Transport

Electric skateboard producer Boosted, backed by Stanford-StartX Fund, has laid off employees after its business model succumbed amid the US-China tariff war.

Sistema and Direct Line participated in a $41m series B round for Five, which is currently trialling its autonomous driving technology in London.

The ride sharing company has opened the application period for its third Velocity scale-up initiative and launched a Vietnam-based startup accelerator called Ignite.

Autonomous car developer Waymo has snatched up its first external funding, with parent company Alphabet, Magna International and AutoNation all investing.

Alphabet will exit credit management company Credit Karma in a $7.1bn acquisition by Intuit.

The autonomous driving system developer is now valued at over $3bn, having secured $462m including $400m from strategic partner Toyota.

Returning investor RATP Capital Innovation and long-term insurer Allianz France both participated as the moped rental platform raised $25.5m.

Samsung Venture Investment has invested in train ticketing portal RailYatri's bus spinoff, IntrCity, as part of a $13.5m round.

Reports suggest Grab, which just raised $856m from strategic partners TIS and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, is in talks to merge with rival Gojek in a $23bn deal.

Ola-backed urban mobility service Vogo secured the funding at a reported valuation of just over $76m, with LGT Lightstone leading the round.

Nvidia, Intel and others are piling innovation resources into AI-specialised chip architectures amid heightened risk of competition from Chinese vendors