The figure became the second largest fine ever issued under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, behind only the 1.2 billion euro that Ireland imposed on Meta in 2023, and it overtook the 746 million euro Luxembourg levied on Amazon in 2021, a penalty a Luxembourg court set aside on procedural grounds in March this year.

The number drew the headlines. The reasoning is what should worry boardrooms. The regulator found that between 2018 and 2022 Uber let software decide, on its own, when a driver stopped earning.

Where the company’s systems suspected fraud, an account was switched off automatically for a period.

Where a driver’s customer ratings stayed low for long enough, the regulator says the account was switched off for good, again by machine.

In neither case, the watchdog found, was there a human being who looked at the file before the driver lost access to the platform, and drivers were not told enough about how the decision had been reached to have any realistic chance of challenging it.

Monique Verdier, the authority’s deputy chair, put it plainly. Drivers, she said, went from earning to not earning in an instant, with no warning and no person involved.

“A computer should not make decisions on its own that have such major consequences,” she said.

A human should have reviewed the case first.

Uber does not accept the finding.

“We strongly disagree with this decision and disproportionate fine,” a company spokesperson said, adding that Uber takes drivers’ rights seriously and that its policies include both human review and a route for drivers to dispute a suspension.

The company says it will appeal, which moves the case into the Dutch courts, where the penalty can be upheld, reduced or thrown out.

Uber has already contested the regulator’s two previous large fines against it, and neither of those disputes has concluded.

What Uber is accused of doing
The GDPR has been in force since May 2018. Article 22 of the regulation gives every person in the EU the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing where that decision has legal effects or otherwise significantly affects them.

There are exceptions, but even where an exception applies the person is entitled to safeguards, including the right to obtain human intervention, to express their point of view and to contest the decision.

A second set of provisions requires organisations to tell people when automated decision-making of this kind is taking place and to explain the logic behind it.

The Dutch authority found Uber in breach on both counts. On the first, the regulator’s view is that switching off a driver’s account is about as significant an effect as a decision can have, because it removes the driver’s livelihood on the platform for as long as the block lasts.

The French data protection authority, the CNIL, which worked on the case with its Dutch counterpart, described the practical effect in the same terms. Once an account was blocked, the driver could accept no rides and earn no money through Uber, and there was no human involvement in reaching that outcome.

The examples the regulators give are ordinary features of ride-hailing. Uber’s systems flagged drivers who appeared to have taken unnecessary detours to inflate a fare, or who accepted a trip with no intention of completing it. Those flags led to automatic suspensions.

ALSO READ | Uber makes big-ticket investment commitment in self-driving startup Nuro

Separately, drivers whose ratings from passengers fell below the threshold Uber set were suspended and, the regulator says, in persistent cases removed permanently.

On the second count, the regulator found that drivers were not properly informed. They were not told that a machine was making the call, and they were not given enough information about why, which left them unable to argue their case.

Uber’s defence rests on two points. The first is factual. It says it has never used automation to make a permanent deactivation decision, that most suspensions are short, and that a human reviews any permanent removal. The second is proportionality.

Uber says relatively few drivers were affected, and points out that 126 drivers across Europe were deactivated for low ratings in 2021. It also says the policies under examination were discontinued years ago and that its current process includes human evaluation and a clear appeal channel. The Dutch authority itself confirms that Uber has stopped the practices it objected to.

Why the bill is so large
The regulator did not arrive at 825 million euro by counting affected drivers and multiplying. GDPR fines are set by reference to the seriousness of the breach and then capped at a share of the offender’s worldwide turnover.

For the most serious categories of breach, which include violating Article 22, that cap is 4%. All European privacy regulators use the same method, and the Dutch authority aligned its decision with other supervisors across the bloc before issuing it.

Uber’s global revenue in 2025 was about 44.5 billion euro. Four per cent of that would have been roughly 1.78 billion euro.

The penalty imposed works out at about 1.85% of turnover, less than half the maximum, but the base figure is Uber’s entire worldwide business, not its European ride-hailing arm and certainly not the fraction of European drivers who were deactivated.

That is the design of the law. It was written so that a global company could not treat a European fine as a rounding error, and it explains why a dispute that Uber frames as involving a small number of drivers has produced one of the largest privacy penalties in history.

The Netherlands got the case because Uber’s European headquarters is in Amsterdam. Under the GDPR’s one-stop-shop rule, the regulator in the country where a company has its main European establishment leads cross-border investigations.

The complaint began in France, with the human rights group Ligue des droits de l’Homme, and reached the Dutch authority via the CNIL.

This is the fourth Dutch fine on Uber. The regulator imposed 600,000 euro in 2018, 10 million euro in 2023 and 290 million euro in 2024, the last of those for transferring drivers’ personal data to the United States without adequate safeguards.

Paul-Olivier Dehaye, founder of the Swiss digital rights group PersonalData.io, which helped drivers obtain their data, has said the fines all trace back to complaints from the same group of drivers.

The man who started it
That group formed around Brahim Ben Ali, a former Uber driver in France whose account was deactivated in 2019.

According to the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, Ben Ali gathered testimonies from about 170 other drivers before taking his complaint to the Netherlands, with PersonalData.io helping the drivers use their data access rights to find out how decisions about their accounts had been made.

Dehaye’s description of the problem is the one that resonates with drivers.

A driver can complete a thousand journeys with satisfied passengers, he has said, but “if just one person reports a very serious problem, the consequences can be enormous.”

Dehaye is now setting up a company called StartClaims to support litigation and further regulatory action, starting with Uber and later extending to other gig economy platforms and to advertising technology.

