Andre H.

What Waymo’s Expansion in San Francisco Signals for the Future of Scaled Mobility? Being in San Francisco this week, it’s impossible not to miss how automation is beginning to reshape the city’s streets and what that means for business at scale. Watching Waymo’s driverless cars quietly navigate Market Street feels less like a tech showcase and more like the early stages of a transportation revolution. San Francisco has long served as a proving ground where small experiments become global movements. Waymo reflects how transformative technologies evolve: by mastering complexity first. Each driverless mile adds to a growing dataset that strengthens not just passenger rides but broader applications in freight and logistics. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (Google), now operates a fleet of more than 2,000 vehicles across five US markets. Most are JLR electric (the one in the video) vehicles equipped with custom-built sensors and computing systems. This scale positions Waymo as one of the few autonomous players capable of both technological depth and geographic reach. Competition, however, is intensifying. Tesla recently expanded its robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, opening services to the public, while Amazon-owned Zoox launched operations in Las Vegas and San Francisco. Transportation is rapidly becoming a connected, data-driven ecosystem where software and hardware converge to move people and goods seamlessly. From a brand perspective, transport and supply are often underestimated in the P&L, seen as operational line items rather than strategic levers. Too often, they’re considered at the end of planning instead of at the heart of how value reaches retailers and consumers. Yet logistics is a key pillar of scalability, it’s what determines how quickly, sustainably, and efficiently we can deliver. It’s fascinating to imagine how the next generation of autonomous mobility will change that equation. The ability to move products easily, quickly, and cost-effectively will redefine how companies expand, compete, and serve global demand. In many ways, what’s happening on San Francisco’s streets today offers a glimpse of how brands will build tomorrow’s growth, powered by technology, efficiency, and intelligent movement.

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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Lucid, Nuro, and Uber Unveil Global Robotaxi at CES, Announce Autonomous On-Road Testing Las Vegas, NV, January 5 – Lucid Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: LCID), Nuro, Inc. (“Nuro”), and Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: UBER), today unveiled the production intent vehicles that will be used in their global robotaxi service and introduced the Uber-designed in-cabin rider experience for the first time at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026. The companies also announced that autonomous on-road testing began last month, an important milestone in the development and validation of the robotaxi service ahead of its expected launch in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year. Nuro is leading the testing using robotaxi engineering prototypes supervised by autonomous vehicle operators, beginning in the Bay Area.

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Waabi Unveils Autonomous Truck in Partnership with Volvo In a groundbreaking development, Waabi has unveiled its latest autonomous truck, a product of its collaboration with Volvo Autonomous Solutions. This partnership marks a significant milestone as Waabi integrates its innovative software stack into a custom truck designed on Volvo’s advanced autonomy platform. This initiative not only underscores Waabi's commitment to advancing autonomous logistics but also showcases the potential of strategic alliances in shaping the future of transportation. Together, we are paving the way for safer and more efficient roads. #AutonomousVehicles,#Logistics,#Transportation,#SmartTrucking,#Innovation,#Waabi,#Volvo,#FutureOfTransportation,#FleetTech,#SafetyInTransport

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Zoox just launched public robotaxi rides in San Francisco. Waymo continues expanding across cities and freeways. That sounds like progress. From a systems-engineering perspective, it signals something else. Robotaxi fleets are scaling faster than their verification frameworks. Every new deployment zone changes pedestrian behavior, occlusion geometry, cyclist interaction, and edge-case combinations. As the operating environment expands, scenario distributions shift — and validation assumptions decay. This isn’t a software bug story. It’s a boundary problem. Here’s why expansion inevitably outruns verification. https://lnkd.in/gxi4aFbW

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Stoked to share that we just opened a new Kinetic hub in Dogpatch, San Francisco. Kinetic is building the robotic repair network for precision car repair - and this launch is a meaningful step forward: 3rd location in the Bay Area, 7th location on the West Coast. Modern vehicles are basically computers on wheels - packed with radars, cameras, and increasingly lidar, and capable of making driving decisions more and more agentically. That progress is awesome… but it also raises the bar for what it takes to keep these cars safe and road-ready. Precision sensor calibration, service, and programming isn’t optional anymore - it’s foundational. And we’re focused on doing it correctly, efficiently, and affordably at scale. Huge thanks to everyone who helped make this hub happen. If you’re a collision shop, dealership, fleet, or insurance partner in the Bay Area and want to see what we’re building, I’d love to connect. Also - shoutout to Rya Jetha for the write-up in the The San Francisco Standard (link in comments). More Kinetic updates coming soon.

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🚗 Mobility, AI & Systems Digest From 🤖 robotaxi scale to 🧬 regenerative biology and 🌍 infrastructure shifts — this week shows something important: Scale is replacing speculation. 💬 Quote of the Week “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” — R. Buckminster Fuller 🚖 Future of Mobility 🚕 Waymo CEO predicts 1 million weekly rides by the end of the year. – The Verge 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eV8nVMPA 🏎️ Ferrari Luce: a first look at the Jony Ive and Marc Newson-designed EV – Wallpaper* 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ej9FbFvZ 🚦 Glydways to ‘redefine mass transit’ with autonomous EVs – Electrek.co 🔗 https://lnkd.in/erf5EhFE 🚗 Hyundai is reportedly looking to supply Waymo with 50,000 IONIQ 5 for robotaxis – Electrek.co 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eFr8x5hj 🚖 Pony AI and Toyota roll out mass-produced robotaxis in China – South China Morning Post SCMP 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ecTwkSmJ 💻 Software & Platform Shift 🧠 Rivian was saved by software in 2025 – TechCrunch 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eukcnyFy 📊 Geotab Is Moving From Tracking Fleet Vehicles To Tracking Everything – Forbes 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e9X2dGpa 🌐 Google Chrome ships WebMCP in early preview – VentureBeat 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ebMgRHY8 🔘 Human Factors 🔘 Physical Buttons Are Making a Comeback in EVs – Business Insider 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eMnVk_Yk 🚪 Carmakers Rush to Remove Chinese Code Under New Federal Rules – Autoblog 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ePMqzDCv 🧬 Science & Systems 🧠 Scientists Grew Mini Human Spinal Cords, Then Made Them Repair After Injury – ScienceAlert 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e4Ek6p4h 🌲 Forests are changing fast and scientists are deeply concerned – ScienceDaily 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eyfzWcZH ⚛️ Europe Launches Euro-Q-Exa Quantum Computer – Quantum Computing Report 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eYPcMXt7 📊 Stat of the Week 📈 Global equity funds saw a net inflow of $25.54 billion last week, led by record inflows into European equity funds. Reuters 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eNjzcgsD

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Robotics + automotive repair! Exciting growth for Kinetic. “Kinetic uses artificial intelligence, computer vision and robotics technologies to service modern vehicles after collisions.”

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