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Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of Stripe, speaking at 2022’s Italian Tech Week in Turin, Italy.

Giuliano Berti | Bloomberg | Getty Images

SAN FRANCISCO — What started as a casual roundtable at Stripe’s headquarters to discuss issues facing fintech companies turned into a billion-dollar acquisition that could become a defining moment for the industry.

Last summer, Stripe hosted Wally Adeyemo, who was then deputy secretary of the Treasury Department, for a chat with a number of financial services providers. Among the attendees were Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams. The two entrepreneurs had never met.

Abrams, whose startup specialized in stablecoin infrastructure, said the session surprised him, as it quickly morphed into a conversation specific to his company.

“It was shocking to me,” Abrams told CNBC this week, recalling the event. The group “spent 90-plus percent of the meeting talking about stablecoins — even though we were the only stablecoin company” in the room, he said.

By the end, Bridge was firmly on Stripe’s radar. Months later, that initial meeting led to Stripe’s biggest acquisition to date, a $1.1 billion purchase of Bridge. The deal, which closed Tuesday after clearing regulatory hurdles, gives Stripe a firm foothold in crypto, a market where it previously struggled to gain traction.

“In the course of us spending time together, he probably developed more of an understanding of our business,” said Abrams, who co-founded Bridge in 2022. “And I think there was a growing excitement around the ways that our business can grow, and probably the ways our business could help support and grow the Stripe ecosystem.”

Stripe co-founder John Collison on startups, state of consumer and impact of AI

Bridge’s roughly 60-person team convened in San Francisco on Tuesday for the official onboarding. The newcomers were introduced to Stripe’s culture with a crash course on how to write like a Stripe employee and an intro to the business from Collison.

It’s all part of Stripe’s standard fintech boot camp, a program that runs every two weeks for new hires.

Bridge focuses on making it easier for businesses to accept stablecoin payments without having to directly deal in digital tokens. Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to the value of a real-world asset, such as the U.S. dollar. Customers include Coinbase and SpaceX.

Companies across the financial services landscape, from legacy banks to startup payment providers, are adopting stablecoins or exploring launching their own because they make it easier and cheaper to switch between currencies and to move money digitally. Standard Chartered predicted in a recent report that stablecoins could grow to become about 10% of foreign exchange transactions, up from 1% today.

Prior to Abrams’ first interaction with Collison at the roundtable, Bridge had been aggressively courting Stripe as a customer, hoping to integrate its technology into the payment giant’s ecosystem. As the two CEOs spent more time together in the weeks that followed, Collison’s interest in Bridge deepened.

Previous failure

Stripe had already taken a shot at crypto — and failed. It was one of the first major fintech firms to support bitcoin payments in 2014, but pulled the plug in 2018, citing scalability issues and high transaction fees. Still, the company insisted at the time that it remained “very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall.”

Stablecoins would be Stripe’s next foray. At its flagship Sessions conference in April, the company said it would enable merchants to accept stablecoins for online purchases. In its first week of the offering, Stripe saw more stablecoin volume than in its entire history of offering bitcoin transactions.

However, Stripe was still missing a key component to make it all work. It needed a way to seamlessly handle cross-border transactions.

That’s precisely what Bridge offered, said Neetika Bansal, Stripe’s head of money movement products.

“If you think about Stripe and what we’ve focused on for the past seven years — what I personally have focused on — it’s been about breaking down the barriers for global commerce,” Bansal told CNBC in an interview at Stripe’s office. “We’ve done it, to a large part, on traditional financial rails.”

Stripe’s approach to global payments for years involved navigating the complex regulatory and operational challenges in each market it entered. Bridge had developed “a super elegant solution to cross-border use cases” and had “meaningful traction with companies of all sizes,” Bansal said. “It just felt almost like a no-brainer to go and acquire them.”

Early Bridge investor weighs in on $1.1 billion Stripe deal

Stripe paid a hefty price for a two-year old company, an amount that was about three times higher than Bridge’s valuation in a funding round in August.

Bansal framed the acquisition as a strategic step toward modernizing Stripe’s global money movement capabilities.

“We are working very closely together to figure out the right opportunities, where we should power our products with Bridge and, in fact, where we should do new product development on Bridge infrastructure,” she said. “That’s what the next few weeks look like.”

