Technology

Startup Kinetic rolls out robots to fix electric cars, and someday robotaxis

Published

1 year ago

June 20, 2024

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Kinetic cofounders: CEO Nikhil Naikal, CTO Sander Marques, COO Chris Weber

Courtesy: Kinetic Automation

While electric vehicle demand is still increasing in the U.S., the sales growth rate for cars that pollute less has cooled down in 2024 due partly to the high cost of insurance and repairs for tech-laden new models.

A 2024 study by J.D. Power found that, despite the climate benefits, only 26% of car buyers in the U.S. were “very likely to consider purchasing” an EV in the next year, and more than 20% were “very unlikely to consider an EV purchase” at all.

That’s where Santa Ana, California startup Kinetic Automation comes in. By providing diagnostics and recalibration of the high-tech systems in modern vehicles, the company hopes to decrease costs associated with EV ownership and repairs.

The startup, which employs about 40 people full-time, has developed a robotic system that uses computer vision and machine-learning software to quickly diagnose issues with a vehicle’s digital systems.

Kinetic CEO and co-founder Nikhil Naikal explained that a lot of new models, especially battery electrics, are loaded with bells and whistles such as touchscreens and robust infotainment software, along with a variety of cameras and sensors that enable everything from rapid charging to driver safety features including forward collision avoidance, lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control.

The existing collision repair industry is well-equipped to handle most physical fixes like replacing a bumper, a busted windshield, brakes and paint or adjusting alignment. But for many collision repair centers and auto dealerships, ensuring all sensors, software and computers are working properly can prove time-consuming and expensive.

Kinetic puts its robotic systems and technicians to work helping these shops and dealerships fix the finicky, “digital” aspects of customers’ cars.

Here’s how it works: A customer’s car rolls up to one of Kinetic’s service bays, where it is scanned from bumper to fender with machine vision sensors, some on a robotic arm that peers over the top of the vehicle.

The scan determines which systems need to be precisely programmed or need a recalibration. Then Kinetic’s software, which is connected to the vehicle’s systems, will initiate and track the completion of those fixes.

Kinetic uses robotics and AI to recalibrate the software and sensors in electric vehicles.

Courtesy: Kinetic Automation

The company built its first four service hubs in Las Vegas, and Orange County, San Bernardino and Riverside counties in California.

To fuel its growth, Kinetic has raised $21 million in a Series B round of venture funding led by Menlo Ventures, joined by Allstate Strategic Ventures, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and the company’s earliest investors Lux Capital, Construct Capital and Haystack Ventures.

Menlo Ventures’ Partner Shawn Carolan, who invested in Uber and Jump Bikes, said collision companies and auto dealerships that had worked with Kinetic as pilot customers helped convince his firm to lead the deal.

“They were saying, ‘This reduced our cycle time by days.’ Or ‘We got cars back to customers faster and cheaper,’ and ‘This made my life way easier,'” he explained. “So we knew this was already solving a tremendous pain point.”

Before starting Kinetic with his co-founders, COO Chris Weber and CTO Sander Marques, Naikal worked as the vice president of software engineering at Velodyne, a company that made lidar sensors that enable robots, drones and autonomous vehicles to detect and avoid objects in their surrounding environment. Velodyne merged with Ouster in 2023.

Weber previously worked as an operations leader at Uber, while Marques is a repeat tech entrepreneur whose prior company developed engine control modules for high-performance vehicles.

Kinetic will one day provide its services to robotaxi fleets, Naikal said, and to the owners of other autonomous vehicles. But for now, the startup is focused on hiring, training technicians and building out its service hubs across the U.S. to handle a higher volume of auto repairs, especially the electric vehicles that are growing to comprise a larger portion of cars on U.S. roads each year.

So far, Kinetic has most commonly worked on Ford Mach-E, GM Chevy Bolt, Hyundai Ioniq EVs, and some Teslas at its existing service hubs, the CEO said.

Market research firm Canalys forecasts that sales of battery and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles combined will reach 2.2 million units in 2024 in North America, representing about 12.5% of all new vehicle sales in the region.

“Motor vehicle insurance for EVs, and across the board, has been a major contributor to inflation rising something like 20% when you look at the Consumer Price Index over the last 12 months,” Naikal said. “I’d like to hope we can shave a few points off of that while making people more comfortable switching to electrics.”

Technology

Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s AI chips are now being manufactured in Arizona

Published

2 hours ago

October 28, 2025

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Jensen Huang says Nvidia's AI chips are now being manufactured in Arizona

Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media prior to the keynote address at the Nvidia AI summit in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the company’s GTC conference on Tuesday that its Blackwell graphics processing units — the company’s fastest AI chips — are now in full production in Arizona.

Previously, Nvidia’s fastest GPUs were solely manufactured in Taiwan.

Huang said that President Donald Trump had asked him nine months ago to bring manufacturing back to U.S. shores.

“The first thing that President Trump asked me for is bring manufacturing back,” Huang said. “Bring manufacturing back because it’s necessary for national security. Bring manufacturing back because we want the jobs. We want that part of the economy.”

Earlier this month, Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced that the first Blackwell wafers had been produced in a facility in Phoenix, Arizona. Wafers are the base material on which semiconductors are etched onto.

Nvidia said in a video that Blackwell-based systems will now be assembled in the U.S., too.

Much of what the company announced on Tuesday at its conference in Washington was for an audience of policymakers to convince them of the essential role that Nvidia plays, and that it would hurt U.S. interests to restrict its exports.

