Los Angeles-based Bidbus has raised a $15 million Series A round led by early-stage mobility fund Ibex Investors, with additional investors also participating, to scale its car-selling platform beyond its current California and Texas markets.
Bidbus runs a digital marketplace where multiple dealerships bid competitively on a seller's used car, letting sellers get dealership-level offers without leaving home; founders say the resulting average offer is about $2,000 to $3,000 higher than what Carvana offers.
The model targets the gap between instant-sale services like Carvana, which can undervalue cars by thousands of dollars, and traditional dealership trade-ins, whose offers vary widely and demand extra seller time and effort — a pricing-efficiency problem increasingly relevant as digital used-car transactions scale nationally.
Aseon Labs, co-founded by the Pushme battery-swapping team, has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners to build parking space-sized automated pods for robotaxis.
The pods address deadhead miles—unprofitable miles driven without paying passengers—by enabling robotaxis to be inspected, cleaned, and charged at distributed locations throughout cities rather than at distant depots.
The six-person team will use funding to build five prototypes, expand to about a dozen employees, and acquire real estate for a network of robotic pit stops, backed by Y Combinator, Expa, and investors including former Google executive Adrian Aoun and operators from Anthropic, Nuro, Turo, and Revolut.
Waymo and Waze announced a pilot program on April 9, 2026, using Waymo's perception and physical feedback systems to detect potholes and provide the data to cities and state Departments of Transportation.
The data will be available through the free Waze for Cities platform to municipal officials and visible to Waze app users in Waymo-operating cities, with user verification improving detection accuracy.
Potholes cause significant vehicle damage and contribute to crashes; cities currently rely on non-emergency 311 reports and manual inspections, which provide incomplete road maintenance coverage.