Stripe processes millions of cross-border transactions daily, a segment that’s growing 50% annually. Bansal said stablecoins could meaningfully reduce costs and streamline transactions compared to traditional financial networks.

Bansal used as an example a company in the U.S. paying a contractor in the Philippines, which she called “a common use case as company workforces are going global.”

Stripe has partnered with Remote.com, a global human resources and contractor platform, to process payouts using stablecoin infrastructure in more than 70 countries. Bansal said she sees stablecoins playing a growing role in foreign exchange and treasury management for large enterprises.

For now, Bridge will continue running its existing products, but the teams are working together to determine the best integrations and explore new products that can be built on Bridge’s technology.

“They’re clearly a leader in the space,” Bansal said about Bridge. “A lot of our conversations are about absorbing what Bridge has learned about stablecoins.”

WATCH: Fintechs soar after election

Fintech trades soar post election

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Pet Valu deploys electric semi trucks so pets can breathe a bit easier

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Pet Valu deploys electric semi trucks so pets can breathe a bit easier

They may not purr like a well-tuned diesel, but Pet Valu has added two brand-new, whisper-quiet Volvo VNR Electric semi trucks to its growing logistics fleet as part of the company’s ongoing effort to transform its supply chain into one that’s more efficient, and more sustainable.

Pet Valu is one of Canada’s leading specialty retailers, offering a wide variety of pet food, toys, and and other fur-and-feather friendly supplies to keep pets healthy and happy. Part of the company’s efforts to deliver on that happy/healthy promise is in reducing ground-level air pollution, and these new, zero-tailpipe emission electric semi trucks will help Pet Valu achieve that vision.

“At Pet Valu, we are committed to continuously improving how we serve devoted pet lovers and their pets,” explains Nico Weidel, chief supply chain officer, Pet Valu. “Each electric delivery truck represents an opportunity to avoid consuming over 25,000 liters of diesel fuel or over 62 tonnes of CO2 (emissions) per year. We’re excited to explore how these trucks perform and assess the potential for further electrification of our delivery fleet in the future.”

Pet Valu spec’ed out its new Class 8 Volvo VNR Electric day cab trucks with the 565 kWh six-battery pack configuration, offering route drivers an operating range of up to 442 kilometers (about 275 miles) per charge. And, while Volvo’s VNRs are capable of ultra-fast charging, these trucks will power up overnight overnight at the company’s Surrey distribution center an a newly installed 120 kW charger.

In addition to deploying the trucks, the Volvo Trucks team worked closely with Pet Valu to identify and secure additional funding opportunities to help offset the high up-front cost of the battery-electric semis, including federal (Canadian) and provincial incentive programs Clean BC – Go Electric and iMHZEV (incentives for Medium- and Heavy-Duty Zero-Emission Vehicles).

“We are excited to see Pet Valu taking the initiative in the Canadian pet supply industry by adopting Volvo’s VNR Electric trucks,” says Matthew Blackman, managing director for Canada, Volvo Trucks North America. “As they venture into sustainable transportation, this effort is expected to not only strengthen their supply chain but also help support a healthier planet, one ‘purr-fectly’ quiet kilometer at a time.”

And, yes: we made the same joke. (I stand by it.)

Electrek’s Take

Martin Brower orders more Volvo electric trucks for MacDonald’s in Canada
Volvo VNR Electric semi deployed by 3PL Martin Brower; via McDonald’s.

Pet Valu joins a growing list of companies – and they’re already adding to the tally of tens of millions of all-electric, zero emission miles driven by Volvo customersBy the time Volvo rolls out its next-generation VNL and FH electric semis later this year, they will represent company’s third generation of Class 8 EVs, and will be backed by more than 100,000,000 miles of real-world data collected by thousands of trucks across dozens of companies.

Can anyone catch up?

SOURCE | IMAGES: Volvo Trucks.

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Milestone: TRC reaches $2 billion in commercial ZEV funding

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Milestone: TRC reaches  billion in commercial ZEV funding

Consulting firm TRC has made a name for itself in the clean trucking space both for managing the ACT Expo and helping commercial fleets navigate the increasingly complex world of ZEV incentives. This week, the company reached a major milestone: $2 billion in funding!

Over the last few years, GNA (which was acquired by TRC in 2023) has developed and submitted more than 650 successful grant applications and funding requests on behalf of its clients, helping them to achieve their environmental and sustainability goals while saving money on total cost of ownership in the process.