Huang said on Tuesday on a panel before his speech that Nvidia was holding its conference in Washington to allow Trump to attend, according to CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos, but the president is currently on a trip in Asia.

Trump said on Tuesday that he planned to meet with Huang on Wednesday, according to a Reuters report.

Demand for the company’s GPUs remains high, with 6 million Blackwell GPUs shipped in the last four quarters, Huang said Tuesday. Nvidia expects $500 billion in GPU sales between the Blackwell generation and next year’s Rubin chips combined, he added.

Cell networks ‘built on foreign technologies’

Additionally, Huang Tuesday said Nvidia would partner with Finland-based Nokia to build gear for telecommunications, an industry that he said was worth $3 trillion. As part of the partnership, Nvidia will take a $1 billion stake in Nokia.

Huang said that Nvidia is building chips for 5G and 6G base stations because it’s important to have wireless networks based on American technology.

“Thank you for helping the United States bring telecommunication technology back to America,” Huang said to Nokia CEO Justin Hotard during his speech.

The deal is an appeal to Western policymakers who have long had concerns about the amount of technology from China’s Huawei that is used for cellular networks around the world.

“Our fundamental communication fabric is built on foreign technologies,” Huang said. “That has to stop, and we have an opportunity to do that, especially during this fundamental platform shift.”

Nokia will use Nvidia chips in its future base stations, which are the pricey computers that distribute cellular signals. Huawei gear, the market leader, was effectively banned in the U.S. in 2018, leaving Nokia and Ericcson as the primary equipment vendors for U.S. networks.

Huang said that Nokia would be using a new product called Nvidia ARC that combines its Grace GPU, a Blackwell GPU and the company’s networking parts. Huang said that AI delivered over next-generation 6G networks could help operate robots and deliver more accurate weather forecasts.

Stakes are high

The location of the conference carries significance as Nvidia makes the case that it is a core part of the “U.S technology stack.”

Huang has argued that it would be better for American interests if Chinese AI developers got used to U.S. technology like Nvidia’s chips, rather than forcing the Chinese to develop their own AI chips.

“Nvidia is a proud American company building the U.S. AI infrastructure that will ensure our country leads the world in shaping the future of innovation,” Kari Briski, Nvidia’s vice president of generative AI software for enterprise, told reporters on a Monday call.

The stakes are high for Nvidia. U.S. export restrictions have already cost Nvidia billions of dollars in lost sales.

In April, the U.S. government informed Nvidia that its H20 chip, which was specially designed to comply with U.S. export controls, would require a license to ship to China. In May, Nvidia said it would have recorded about $10.5 billion in H20 sales over two quarters if the government hadn’t made the license requirement.

Then, in July, Huang visited Trump in Washington and again tried to persuade him and other administration officials that it is in U.S. interests to ship Nvidia chips to China. The Trump administration said it would approve license requests for the H20, but that Nvidia would have to pay the U.S. government 15% of China sales.

Still, Nvidia’s China business isn’t yet back on track.

Earlier this month, Huang said at a financial conference that Nvidia is currently “100% out of China” and has no market share there. While Nvidia said it would receive licenses for the H20 chip, the company hasn’t revealed a newer chip for China based on the company’s current generation of Blackwell GPUs.

Quantum computing

Many of Nvidia’s announcements on Tuesday were partnerships intended to signal that the company works with a variety of U.S. companies.

Among those announcements was NVQLink, a new way to connect quantum chips to Nvidia’s GPUs.

The U.S. having a lead in quantum computing is important to policymakers because military officials are worried that a foreign adversary may be able to spy on military communications if it gets a working quantum computer first.

Nvidia officials said in a Monday call that its chips can be used to correct errors that pop up during quantum computing and advance the technology. Nvidia said that 17 different quantum computing startups would produce hardware compatible with NVQLink.

“Researchers will be able to do more than just error correction,” Huang said Tuesday. “They will also be able to orchestrate quantum devices and AI supercomputers to run quantum GPU applications.”

Nvidia also said it will partner with the Department of Energy to build seven new supercomputers.

WATCH: Nvidia CEO: We brought GTC to DC so President Trump could attend

Technology

Cramer: Amazon layoffs will help costs, but growth in this one area is what’s needed most

Published

3 hours ago

October 28, 2025

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Cramer: Amazon layoffs will help costs, but growth in this one area is what's needed most

Technology

GitHub unites OpenAI, Google and Anthropic AI agents in one place to bring ‘order to the chaos’

Published

4 hours ago

October 28, 2025

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GitHub unites OpenAI, Google and Anthropic AI agents in one place to bring 'order to the chaos'

Signage at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, California, US, on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025.

Benjamin Fanjoy | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Microsoft’s GitHub unit on Tuesday announced Agent HQ, a new “mission control” interface that will allow software developers to manage coding agents from multiple vendors on a single platform.

An artificial intelligence agent is a tool that can independently complete tasks on behalf of a user. Several companies, including GitHub, have built and released popular agents that are specifically designed for programming.

Developers have a range of new capabilities at their fingertips because of these agents, but it can require a lot of effort to keep track of them all individually, said GitHub COO Kyle Daigle.

Developers will now be able to manage agents from GitHub, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI and Cognition in one place with Agent HQ.

“We want to bring a little bit of order to the chaos of innovation,” Daigle told CNBC in an interview. “With so many different agents, there’s so many different ways of kicking off these asynchronous tasks, and so our big opportunity here is to bring this all together.”