PersonalData.io has said it is preparing a class action seeking compensation for drivers.

That matters for the arithmetic. A regulatory fine goes to the state. Compensation claims go to the people who lost income, and under the GDPR individuals can seek damages for harm caused by a breach.

If the Dutch decision survives appeal, it becomes a ready-made finding of fact on which such claims can be built. The 825 million euro may be the first bill rather than the last.

The timing is the story
What lifts this case above a large number and a corporate appeal is the calendar. On July 27, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, known as the “Digital Omnibus on AI,” entered into force. Its centrepiece was a delay.

The EU AI Act’s rules for high-risk systems listed in its Annex III, a list that expressly covers software used in recruitment, task allocation, monitoring and the termination of work relationships, had been due to apply from August 2 2026.

The omnibus pushed that date to December 2 2027. Systems embedded in products already regulated under EU safety law got until August 2 2028.

Businesses read the delay as breathing space, and law firms across Europe wrote client notes telling them that the heaviest compliance regime had moved out by sixteen months. Three weeks later the Dutch regulator signed a decision that made the point the other way.

It did not cite the AI Act. It did not need to. It reached for a provision that has been in force since 2018 and that most companies had filed under privacy rather than employment, and it used that provision to penalise precisely the kind of automated dismissal decision the AI Act’s high-risk rules were meant to govern.

The lesson is uncomfortable. The AI Act delay changed when companies must document, test and register their high-risk systems.

It changed nothing about whether they may let those systems make consequential decisions about people without a human in the loop. That question was settled eight years ago, and the answer was no.

Nor is the GDPR the only older instrument in play. The EU’s Platform Work Directive, adopted in 2024, requires member states to write human oversight of algorithmic management into national law by December 2 2026, a year ahead of the AI Act deadline.

Dutch courts have also already ordered Uber and its rival Ola to explain automated decisions to drivers in cases brought by driver groups.

The regulatory floor under algorithmic management was built well before the AI Act, and it is the floor, not the ceiling, that companies are now tripping over.

Why this reaches far beyond ride-hailing
Uber is the defendant, but the practice it is accused of is widespread. Over the past decade thousands of companies have moved recruitment screening, performance scoring, productivity monitoring and in some cases dismissal recommendations onto software.

The stated reasons are consistency and speed. The unstated reason is cost. A human reviewer is expensive, and the whole economic logic of automating a decision is that no human needs to look at most cases.

The Dutch decision attacks that logic directly. If a decision significantly affects a person, the GDPR says a human must be able to intervene, and regulators have been clear for years that the intervention must be meaningful.

A person who glances at a screen and clicks approve on whatever the model recommends is not a safeguard. That means the cost saving from automation shrinks the moment the decision becomes consequential, and it means that a company which cut its review staff on the assumption that the software could be trusted now carries a liability it did not book.

Not everyone agrees with the regulator’s framing.

The technology commentator John Gruber argued that the decision risks making it unlawful for Uber to police drivers who scam passengers or leave them stranded, and that describing a computer as the decision-maker is like blaming the time clock when a habitually late employee is dismissed.

The rules, in his view, were set by managers and the software merely tracked whether they were followed.

Dehaye’s response was that Uber remains free to discipline drivers who cheat, provided a person makes the decision and the company takes responsibility for it. That is, in substance, what the regulator is asking for.

The GDPR does not ban fraud detection or rating systems. It bans handing the final, livelihood-ending decision to the machine and walking away.

What happens next
Uber’s appeal will take years. Its earlier disputes with the Dutch regulator over the 2023 and 2024 fines are still unresolved, and Meta’s challenge to the 1.2 billion euro Irish fine, now more than three years old, is a reminder of how slowly these cases move.

The Amazon precedent cuts both ways. A court did annul that fine in March, but on the grounds that the regulator had not properly assessed fault and proportionality, while endorsing the finding that Amazon had broken the law.

Uber’s best argument on appeal is the same one, that the sum is out of proportion to the harm.

The political backdrop will not help. Washington has repeatedly threatened retaliation against European penalties on American technology companies, and a fine approaching a billion dollars on a US ride-hailing group adds to that pile.

For everyone else, the practical questions are simpler. Which decisions about staff, contractors and customers does the company currently allow software to make alone? Which of those would a regulator regard as significant?

And where a human is nominally in the loop, would that person’s review survive scrutiny as a real check rather than a formality?

Companies that were planning to answer those questions in late 2027 have just been told the deadline passed in 2018.

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“The partnership will expand from the existing commercial service in Zagreb, coming soon to the Uber platform, to four additional cities in Europe. Additional details about the rollout will be announced in phases, and the expanded partnership also includes plans to deploy in the Middle East,” the companies said.

“The expanded agreement gives Pony.ai’s joint-deployment model a clearer path to commercial scale. The model brings together three core functions required to operate Robotaxi services at scale: Level 4 (L4) autonomous driving technology, a leading mobility platform, and day-to-day fleet operations. It allows technology, platform, and fleet partners to work together in the same market, while individual partners may also take on more than one role. Vehicle funding and ownership can sit with different partners depending on the market,” Pony remarked.

In the expanded partnership, Pony.ai will supply its L4 autonomous driving technology, rider experience, and knowledge gained from running many Robotaxi services, while Uber will offer customer access through its top global mobility platform, which includes booking, payment, and customer service, as well as its increasing number of human drivers.

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While the robotaxi industry has hit the top gear in terms of re-accelerating development, testing, and early commercial deployment of self-driving vehicles, led by companies including Tesla, Alphabet’s Waymo, and Amazon’s Zoox, Uber has also entered the race by partnering with companies like Chinese tech giant Baidu, American electric vehicle maker Rivian, and British startup Wayve. It also is working with Waymo in some cities in the United States.

