Baidu will bring its driverless taxis to Europe next year via a partnership with U.S. ridehailing firm Lyft, as the Chinese tech giant looks to expand its autonomous vehicles globally.

The robotaxis will initially be deployed in the U.K. and Germany from 2026 with the aim to have “thousands” of vehicles across Europe in the “following years,” the two companies said.

Lyft has had very little presence in Europe until last week when it closed the acquisition of Germany-based ride hailing company FreeNow, which is available in over 150 cities across nine countries, including Ireland, the U.K., Germany and France.

Deployment of the autonomous cars is “pending regulatory approval,” Lyft and Baidu said in a Monday statement. It’s unclear if Lyft will offer Baidu’s robotaxis via the FreeNow app or another product.

The partnership marks a continued push from Baidu to expand its robotaxis to international markets.

Last month, Baidu partnered with Uber to deploy its autonomous cars on the ride-hailing giant’s platform outside the U.S. and mainland China, with a focus on the Middle East and Asia, which will launch later this year. The partnership also covers Europe, though a launch date for the region has not yet been disclosed.

In China, Baidu has been operating its own robotaxi service since 2021 in major cities like Beijing, allowing users to hail an Apollo Go car through the app. Meanwhile, for Lyft, the deal could boost the firm’s presence in the region as it looks to take on rivals like Uber and Bolt.

Autonomous vehicles have become a big focus for ride-hailing companies which have looked to partner with companies that are developing the technology for driverless cars.

In the U.K., a market that Lyft is targeting, Uber this year partnered with self-driving car technology firm Wayve to launch trials of fully autonomous rides starting in spring 2026.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was awarded an interim pay package of 96 million shares of the company over the weekend. The shares would be worth about $29 billion.

Tesla stock climbed about 2% Monday.

The company said in a filing Sunday that the pay package would vest in two years as long as Musk continued as CEO or in another key executive position.

The new award would be forfeited if the legal battle over his 2018 compensation ends with Musk being able to exercise the larger pay package, which was valued at $56 billion.

In January, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick upheld a prior ruling in the case, Tornetta v. Musk, that the compensation plan was improperly granted. Tesla shareholders approved the pay package in June 2024.

The case is now before the Delaware Supreme Court.

Musk’s 2018 pay package included a set of performance targets for the company, which were all achieved.

The judge called it “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets” in her January decision and said it was 33 times higher than the nearest comparison, which was Musk’s prior compensation package.

Artificial intelligence startup Harvey on Monday announced it has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, just three years after its launch. 

Harvey runs an AI-powered legal platform for lawyers at law firms and large corporations. Its technology can help with legal research, drafting and diligence projects, and the company is also building industry-specific use cases. 

Winston Weinberg, co-founder and CEO of Harvey, said the startup’s ARR milestone has largely been driven by usage. Harvey has surpassed 500 customers, including CNBC’s parent company, Comcast, and its weekly average users have quadrupled over the past year, the startup said. 

“Most of our accounts grow pretty massively,” Weinberg told CNBC. “You’ll sell to a Comcast or to a law firm, and they’ll buy a couple hundred seats, and then they expand that usage pretty quickly.” 

Weinberg is a former lawyer, and he co-founded Harvey with his friend and roommate Gabe Pereyra, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind and Meta. The pair launched the company in 2022 after experimenting with OpenAI’s large language model GPT-3, which came out before its viral AI chatbot, ChatGPT. 

The company’s name, Harvey, is partially inspired by one of the main characters in “Suits,” a legal drama TV series, Weinberg said.

Harvey has raised more than $800 million from investors, according to PitchBook, including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and the OpenAI Startup Fund. The company also earned a spot on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. 

“With gen AI, and how fast everything’s moving, you just have to learn how to scale really, really fast,” Weinberg said. “I’d say, like every six months I go through a new scaling experience.”

In the months ahead, Weinberg said Harvey is focused on its global expansion and continuing to build out its team. The startup recently hired Siva Gurumurthy, the former director of engineering at Twitter, as its chief technology officer, and John Haddock, who spent a decade at Stripe, as its chief business officer. 

Weinberg said he has learned to appreciate the value of a strong team, especially during periods of rapid growth. 

“We’re starting to get to the point where we have really good leadership in place,” Weinberg said. “That just changes your ability to scale to such a massive degree.”

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC.