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Chinese automaker BYD had one of the biggest stands at the IAA show in Munich, Germany in 2023.

Arjun Kharpal | CNBC

Elon Musk dismissed BYD in 2011 by laughing at their products during a Bloomberg interview.

“Have you seen their car?” Musk quipped. “I don’t think it’s particularly attractive, the technology is not very strong. And BYD as a company has pretty severe problems in their home turf in China. I think their focus is, and rightly should be, on making sure they don’t die in China.”

BYD did not get wiped out. Instead, BYD dethroned Tesla in the fourth quarter as the top EV maker, selling more battery-powered vehicles than its U.S. rival.

“Their goal was to be China’s largest auto manufacturer and put China manufacturing on the map,” Taylor Ogan, CEO of Snow Bull Capital, said of BYD’s long-standing ambition.

So how did the Chinese company, which began by making phone batteries, become an electric car giant?

BYD’s history

While BYD is now known as an electric car giant, its tentacles stretch into many areas from batteries to mining and semiconductors, which is a large reason behind its success.

Chemist Wang Chuanfu founded BYD in 1995 in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, China’s massive tech hub. It was founded with 20 employees and 2.5 million Chinese yuan of capital, or $351,994 at today’s exchange rate.

In 1996, BYD began manufacturing lithium-ion batteries, the type that are in our modern day smartphones. This coincided with the growth of mobile phones. BYD went onto supply its batteries to Motorola and Nokia in 2000 and 2002, respectively, two of the mobile phone industry’s juggernaughts at the time.

In 2002, BYD listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, riding the wave of its success in lithium-ion batteries.

BYD’s pivot to autos

It wasn’t until 2003 that BYD acquired a small automaker called Xi’an Qinchuan Automobile.

Two years later, it launched its first car called the F3, which was a combustion model. And then in 2008, it launched the F3DM, its first foray into electric vehicles. The F3DM was a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

That same year Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway made what was at the time a $230 million investment in BYD.

This gave a boost to BYD’s electric car ambitions.

BYD continued to push into the EV space and this is where its history as a battery maker came into play. In 2020, the company launched the Blade battery, which many argued helped spark BYD’s growth in EVs.

It is an LFP or lithium iron phosphate battery. At the time, according to Ogan, many battery makers were moving away from LFP batteries due to perceptions that they had poor energy density, i.e. they were too heavy for the amount of energy they were able to provide.

But BYD touted the Blade as a breakthrough that provided good energy density and high levels of safety. It committed to putting this in its Han, a sporty sedan which was released in 2020 and seen as a rival to Tesla’s Model S. BYD then put the Blade in subsequent models it released.

“The energy density at the cell level and the pack level were actually higher than what BYD initially unveiled … Everyone was blown away,” Ogan said.

BYD sold 130,970 pure battery electric vehicles in 2020. Last year, the company sold 1.57 million battery EVs.

What has been behind BYD’s success?

The breakthrough with the Blade underlines why BYD has found success in EVs — strategic investments and the fact that it has more businesses than just cars.

“BYD cut their teeth being a supplier in the high tech space, building up resiliency by supplying batteries to hard to please companies like Apple,” Tu Le of Sino Auto Insights, told CNBC.

“Wang Chuanfu then had the wherewithal to acquire a broken down local Chinese automotive brand and was able to focus on innovating on battery tech, enough so that it can sell to other automakers. If that wasn’t enough they were head down grinding, continually improving the design, engineering and quality of it’s own stable of vehicles. We didn’t know this at the time, but everything it’s done over the last 15-20 years set it up to surpass Tesla in Q4 ’23.”

Wang Chuanfu, Chairman and President of BYD.

May Tse | South China Morning Post | South China Morning Post | Getty Images

Beijing backs EVs

As well as BYD’s own tactics, its rise has been helped by the Chinese government’s huge support of the country’s EV sector. Over the past few years, Beijing has offered subsidies to incentivize buyers of electric cars and offered state support to the industry. These measures began around 2009, at the time BYD was looking to ramp up its EV push.

China is 'driving' towards an EV future: ToscaFund Hong Kong

Rhodium Group estimates that BYD received approximately $4.3 billion in state support between 2015 and 2020.

“BYD is a highly innovative and adaptive company, but its rise has been inextricably linked to Beijing’s protection and support,” Gregor Sebastian, senior analyst at Rhodium, told CNBC. “Without Beijing’s backing, BYD wouldn’t be the global powerhouse it is today.”

“Over time, the company has enjoyed below-market equity and debt financing allowing it to scale up production and R&D activities.”

Global ambitions

After dominating China’s EV market, BYD is now epanding aggressively overseas. It sells cars in a number of countries from the United Arab Emirates to Thailand and the U.K.

In southeast Asia, BYD has a 43% market share in electric vehicles. But BYD’s interntional expansion is not just about selling cars, it involves manufacturing and materials too.

BYD said in December it would open its first European manufacturing plant in Hungary. And the company is also looking to buy lithium mining assets in Brazil. Lithium is a key component of BYD’s batteries.

However, with global expansion comes scrutiny from governments who are concerned about the subisides that Chinese carmakers have received.

In September, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, launched an investigation into subsidies given to electric vehicle makers in China.

Meanwhile the U.S. is trying to boost its own domestic EV sector through the Inflation Reduction Act, with an aim of keeping out Chinese competitors.

“Initiatives like the IRA and the EU anti-subsidy probe aim to impede China’s progress in these markets,” Rhodium’s Sebastian said.

“To ensure sustained growth, BYD is proactively addressing these political hurdles, as seen in its recent investment in an EV plant in Hungary, underscoring its commitment to global expansion.”

What next?

The battle between Tesla and BYD — the world’s two biggest EV makers — is set to continue. Sino Auto Insights’ Le said he beleives that BYD still hasn’t “reached max potential.”

“Most automotive companies for the longest time didn’t take them seriously. That’s where part of their journey mirrors Tesla’s because people didn’t take Tesla seriously in the early days either,” Le said.

Tesla will likely be overtaken in terms of units, says Canaccord's George Gianarikas

As for Tesla, the company is facing stiffer competition in 2024 with Chinese competitors launching more models and traditional automakers trying to catch up in the EV race.

Daniel Roeska, senior research analyst at Bernstein Research, told CNBC that there isn’t a big driver of sales volumes in Tesla’s car portfolio in the coming months. BYD on the other hand could see faster growth.

“BYD quite to the contrary is really pushing the pedal to the metal … by accelerating growth in Europe and other overseas markets. And so there is a lot more growth in the BYD story in the next 12 to 24 months for sure,” Roeska said.

Tesla’s Musk has recognized that he shouldn’t have taken BYD lightly. In a comment posted in X in response to a video of his 2011 Bloomberg interview, Musk said: “That was many years ago. Their cars are highly competitive these days.”

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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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