As per a Reuters report, Uber, through its three-way partnership with Nuro ⁠and electric vehicle company Lucid, is eyeing rolling out some 35,000 robotaxis, using Lucid’s Gravity SUVs and upcoming midsize vehicles, Nuro’s technology, and Uber’s platform.

Uber had previously invested USD 500 million in Lucid, apart from participating in a USD 203 million funding round for Nuro that valued the Silicon Valley-based self-driving startup at USD 6 billion.

“Uber has since made an unreported follow-on investment in Nuro significantly larger than its first funding,” Reuters said, quoting unnamed sources.

Uber has also reportedly agreed to provide additional funding for Nuro once ‌it hits ⁠certain development and commercial milestones. Together these commitments tally nearly USD 500 million.

“The first few milestones have already been met on time, triggering the release of some funds from Uber,” claimed one of the sources.

“The remaining money is tied to targets including testing without a driver, planned for later this year, carrying passengers in those driverless cars, expected by the ⁠end of this year, and ramping up the service next year,” the person stated further.

Talking about Nuro, the startup initially made small ⁠delivery bots before pivoting to licensing its self-driving software to carmakers and mobility companies in 2024. The company is currently testing with safety drivers, eyeing a launch in the San Francisco Bay Area by the end of 2026. Apart from Uber’s backing, Nuro is also supported by investors including Nvidia and SoftBank.

The post Uber makes big-ticket investment commitment in self-driving startup Nuro appeared first on International Finance.

The legacy mechanisms of the logistics industry are known for having tedious back-office processes and siloed data, along with a lack of operational and financial visibility, factors that as a combination, drain companies’ profits and increases consumer costs. Loop wants to ease up the pressure, through the technology’s helping hand.

Loop’s founders, Matt McKinney and Shaosu Liu, are Uber veterans. In Uber Freight, McKinney tackled the problem of building a new structure for the legacy transportation payment system, while Liu handled the building process of a software that can optimize a network of networks to build a more collaborative supply chain.

The assignments gave the duo a first-hand experience of the “legacy issues” bothering the global supply chain ecosystem, giving them the inspiration to come up with Loop, about which International Finance, in today’s episode of the “Start-up of the Week,” will talk in detail.

Redefining the next-generation supply chains

As per the Loop, enterprises require a more dependable data foundation to sustain high operational performance, free up working capital, and take strategic decisions with confidence. To enable this, the start-up, through its “Logistics Data Platform,” has automated 99% of freight and parcel audits to deliver efficient, accurate outcomes.

Loop stores important supply chain and spend documents (rate tables, manual calculations and invoice) in one platform, before automatically auditing every line-item on the invoice and identifying discrepancies in hours.

Another headache logistics players face is the “black box,” the event in which shipment, after leaving the dock, leaves businesses powerless to prevent delays or manage customer expectations. To address this, Loop, using the “click-to-porch visibility” approach, lets its online platform absorb over 20 billion scans annually across all modes and carriers, standardizing messy data into a single, accurate view.

With a wide range of custom dashboards and reports, logistics players get to track every package in real-time to monitor network velocity, confirm delivery status, and ensure their shipments are moving as promised. Loop’s predictive “at-risk” logic also flags shipments that are stalling, dwelling, or projected to miss their commit date, way before the carrier even reports a delay.

The start-up’s customizable dashboards provide a real-time command center for logistics operations, tracking critical parameters like on-time delivery percentages, carrier service levels, and dwell times.

When it comes to logistics companies securing the best possible terms and rates, Loop prepares them with data-driven insights and veteran carrier intelligence services. The start-up’s “parcel contract optimization” combines deep shipping data analysis with decades of industry expertise to secure better rates and maintains optimal contract performance over time.

Loop’s contract intelligence dashboards provide real-time visibility into a logistics company’s contract performance, breaking down costs by service type, zone, and accessorial charges to reveal optimization opportunities at a glance. Interactive analytics let the business drill down into specific contract terms, track realized versus contracted discounts, and monitor minimum charge utilization to ensure the business is maximizing every negotiated benefit. The start-up claims its contract intelligence and industry expertise delivering up to 50% post-audit savings for logistics players by optimizing their rates.

Loop’s contract intelligence dashboards come equipped with built-in tools, that show the client companies how proposed discount changes will directly impact their real-world financials. The “what-if” scenario modelling allows the businesses to simulate the precise impact of different discount structures or minimum charge adjustments against their historical shipping data. They get to see the potential savings or costs of the proposals, before agreeing to the terms and conditions.

Loop’s “Carrier Invoice Pay” streamlines global AP (accounts payable) process with accurate, seamless freight payments, with flexible (including custodial) options reducing administrative costs and improving working capital. No more of logistics professionals sorting invoices, chasing approvals and answering “where is my money?” calls from carriers, as the start-up takes over these repetitive functions, through its AI-native audit, which guarantees every invoice is 100% accurate before it’s approved. From there, Loop’s flexible payment solutions provide logistics companies the control, flexibility, and automation they want.

A full stack of cutting-edge tech

Loop’s “Control Suite” puts logistics players in command, with tailored policies assisting the industry players to get a real-time visibility into their financial health, network performance, and policy compliance. We are talking about a business automation an audit-related engine, that helps its users to seamlessly review their organizational rules for financial approvals, service-level enforcement and required documentation.

The heart of Loop’s “Control Suite” is the “Control Tower,” an operational and financial intelligence platform, that monitors shipment volumes, spend trends, and compliance performance in real-time, before identifying the root cause behind the failure of the company policies.

