new brands launching in the segment.

Brian Gu

Vice Chairman and Co-President, Xpeng

Nio delivered 160,038 vehicles in 2023, representing an increase of 30.7% compared to a year ago — but it still was well below its target of about 245,000 cars based on management’s target to “double the volume” of 2022 during their fourth quarter earnings call.

Li Auto delivered 376,030 vehicles in 2023 – meeting its annual delivery milestone of 300,000 vehicles.

In terms of sales, BYD met its 3 million target in 2023 and surpassed Tesla as the world’s top-selling EV brand in the fourth quarter, selling more battery-powered vehicles than its U.S. rival.

BYD produced 3.05 million vehicles in 2023 while Tesla said it made 1.84 million vehicles that same year.

‘Strong momentum’

“I think we will continue to see a number of the catalysts that’s propelling the growth of the new energy vehicle market, obviously the technology, the product launches, as well as the continued conversion from internal combustion engines to new energy vehicles,” said Gu.

 The new energy category includes electric and plug-in hybrid power sources.

“But in order to be competitive, I think we still need to focus on differentiating innovative technology as well as maintaining a very strong cost-competent competitive advantage with scale as well as technological innovations,” he added.

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Glean, gen AI enterprise search startup, raises $150 million in deal adding billions to valuation

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Glean, gen AI enterprise search startup, raises 0 million in deal adding billions to valuation

Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, on SaaS Monster stage during day one of Web Summit 2022 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal, on Nov. 2, 2022.

Harry Murphy | Sportsfile | Getty Images

Generative AI enterprise search startup Glean announced on Tuesday that it raised $150 million in a Series F financing, pushing up its valuation from investors by billions of dollars in less than a year, to $7.2 billion. 

The company’s last fundraising in September 2024 valued Glean at $4.6 billion.

On Tuesday, Glean was also named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list for the second-consecutive year.

Glean reported that its annual recurring revenue surpassed $100 million in its last fiscal year, ending Jan. 31, 2025 — less than three years after it was launched by a founding team that includes veterans from Google, Meta, and Dropbox.

“We’re building the platform that brings AI into the fabric of everyday work, connecting people to knowledge, automating tasks, and enabling smarter decisions across the enterprise,” said Arvind Jain, Glean co-founder and CEO, in a release announcing the deal.

In early 2025, Glean launched its agentic AI, Glean Agents, which the company says are on pace to support one billion agent actions by year-end.

More coverage of the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50

The company’s core product is an AI-powered enterprise search platform that integrates with a wide array of workplace apps — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, and Salesforce. Glean uses natural language understanding and machine learning to create a personalized knowledge graph for each user, improving enterprise search results and the ability to generate content, while automating individual workflows and corporate processes. While initially focused on tech industry customers, Glean has expanded to finance, retail and manufacturing.

Jain told Deirdre Bosa, anchor of CNBC’s “TechCheck,” that the capital will allow Glean to double the size of teams in R&D and sales as it pushes further into the large enterprise market, overseas markets, and into more partnerships similar to recent ones with companies including fellow Disruptor Databricks, Snowflake and Palo Alto Networks.

Jain said for many large enterprises across sectors of the economy, the gen AI boom is as much about concern as it is about excitement. “Large enterprises are more worried about this. They don’t want to be left behind,” he told CNBC. “The most important thing that I hear from businesses is they are trying to make sure that their workforce becomes AI-first,” he added.

Wellington Management led the fundraising, with existing investors Capital One Ventures, Altimeter, Citi, Coatue, DST Global, General Catalyst, ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Kleiner Parkins, Latitude Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures and Sequoia Capital, all participating in the deal. New investors included Khosla Ventures, Bicycle Capital, Geodesic and Archerman Capital.

While consumer-facing gen AI is growing the fastest — OpenAI says it is adding millions of users an hour, and on Monday reported annual recurring revenue above $10 billion — Jain said the enterprise market has to be thought of in distinct terms. “You have to remember that models like ChatGPT, they don’t know anything about your internal company’s data,” he said. “We’re able to actually use that context and combine it with the power of models to solve real business problems for you.”

OpenAI does have its own enterprise business, which recently passed the three-million user mark.

While Glean has seen exponential growth in recent years, it will continue to face challenges in a competitive market including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Amazon Q Business and ChatGPT Enterprise, along with offerings from fellow Disruptors Perplexity and Writer. Jain said in some cases its technology is not in competition with, but complementing the large language models being developed for the enterprise, such as fellow Disruptor Anthropic‘s Claude.

But the competition is intensifying from all sides and overlapping. “Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, they all want to actually come into this space that we started,” Jain said. “We have a lead. We have deep enterprise technology that we built over these years. … We have to keep innovating. And the good thing for Glean is that we’re not building a product that’s going to get commoditized,” he said.

Currently based in Palo Alto, the company will soon be opening a new office in San Francisco to support its growth.