“We feel privileged to assist forward-thinking companies to achieve their goals to develop and demonstrate the commercial use of some of the most cutting-edge and advanced technologies in the marketplace today,” said Erik Neandross, President, Clean Transportation Solutions at TRC. “Managing multi-million-dollar grant applications can be daunting, but our team’s tenacity and knowledge ensures that our clients will successfully achieve their objectives while they remain focused on their core business activities.”

Noteworthy projects that received funding through TRC’s support include:

  • Over $40 million for the JETSI Project, which deployed 100 zero-emission Class 8 trucks across Southern California to operationalize zero-emission freight movement at scale.
  • $44 million for Volvo LIGHTS, an initiative that implemented a blueprint for the complete ecosystem needed to successfully deploy commercial battery-electric trucks.
  • $95 million for the Nevada Gold Mines 200 MW Solar Project, accelerating the decarbonization of mining operations in Northern Nevada.
  • $15.4 million for the Frito-Lay Zero and Near Zero Emission Freight Facility (ZANZEFF) Project in Modesto, CA, to deploy an array of commercially available and pre-commercial ZE and NZE technologies as well as renewable power generation and energy storage.
  • $5 million for Mariposa County Resource Conservation District to develop, demonstrate and deploy environmentally and economically sustainable biomass-to-energy systems for the forest and food waste sectors.
  • $6.5 million for Foster Farms for projects to modify parking yards with EV charging parking stalls and implement emissions-reducing mechanical upgrades at five Foster Farms plants.
  • $4.4 million for Otter Tail Power Company to enhance grid resiliency with next-generation technology.

TRC’s efforts have helped clients to tap funding from sources such as Volkswagen Settlement Funds, Federal Highway Administration, DOE, South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), California Air Resources Board (CARB), California Energy Commission (CEC), Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) programs, and others.

Electrek’s Take

Joe Annotti is a senior executive dedicated to clean transportation and energy independence initiatives at TRC, and has been a great guest on several of my podcasts – most recently Quick Charge on the Electrek Daily channel. You can check out that episode, above, then let us know what you think of TRC’s fleet decarbonization efforts in the comments.

SOURCE | IMAGES: TRC; photo by the author.

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First ever electric rail car mover gets to work at Port of Baltimore [video]

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First ever electric rail car mover gets to work at Port of Baltimore [video]

The Helen Delich Bentley Port of Baltimore has announced a first for the contemporary American maritime industry: a battery-electric rail car mover that can organize the rail yard without dirtying up the air around it.

Built by the Marmon Rail’s Italian Zephir division, the LOK 16.150E model rail car mover features an 80-volt rechargeable battery pack sending current to a pair of 40 kW (about 50 hp) high-torque brushless motors. That may not sound like a lot in a world of 650 hp Kias and 1000 hp Teslas, but it’s enough to generate a drawbar pull (read: towing force) of more than 39,000 lbs. … all while generating zero tailpipe emissions.

“At this terminal, the asset will be used to help with intermodal cargo exchange,” said Matt Stahl, Mid-Atlantic terminal general manager for global shipping gurus Wallenius Wilhelmsen, who operate the Zephir. “We can do it with our own asset, without any assistance.”

Wallenius Wilhelmsen is using the Zephir to move rail cars loaded with heavy lift, farm and construction equipment, and military cargo within the Dundalk Marine Terminal, and claims it will remove over 180 tons of harmful carbon emissions per year.

You can check out the promotional video released by the Port of Baltimore to celebrate the Zephir’s deployment, below, then let us know what you think in the comments.

Electrek’s Take

Historically-conscious readers already know that the key word in that first paragraph is contemporary, because the Zephir is very much a case of “what’s old is new again,” according to Freightwaves’ Stuart Chirls. Chirls explains that the Zephir, “harks back [sic] to battery-powered railcar movers built by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1912, rubber-tired ‘locomotives’ used to switch freight cars around the narrow streets of the Baltimore waterfront on track curvature too tight for standard motive power.”

If you want to learn more about the Pennsylvania Railroads’ 100-year lead on electric rail car switcher technology, check out this article on Railfan, which includes the photos below plus a whole lot more.

Don’t miss: they had license plates!

Rubber Tired Switchers

SOURCES | IMAGES: Port of Baltimore, via Freightwaves, Railfan.

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