Another brilliant piece of Loop’s innovation has been its AI-native platform, “Loop AI,” that has been customised with various AI models and agents, to fix messy logistics data. This approach delivers what legacy systems can’t: comprehensive data capture, leading data quality, and a path to end-to-end automation.

“DUX,” Loop’s another AI-based solution for logistics businesses, uses high-quality data, creating a complete and accurate shipment data, helping supply chain teams to move from reactive exception management to proactive optimization method.

The post Start-up of the Week: Through AI, Loop redefines logistics industry appeared first on International Finance.

The announcement confirmed a Reuters report, which claimed that GSM was targeting a debut in Hong Kong by 2027, potentially marking the first initial public offering (IPO) in the city by a Vietnamese company.

Founded in 2023 by Vingroup and VinFast head Pham Nhat Vuong, GSM runs Vietnam’s largest all-electric taxi fleet under the Xanh SM brand, using vehicles exclusively supplied by Nasdaq-listed VinFast.

“There have been advisory views suggesting a valuation of around $20 billion. However, we continue to consult a range of perspectives. Any eventual valuation would depend significantly on the timing and market conditions at the time of listing,” Vingroup added.

If GSM achieves such a valuation, the two-year-old ride-hailing company will end up rivalling its closest competitor, Nasdaq-listed Southeast Asian Grab, which has a market capitalisation of approximately USD 21 billion. Grab is also known as Southeast Asia’s dominant “super app,” starting as a ride-hailing service, “My Taxi,” in 2012, to offer safer transport.

The business further evolved to include food and grocery delivery, digital payments (GrabPay), financial services, and more, becoming the region’s first decacorn by solving local needs like cash payments and motorbike transport. Grab also acquired Uber’s SEA operations and got listed on NASDAQ in 2021. Not only Grab, but also rivals like Uber, Lyft, and Indonesia’s GoTo all have their stock market presence.

While Vingroup did not give a location or a concrete timeline for GSM’s listing, it confirmed a listing would not occur in 2026. Two sources had indicated the valuation could range between USD 2 billion and USD 3 billion, with one suggesting GSM was looking to raise at least USD 200 million and that the valuation would factor in debt. Both sources requested anonymity due to the confidentiality of the information, reported Reuters.

The IPO plan, still tentative, would mark Vingroup’s second overseas listing after electric-vehicle maker VinFast’s Nasdaq debut in 2023. The collaboration between GSM and VinFast has supported VinFast’s domestic sales while enabling GSM to scale up without bringing third-party suppliers into play. VinFast’s sales to GSM accounted for 26% of its total by Q3 2025, down from 72% in 2023.

As per reports, a Hong Kong listing would offer deeper liquidity and stronger investor appetite for electric vehicle and mobility plays versus Singapore or Nasdaq, where VinFast has faced liquidity challenges tied to a small free float. The move would also fund GSM’s regional growth, strengthening its position in Southeast Asia’s competitive market and, most importantly, easing financial pressures on Vingroup and Vuong as VinFast continues its costly expansion and development efforts.

GSM held about 40% of Vietnam’s ride-hailing market in the first quarter of 2025, versus Grab’s 32%, data from research firm Mordor Intelligence showed. Rakuten Insight, however, estimated Grab’s share at 55% and GSM’s at 35%. GSM has expanded into Laos, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and is exploring an entry into India.

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If you stood on the corner of 4th and King in San Francisco Street Station late in 2025, you would have witnessed a quiet revolution. It wasn’t marked by flying cars or neon-soaked cyberpunk aesthetics, but by something far more mundane: a white Jaguar I-PACE pulling up to the curb, hazard lights blinking, with absolutely no one in the front seat. A mother, holding a newborn, steps out. She doesn’t thank a driver. She taps her phone, and the car silently merges back into the chaotic flow of traffic.

For a decade, the promise of Level Four autonomy (vehicles that can drive themselves in specific conditions without human intervention) was just that, a promise. It was perpetually “five years away.” But 2025 was the year the timeline collapsed. It was the year the “gamble” began to pay out for some, while others realised they were holding a losing hand.

Method vs mania

Nowhere was the divergence in strategy more palpable than in the United States, where the market split into two distinct realities. There was the methodical conquest of Waymo and the chaotic ambition of Tesla.

By the close of 2025, Waymo, the Alphabet-backed juggernaut, had effectively won the first round of the American autonomy wars. They were running a utility, not a test. With over 14 million paid trips logged in 2025 alone, Waymo had moved beyond the “science project” phase to become a genuine alternative to Uber and Lyft in cities like Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin.

The company, formerly known as the “Google Self-Driving Car Project,” stuck to its expensive, sensor-heavy approach, utilising LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), radar, and cameras to create a redundancy that allowed its “Driver” to see through fog, glare, and darkness.

Critics had long argued that this hardware stack was too expensive to scale. They were wrong. As the market matured, the cost of solid-state LiDAR plummeted from $75,000 a decade ago to under $500 per unit in 2025, allowing Waymo to wrap its cars in a digital safety blanket without breaking the bank.

The result? A valuation soaring to $126 billion following a massive $16 billion funding round. Investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital bought tech, and also the only thing that matters in this industry: trust.

Contrast this with the turbulent reality in Austin, Texas, where Tesla finally launched its long-awaited “Cybercab” service.

Elon Musk had bet the house on a different philosophy, “Pure Vision.” The argument was seductive in its simplicity. Humans drive with eyes (cameras) and a brain (neural nets), so why does a car need lasers?

