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Grabango, a venture-backed startup that was vying to take on Amazon in cashierless checkout technology, is shutting down after it was unable to raise enough money to stay afloat.

“Although the company established itself as a leader in checkout-free technology, it was not able to secure the funding it needed to continue providing service to its clients,” a spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC on Wednesday. “The company would like to thank its employees, investors, and clients for all their hard work and dedication.”

Food tech publication The Spoon reported earlier on Grabango’s closure.

Launched in 2016, Grabango was developing checkout-free technology that uses computer vision and machine learning to track and tally up items as shoppers grab them from store shelves. Will Glaser, Grabango’s founder and CEO, is a longtime Bay Area technologist who cofounded music streaming service Pandora.

The company employed roughly 100 employees, according to LinkedIn and Pitchbook.

Grabango raised just over $73 million, Pitchbook data shows, with its most sizable financing round coming in 2021, before the market turned. In June of that year, Grabango raised $39 million in a round led by Commerce Ventures, with participation from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund as well as the venture arms of Unilever and Honeywell.

In February of this year, Glaser told Axios the company had plans to go public “in a couple of years at a $10 billion to $15 billion market cap.”

The IPO market has dried up since early 2022, with just three notable venture-backed companies debuting in the U.S. this year. The lack of liquidity has hammered the venture industry, making it harder for firms to launch new funds and for startups, outside of a select few AI companies, to raise capital.

Based in Berkeley, California, Grabango was seen as one of the primary rivals to Amazon’s cashierless checkout offering, called Just Walk Out. Other startups in the space include AiFi and Trigo.

Grabango had inked deals with grocers including Aldi and Giant Eagle, along with convenience store chains 7-Eleven and Circle K. Amazon has targeted its Just Walk Out service to convenience stores and retailers in airports, stadiums and hospitals, among other venues.

Amazon in April pulled its cashierless checkout technology from its U.S. Fresh stores and Whole Foods supermarkets. In a blog post following that decision, Glaser said Amazon’s reliance on shelf sensor technology in its JWO system had “proven to be its Achilles’ heel.” Glaser said Grabango eschewed shelf sensors in favor of computer vision which put it on a path for “widespread adoption.”

“This is a classic Tortoise and Hare parable, but with the players taking on surprising roles,” Glaser wrote. “The much larger Amazon lept to an early lead, but was unable to turn it into a sustained success. The more nimble Grabango, ironically, took the more difficult technical path, and is now reaping the benefits of its patience with a fundamentally more capable system.”

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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Former Trump advisor Dina Powell McCormick leaves Meta board after eight-month stint

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Former Trump advisor Dina Powell McCormick leaves Meta board after eight-month stint

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Dina Powell McCormick, who was a member of President Donald Trump’s first administration, has resigned from Meta’s board of directors.

Powell McCormick, who previously spent 16 years working at Goldman Sachs, notified Meta of her resignation on Friday, according to a filing with the SEC. The filing did not disclose why McCormick was stepping down from Meta’s board, but said her resignation was effective immediately.

Meta does not plan on replacing her board role, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Powell McCormick is considering a potential strategic advisory role with Meta, but nothing has been decided, the person said.

Powell McCormick joined Meta’s board in April along with Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement at the time that the two executives “bring a lot of experience supporting businesses and entrepreneurs to our board.”

Powell McCormick served as a deputy national security advisor to President Trump during his first stint in office and was also an assistant secretary of state during President George W. Bush’s administration.

She is married to Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa, who took office in January.

Powell McCormick is the vice chair, president and head of global client services at BDT & MSD Partners, which formed in 2023 after the merchant bank BDT combined with Michael Dell’s investment firm MSD.

With her departure, Meta now has 14 board members, including UFC CEO Dana White, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and former Enron executive John Arnold.

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Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay package must be restored as court rules cancellation was too extreme

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Musk's  billion Tesla pay package must be restored as court rules cancellation was too extreme

Elon Musk's 2018 Tesla pay package must be restored, Delaware Supreme Court rules

Elon Musk‘s 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla, worth some $56 billion when it vested, must be restored, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled Friday.

“We reverse the Court of Chancery’s rescission remedy and award $1 in nominal damages,” the judges wrote in their opinion.

In the decision, the Delaware Supreme Court judges said a lower court’s decision to cancel Musk’s 2018 pay plan was too extreme a remedy and that the lower court did not give Tesla a chance to say what a fair compensation ought to be.

The decision on the appeal in this case, known as Tornetta v. Musk, likely ends the yearslong fight over Musk’s record-setting compensation.

Musk’s net worth is currently estimated at around $679.4 billion, according to the Forbes Real Time Billionaires List.

Dorothy Lund, a professor at Columbia Law School, told CNBC that while the Friday opinion may restore the 2018 pay plan for Musk, it leaves the rest of the lower court’s decision unaddressed and intact.

“The court had previously decided that Musk was a controlling shareholder of Tesla and that the Tesla board and he arranged an unfair pay plan for him,” she said. “None of that was reversed in this decision.”

“We are proud to have participated in the historic verdict below, calling to account the Tesla board and its largest stockholder for their breaches of fiduciary duty,” lawyers representing plaintiff Richard J. Tornetta said in an e-mailed statement.

Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Delaware Supreme Court issued the order per curiam with no single judge taking credit for writing the opinion and no dissent noted.

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Musk’s 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla, comprised of 12 milestone-based tranches of stock, was unprecedented at the time it was proposed. After it was granted, the pay plan made Musk the wealthiest individual in the world.

Tesla shareholder Tornetta sued Tesla, filing a derivative action in 2018, accusing Musk and the company’s board of a breach of their fiduciary duties.

Delaware’s business-specialized Court of Chancery decided in January 2024 that the pay plan was improperly granted and ordered it to be rescinded.

In her decision, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick also found that Musk “controlled Tesla,” and that the process leading to the board’s approval of his 2018 pay plan was “deeply flawed.”

Among other things, she found the Tesla board did not disclose all the material information they should have to investors before asking them to vote on and approve the plan.

After the earlier Tornetta ruling, Musk moved Tesla’s site of incorporation out of Delaware, bashed McCormick by name in posts on his social network X, formerly Twitter, where he has tens of millions of followers, and called for other entrepreneurs to reincorporate outside of the state.

Tesla also attempted to “ratify” the 2018 CEO pay plan by holding a second vote with shareholders in 2024.

In November, Tesla shareholders voted to approve an even larger CEO compensation plan for Musk.

The 2025 pay plan consists of 12 tranches of shares to be granted to the CEO if Tesla hits certain milestones over the next decade and is worth about $1 trillion in total. The new plan could also increase Musk’s voting power over the company from around 13% today to around 25%.

Shareholders had also approved a plan to replace Musk’s 2018 CEO pay if the Tornetta decision was upheld on appeal. That plan is now nullified.

As CNBC previously reported, a law firm that currently represents Tesla in this appeal penned a bill to overhaul corporate law in Delaware earlier this year. The bill was passed by the Delaware legislature in March, and if it had applied retroactively, it could have affected the outcome of this case.

Read the Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling here.

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