Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn is joining the parade of investors in startups, hitching a US$100 million ride with the ride-hailing service Lyft Inc.
Icahn is known for tangling with corporate boards, sometimes launching proxy fights and pushing companies to make big changes or sell themselves. He is less well known for investing in startups, but that has become one of the hottest areas in the market. Venture capitalists poured more than US$48 billion into startups last year, the most since the dotcom bubble burst.
Icahn owns stakes in Apple Inc, Yahoo Inc, Netflix Inc, Hertz Global Holdings Inc, Gannett Co and eBay Inc, among many other publicly traded companies.
Users can download Lyft’s app and book a ride from a nearby driver and use the app to pay for their rides. In March, the company raised US$530 million and valued itself at US$2.5 billion. The privately held company on Friday said it received US$150 million in the new round of fundraising — including Icahn’s investment.
Lyft was launched in 2012 and touts its friendly drivers and an alternative image: In its early days its cars were marked with huge, pink, fuzzy mustaches strapped to the front bumper. This year the company adopted a more modest version of the mustache that sits on the dashboard of the car instead of its exterior.
The company said it operates in about 65 cities including New York, San Francisco and Washington. In the Autumn of last year it rolled out a new service, Lyft Line, that matches up travelers with similar destinations so they can share a ride and save money.
Icahn said in a statement that he believes ride-sharing is set to become a key part of transportation infrastructure in the US. He also praised Lyft’s revenue growth and its management. Icahn Enterprises LP managing director Jonathan Christodoro is to join the San Francisco company’s board of directors. Lyft did not comment on any other terms in the investment.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
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