However, the gamble faced a harsh reality check on the streets of Texas. Without the precise depth perception of LiDAR, Tesla’s vision-only system struggled.

Data released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) revealed a troubling statistic: Tesla’s robotaxi fleet in Austin was crashing approximately once every 55,000 miles. To put that in perspective, human drivers typically go nearly 500,000 miles between police-reported accidents.

While Waymo was scaling into Atlanta and Miami with a “boring” reliability, Tesla was fighting a PR war, forced to keep human safety monitors in their vehicles long after competitors had removed them. The market reacted brutally, with Tesla posting its first-ever annual revenue decline as the “robotaxi premium” in its stock price began to evaporate.

The Chinese industrial machine

While the US wrestled with these philosophical debates, China simply built the future. If the US approach was defined by corporate competition, the Chinese approach was defined by industrial inevitability.

In Wuhan, a sprawling metropolis of 11 million people, Baidu’s “Apollo Go” achieved the holy grail of the robotaxi industry in late 2025. They have grasped unit-level profitability. This was a demonstration of scale. With a fleet of over 1,000 remotely monitored vehicles in a single city, Baidu drove down operating costs until they dipped below the daily wage of a human driver.

The Chinese strategy relied on a “heavy” infrastructure model. Unlike US robotaxis, which are designed to be independent geniuses figuring out the road on their own, Chinese robotaxis communicate with the city itself. Smart traffic lights and roadside sensors beam data directly to the cars, letting them “see” around corners before they even arrive.

The ecosystem birthed a fierce competitive landscape. Pony.ai achieved a “clean sweep” of regulatory permits in China’s Tier-1 cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen), cementing its status as a heavyweight. Meanwhile, DiDi Autonomous Driving (the spin-off of the ride-hailing giant) began the massive task of cannibalising its own mothership. By integrating robotaxis into the main DiDi app in Guangzhou and running 24/7 service, they signalled to the world that the gig economy era of human drivers was drawing to a close.

For the Chinese players, the “gamble” was less about technology and more about export. Could they take this model global? The answer, it turned out, lay in the desert.

The deregulation sandbox

In 2025, the geopolitical centre of gravity for autonomous mobility shifted unexpectedly to the Gulf. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, hungry to diversify their economies, essentially hung an “Open for Business” sign on their highways.

Abu Dhabi granted WeRide the world’s first city-level fully driverless permit outside the United States and China. This was a commercial license to print money.

WeRide, along with Pony.ai, flooded the region with Chinese tech, finding a receptive market that US companies (hamstrung by export controls and data privacy concerns) struggled to penetrate.

In Riyadh, Uber partnered with WeRide to launch the Kingdom’s first robotaxi service. It was a strange-bedfellows situation: an American ride-hailing app dispatching Chinese autonomous vehicles on Saudi roads.

This highlighted a growing trend. There was a decoupling of the “app layer” from the “fleet layer.” Uber, realising it couldn’t win the hardware race, decided to become the universal interface for everyone else’s robots.

Awakening of the sleeping giant

For years, Europe had been the Old World in every sense, with conservative regulations and a scepticism of AI keeping robotaxis off the streets of Paris and Berlin. But 2025 was the year the giant woke up.

Facing the threat of irrelevant automotive industries, European regulators began to fast-track approval processes. The result was a flurry of announcements for 2026. Uber announced partnerships to bring Wayve’s self-driving technology to London, while Mobileye and Volkswagen are preparing to launch commercial services in Munich.

But perhaps the most interesting European story was Verne. Founded by EV visionary Mate Rimac, Verne unveiled a purpose-built robotaxi set to launch in Zagreb. Unlike the utilitarian “toasters” of Zoox or the retrofitted SUVs of Waymo, Verne promised a premium, design-forward experience, a reminder that in Europe, style still counts for something. Underpinning this global explosion was a quiet victory for hardware. The debate over whether to use LiDAR is largely over, and LiDAR won.

In 2025, the “Vision-Language-Action” (VLA) model began to take hold. Powered by chips like NVIDIA’s “DRIVE Thor,” which packs 2,000 teraflops of compute, robotaxis began to understand the world, not just measure it.

Old systems could tell you, “There is an obstacle at X coordinates.” The new VLA systems, utilising the same transformer architecture as ChatGPT, could understand, “that is a police officer gesturing for me to stop because of a parade.” Such semantic understanding was the missing link for operating in chaotic urban environments.

Moreover, the hardware became cheap. The solid-state LiDAR units that cost as much as a luxury car in 2015 were now being stamped out like smartphones. This deflationary pressure meant that companies like WeRide and Pony.ai could deploy redundant, hyper-safe sensor suites for a fraction of the cost of a human driver’s annual salary.

The friction of progress

However, the “Great Robotaxi Gamble” was not without its losers. As the technology scaled, the social friction became visceral.

In San Francisco, the “Cone Army,” protesters who disabled robotaxis by placing traffic cones on their hoods, evolved into more aggressive resistance. People slashed tyres and spray-painted sensors.

The demonstration was an incoherent scream against automation. For the ride-share driver in a Prius, seeing a robotaxi glide past represented an existential threat. In 2025, we saw the first real dip in peak-hour earnings for human drivers in saturated markets like Phoenix.

The robotaxis were taking the easy, profitable short trips, leaving humans to deal with the complex, low-margin edge cases.

Safety, too, remained a paradox. Waymo could legitimately claim a 10x reduction in injury-causing crashes compared to humans. Yet the public holds machines to a standard of perfection, not comparison. When a Waymo vehicle in Austin failed to yield to a stopped school bus repeatedly, it triggered a federal investigation and a media firestorm.