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What’s next for Oura Ring in personal health and fitness monitoring, according to CEO Tom Hale

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What's next for Oura Ring in personal health and fitness monitoring, according to CEO Tom Hale

Oura CEO Tom Hale weighs in on the brand's products, partnerships and competition

When the idea for the Oura Ring was first spawned in 2013, the company’s founders envisioned a device that would take a precise look at sleep and recovery, two important aspects of overall health that they felt few wearable tools had prioritized to that point.

Now, over a decade later, Oura’s ambitions have evolved to transform healthcare and personal health, all while disrupting the growing wearables industry.

“The vision for the future of Oura has to do with the doctor in your pocket,” Oura CEO Tom Hale said in an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday. “Everyone already has kind of a supercomputer in their pocket — everyone should have a wearable device which is monitoring them continuously that just fits into their life, and then a machine intelligence which is overlooking them to provide them preventative personal care to help them live their best and healthiest life.”

Oura, which was ranked No. 23 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has hastened its shift towards broader health monitoring through a combination of technological upgrades, product advances, fundraising, acquisitions, and the usage of AI, LLMs and analytics. That has helped the company broaden its vision from just sleep to cardiovascular health, stress & resilience, women’s health, and now nutrition and eating habits.

It also means evolving beyond tracking things just with a ring, leading Oura into new partnerships with companies like Dexcom, one of the leaders in glucose biosensing via its glucose monitor, and through features like an AI health coach and the ability to take pictures of your food and upload it into the app for nutrition breakdowns and AI-driven advice.

More coverage of the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50

While that pushes Oura further into a broader wearables category competing alongside more all-in-one devices like watches from Apple, Google and Samsung, as well as focused fitness devices from companies like Garmin and Whoop, Hale said that the rest of the category “pushes us to go further and farther ahead in creating innovations that are going to blow people’s minds.”

“We’re really focused on the things that matter that are going to change your health picture,” he said.

Hale said he believes one of the biggest competitors Oura faces is “people just not being aware of the benefits” of wearing the ring, but the company’s increased focus on overall health and wellness is resonating with consumers.

In June 2024, Oura announced that it had sold more than 2.5 million rings. Now, about a year later, Hale said the company has “roughly doubled the business, and we continue to grow.”

Hale said the company had previously announced it was going to do about $500 million in revenue last year, and this year “it’s definitely going to be a lot larger than last year.”

While that doesn’t mean an IPO is on the horizon — Hale said the company has “some catching up to do before we’re ready to be a public company” — Oura sees plenty of room ahead to continue to lean into what its ring wearers are increasingly looking for.

“We see a world where you might be using some sensor for some amount of time to learn some lesson, but the device you’re going to have on your body to monitor your sleep, your activity, your overall health [and] make predictions about your health, will be the Oura Ring,” Hale said.

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Snap to launch smaller, lighter augmented reality Specs smartglasses in 2026

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Snap to launch smaller, lighter augmented reality Specs smartglasses in 2026

The head of Snapchat operator Snap, Evan Spiegel, presents the new generation of Spectacles in Los Angeles on Sept. 17, 2024.

Andrej Sokolow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Snap on Tuesday announced its plans to release a sixth-generation of its augmented reality glasses in 2026, as competition in the smart glasses market continues to heat up. 

The maker of Snapchat said that its next-generation glasses will be called Specs, breaking with the company’s Spectacles branding that it used for previous versions of its wearable devices. The Specs will use AR technology to let people see and interact with digital imagery that’s overlaid over the physical world.

Snap did not reveal a price or exact launch date for Specs, but the new glasses will be smaller and lighter than their predecessors, the company said. Snap’s most recent Spectacles were released in September 2024 to developers only. That edition of the glasses was available under a leasing model that required users to commit to paying $99 a month for a full year. 

The consumer-focused Specs will run on the company’s Snap OS operating systems. Snap said that developers will be able to incorporate Google’s Gemini AI models into programs they develop for the smart glasses, giving coders more AI options to choose from as they write software for the device. Previously, developers could only use OpenAI’s GPT family of AI models to build AR apps for the smart glasses.

“We couldn’t be more excited about the extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence and augmented reality that is enabling new, human-centered computing experiences,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in a statement. 

When Snap launched its first Spectacles glasses in 2016, the $130 wearable was limited to simple features like helping users shoot short videos that they could post to Snapchat. The company updated its glasses with augmented reality displays in 2021 that allowed users to see virtual imagery overlaid by the glasses over what users saw in the real world. 

Since then, competition in the world of head-mounted computers has grown. 

Apple began selling its $3,500 Vision Pro goggles in February 2024, while Meta now has a range of cutting-edge products including Quest VR headsets, Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses and the experimental Project Orion AR glasses, which the social media company showed off last fall.

Google, meanwhile, announced its own entry into the space in May when it revealed a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker, which said it will release its own smart glasses sometime after this year. 

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Why Meta and Snap think AR glasses will be the future of computing

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