The AI understood the bus as a vehicle but failed to understand the social contract of the flashing red lights. It was a stark reminder that driving is as much a sociological activity as a physical one.

Pragmatism takes over

As we look toward 2026, the chips are stacking up on the side of the pragmatists. Waymo and the Chinese cohort (Baidu, WeRide, Pony.ai) have proven that the technology works if you are willing to pay for the hardware and do the grind of mapping and testing. They are building a utility: boring, reliable, and increasingly profitable.

Tesla, meanwhile, remains the wild card. Their gamble on “vision-only” and “end-to-end AI” offers a theoretical ceiling that is infinitely higher, a car that can drive anywhere, anytime, without maps, but a floor that is currently much lower. In 2025, the market showed us that in the transport business, boring wins.

The trillion-dollar race is no longer about who can build the car but who can build the business. The technology is here. The sensors are cheap. The capital is flowing. The only thing left to remove is the driver. And judging by the empty seats rolling down the streets of our cities this year, that train, or rather, that taxi, has already left the station.

The steering wheel didn’t disappear with a bang, but with a software update. And for the millions of people who will hail a robotaxi in 2026, the gamble has already paid off. They just want to get home.

The post The Robotaxi gamble pays off appeared first on International Finance.

The SoftBank Vision Fund, the largest technology investment fund in history, was established in 2017 with an astounding USD 100 billion capital commitment, making it one of SoftBank’s most noteworthy projects. The Vision Fund seeks to invest in high-potential technology companies, with a focus on those operating in fields like biotechnology, robotics, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and robotics. SoftBank has made large investments in well-known tech firms like Uber, WeWork, Slack, and Alibaba through this fund.

As part of its investment strategy, SoftBank frequently places audacious and calculated wagers on cutting-edge trends and disruptive technologies, which can occasionally result in both notable failures and spectacular wins. The company’s investment strategy is distinguished by its readiness to assume sizable risks in the interest of sustained innovation and growth.

Through its subsidiary SoftBank Corp, SoftBank engages in business outside of investments in the telecommunications sector. SoftBank Corp is a prominent mobile network operator in Japan, offering a comprehensive range of fixed-line, broadband, and mobile telecommunication services.

SoftBank has encountered difficulties despite its achievements, most notably concerning its investment in WeWork, which ran into serious problems with corporate governance and finances. SoftBank has also had to re-evaluate its investment strategies and portfolio management as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on a few of the companies in its portfolio.

SoftBank Group continues to be a powerful force in the global business scene. It does this by using its financial resources, strategic vision, and technological know-how to influence many industries and spur global innovation.

The brain behind this successful venture is Masayoshi Son, a Japanese billionaire technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. He is also the founder, representative director, and corporate officer of the company.

Who is Masayoshi Son?
• Born in 1957 on the island of Kyushu, Japan, Masayoshi Son studied computer science and economics at the University of California, Berkeley
• At the age of 19, he was inspired by a microchip he saw in a magazine and became convinced that computer technology would start the next industrial revolution
• Masayoshi Son, while still in college, initiated his first business venture by developing an electronic translator with faculty assistance, ultimately selling it to Sharp Corporation for USD 1.77 million
• After completing his degree in 1980, he started a video game company called Unison World in Oakland, CA.
• Masayoshi Son later sold the company to an associate for close to USD 2 million, and the company was eventually acquired by Kyocera
• In 1981, he founded SoftBank Group, which focused on advancing disruption and technological innovation
• Masayoshi Son promised to help the victims of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami by donating 10 billion yen (USD 120 million) and his remaining salary until retirement in 2011
• In 2013, he was placed 45th on the Forbes magazine’s list of the World’s Most Powerful People, and in the 2018 ranking, he was placed in the 55th position
• As of 2023, Masayoshi Son ranks 69th on Forbes’s list of The World’s Billionaires and is at 239 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index
• According to Forbes, as of 2024, Masayoshi Son’s net worth is around 2,870 crores USD

Leveraging AI

SoftBank, Nvidia, Microsoft, and other tech sector stakeholders announced that they have joined forces to create an alliance focused on leveraging artificial intelligence to optimise the use of mobile base stations.

The AI-Ran Alliance’s members want to collaborate to avoid network bottlenecks and encourage the usage of generative AI-powered smartphone apps.

The initiative was introduced in Spain during the Mobile World Congress, an international trade show for the telecom sector. The team will use artificial intelligence (AI) to process data at mobile base stations instead of in the cloud, which will help save energy and reduce latency in communications.

SoftBank President and CEO Junichi Miyakawa stated in a statement that the alliance “has been formed with the vision to spearhead the advancement of society through AI innovations, particularly from the telecom industry.”

The post Business Leader of the Week: Meet Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank Group appeared first on International Finance.

Now a new worker classification rule has already been the target of at least one court challenge, and businesses in the gig economy that it threatens to disrupt will probably oppose it further. Employment experts predict that the new rule will have a significant impact on the estimated 22.1 million Americans who work as independent contractors, upending the gig economy.

The Department of Labour published information regarding a law that establishes criteria for determining when an individual qualifies as an employee to receive overtime compensation, unemployment insurance, and a host of other legal advantages. The new rule will take effect in March 2024.

Three authors from New Jersey are among the group of freelancers who sued the Department of Labour in January 2024 to have the new regulation overturned. Legal action is also being considered by at least one significant industry lobbying group.

The business models of companies like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash would be jeopardised if the Joe Biden government was to grant “employee” status to workers categorised as contractors. This is because contract workers are far less expensive for their employers than traditional employees.

In their recent statements, Uber and the Flex Association—a trade association that advocates for gig economy businesses—said that the rule would not immediately affect their operations.

In a statement, Uber said that this rule “will not impact the classification of the over one million Americans who turn to Uber to earn money flexibly, nor does it materially change the law under which we operate.”

New regulations may reclassify millions

Millions of additional gig workers, including drivers for Uber and Lyft, may be reclassified as employees when the new law takes effect, according to Erin Hatton, a sociology professor at the University at Buffalo and expert on the gig economy.

“If their employees are viewed as legally covered employees, their employment model will not endure. They will fight back against this with all of their might because they have deep pockets,” stated Hatton.

The business lobbying group United States Chamber of Commerce announced that it was thinking of filing a lawsuit to overturn the rule.

Marc Freedman, vice president of workplace policy at the chamber, said in a statement that “the Department of Labour’s new regulation redefining when someone is an employee or an independent contractor is clearly biased towards declaring most independent contractors as employees, a move that will decrease flexibility and opportunity and result in lost earning opportunities for millions of Americans.”

The freedom of individuals to work when and how they want is threatened, and our economy may suffer grave consequences.

In a call with reporters acting United States Labour Secretary Julie Su stated that low-income workers are disproportionately harmed by the misclassification of workers as contractors rather than employees since they stand to lose the most from legal safeguards like unemployment insurance and minimum wage.

“The relationship between an employer and employee is the foundation of a century of labour protections for working people,” Su stated.

Advocates for workers and a few Democratic officials applauded the rule, arguing that it was essential to guarantee workers’ fundamental rights.

“Worker misclassification also undermines law-abiding businesses that are forced to compete with dishonest employers who use misclassification to unfairly cut down on labour costs,” said Virginia Democrat and US Representative Bobby Scott.

However, some industry associations contend that the law unfairly tilts the odds in favour of classifying workers as employees rather than contractors, depriving millions of workers of opportunity and flexibility.

Marc Freedman, vice president of the US Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement that “making matters worse, the rule is completely unnecessary, as the Department continues to report success in cracking down on bad actors that are misclassifying workers.”

The largest business body in the United States, the Chamber, he continued, is thinking of filing a legal challenge against the rule.

When does a worker become an employee?

The rule relates to a distinction that has grown in significance in light of the growth of gig-based businesses offering a wide range of services, including food delivery, dog walking, rides, and many more services: What distinguishes a worker as an employee from a contractor?

The distinction is significant because employers are subject to several duties under federal, state, and local labour laws regarding their workers.

The ‘Fair Labour Standards Act’ provides safeguards such as overtime compensation, minimum wage, union formation rights, and other benefits to individuals who are classified as ‘employees’ across the country. When employers reduce employee wages, they are also required to make Medicare and Social Security contributions.

In addition to workman’s compensation insurance in the event of an injury sustained on the job, employees are covered by unemployment insurance at the state level. They also have the right to paid sick days and family leave in several areas.

That doesn’t apply to independent contractors, who are treated more like small businesses under employment law and who individually enter into a business partnership with the employer on an equal basis.

According to Samantha Prince, a law professor at Penn State Dickinson Law and an authority on worker classification and the gig economy, the terms of employment are determined by a mutually agreed-upon contract rather than being subject to regulations.

This is true even though the contract is typically written by the big company and is a “take-it-or-leave-it” situation for the contractor.

“Opportunity for profit or loss depending on managerial skill, investments by the worker and the potential employer, the degree of permanence of the work relationship, the nature and degree of control, the extent to which the work performed is an integral part of the potential employer’s business, and skill and initiative” are the six factors listed in the new regulation, which is similar to an older Obama-era rule, to determine whether an individual is an employee or an independent contractor.

Contractors lose out big time

In actuality, judges assessing those variables in court cases will decide how those rules apply to any particular worker, according to Prince. For example, a lot of Uber drivers appear to fulfil four out of the six requirements to be classified as employees, according to her.

“And will that be sufficient for a judge to rule that Uber drivers are employees for the purposes of the FLSA?” That is conceivable,” she questioned.

Businesses have the incentive to categorise workers as contractors as a cost-cutting tactic, even when it isn’t suitable, because hiring a contractor is simpler and less expensive than hiring an employee.

A progressive think organisation called the Century Foundation conducted research that revealed widespread misclassification in the construction business, with as many as 2.1 million workers, or 10–19% of the total workforce, being paid under the table.

Independent contractors frequently receive lower pay for performing the same tasks since they do not receive benefits or overtime compensation.

The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, predicted that the average person working in construction as an independent contractor would make up to $16,729 less annually in wages and benefits than they would as an employee.

Notwithstanding the disadvantages, a large number of contractors express their preference to not be classified as employees and have rebelled against worker categorisation laws.

According to the freelancing complaint, “This lawsuit seeks to vindicate the right of individual entrepreneurs to remain independent in the face of a concerted effort to force them into neither employment relationships they want nor need.”

Advantages or flexibility?

According to a 2023 Indeed job study, individuals who work as independent contractors prioritise their independence and flexibility in terms of work hours, ranking these benefits over higher pay.

However, according to Prince and Hatton, there’s no legal reason why businesses can’t provide flexible work schedules in addition to the perks of employee status.

Prince asserted, “There is no legal restriction on having flexible hours while working as an employee.”

“This flexibility—sometimes true, sometimes not so true—and permanent employment or legally classified employment are not at all synonymous. Those don’t have to be exclusive of one another,” Hatton stated.

The post Stern test for US gig economy? appeared first on International Finance.

Leading Korean mobile operator and AI platform SK Telecom has also made a significant investment of USD 100 million to acquire approximately a 2% stake in Joby Aviation.

In today’s episode of International Finance’s ‘Start-up of the Week’, we will discuss in detail Joby Aviation and its eVTOL dreams.

Joby’s Electric Aerial Ridesharing

Joby’s flagship electric aircraft, powered by six electric motors, has emerged as an ideal candidate for aerial ridesharing in urban areas. The aircraft will also come with a ‘Zero Emissions’ control mechanism. Joby’s eVTOL will be operated by one pilot, whereas four passengers will be accommodated per ride. The top speed of the air taxi will be 200 MPH.

“With more than 1,000 test flights completed over the last 10 years, our aircraft has been designed to meet the uncompromising safety standards set by the FAA and other global aviation regulators. We’re now engaged in a multi-year testing program with the FAA to certify our vehicle for commercial operations,” Joby Aviation stated.

Joby’s eVTOL roadmap

The aircraft has the capability of taking off and landing like a helicopter. It will tilt its six rotors horizontally, before flying like an airplane. The eVTOL will be able to cover a distance up to 150 miles on a single charge, while cruising in the air almost silently.

Joby’s first production prototype rolled off the company’s assembly line in Marina, California, in June 2023. The facility has been built in partnership with Toyota. Toyota has been the air taxi venture’s largest investor with a USD 394 million stake. Toyota North America CEO Tetsuo Ogawa too has joined Joby’s board of directors.

The latest information is that Joby has got the FAA’s special airworthiness certificate, which will help the venture to perform the flight tests of its production model aircraft. From 2017 onwards, Joby has been testing its full-scale eVTOL prototypes. In May 2022, the company received the FAA’s ‘Part 135 Air Carrier Certificate’ for commercial operations. Joby has also teamed up with the American aviation behemoth Delta Air Lines to offer travel to and from airports.

If someone browses Joby’s website, he/she will find an exhibited scenario, where a journey from downtown New York City to the JFK airport in a Joby air taxi will take just seven minutes, 42 minutes shorter than a car trip.

Talking about Joby’s 2023 prospects, the company, which has also stitched up a strategic partnership with ride-hailing major Uber, must clear the full FAA type and production certification, which will take some 18 months from now on, as per the reports. Joby’s first customer, provided the air taxi venture completes all the required FAA certifications, will be the US Air Force, as part of the latter’s USD 131 million contracts under the ‘Agility Prime Program’.

The biggest advantage of the eVTOLs is that they take off and land vertically, thus eliminating the need for runway infrastructure. However, such a cost-effective business model has been a tough one to be implemented. In 2022, the Kittyhawk aircraft project got shut down. So, Joby Aviation has already got a decisive lead, when it comes to turning the dream of having commercial air taxi operations into a reality.

Joby is reportedly planning an operational ecosystem, where the people will download the Joby app, request a trip, and head over to one of the company’s many ‘skyports’, which is a lounge-styled vestibule next to a landing pad. From ‘skysports’, these individuals will get picked up by air taxis.

Charting Joby’s growth journey

Joby’s team of over 1500 passionate professionals is at the cusp of registering the historical feat of being the world’s first commercial air taxi operator, if things go as per the plans.

When the start-up began its journey in 2009, a small team of seven engineers started shaping Joby’s dreams in a Santa Cruz workshop. Technologies like electric motors, flight software, and lithium-ion batteries; everything got designed and developed from scratch in the facility. The company got its first break in 2012, when it was selected to collaborate with NASA on ground-breaking electric flight projects like the X-57 and LEAPTech.

In 2017, Joby Aviation’s first full-scale demonstrator took to the skies. In 2019, the pre-production prototype started a rigorous flight testing program.

“As well as becoming a strategic investor in Joby, Toyota has deployed dozens of engineers to work shoulder-to-shoulder with our team, lending their expertise on factory layout, manufacturing process development and high-volume production,” the venture commented, while describing its ties with the Japanese automobile giant.

Joby became the first eVTOL company to receive airworthiness approval from the US Air Force in 2020.

“We deepened our partnership with Uber, agreeing to integrate our aerial ridesharing service into the Uber app, and vice versa, across all U.S. launch markets. Uber increased their investment in Joby and we acquired the Elevate division, bringing their software tools and commercial launch expertise in-house,” Joby Aviation commented further.

“In 2020, we signed our Stage 4 G-1 certification basis with the FAA, having received an initial Stage 2 G-1 from the agency in 2019. This document lays out a clear path to certifying our aircraft for commercial flights,” it stated further.

During the same year, Joby got listed on the New York Stock Exchange, as its pre-production prototype flew over 5,300 miles, including a flight of 154.6 miles on a single charge.

“We also built a second pre-production prototype, completed our first FAA production conformity inspection and officially began our journey to become the first certified eVTOL airline. We received our Part 135 Air Carrier Certificate, which allows Joby to operate a commercial air taxi service,” the company commented, while narrating its growth journey.

The path ahead

Joby’s plan of having its commercial taxi service by 2025 has been on track so far. Be it prototype testing or earning the FAA and US Air Force certifications, things have been smooth for the venture. Now it has to cross the final barrier, a full FAA-type and production certification test in the next 18 months, to make sure that its air taxi dreams get fulfilled by 2025.

The future smart cities will revolve around the idea of having transportation, which, apart from cutting down their carbon footprint significantly, will ensure that the travelling time between the destinations will be reduced drastically. The nascent industry called the eVTOL has emerged as a viable solution to the challenge. With strategic tie-ups and a realistic approach to this challenge, Joby looks all set to revolutionise 21st century urban transportation.

Image Credits: Joby’s Aviation

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