On November 16, 2021, Matthew Ziburis sat in his car in a residential neighborhood in the Bay Area stalking an “enemy,” as he put it. A veteran of both the US Army and Marine Corps, Ziburis had previously served in Iraq. But on this mission, he was working at the behest of China’s government. The targets that autumn day were American citizens: Arthur Liu and his teenage daughter, Alysa.

Arthur’s personal story was an exemplar of the American Dream. As a university student, he took part in the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China. After the crackdown at Tiananmen Square that year, he fled to the United States, settling in California. Arthur poured a small fortune and an equal amount of energy into molding Alysa into a figure skating phenom. As a national champion at age 13, she bantered along with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, and was at the time on track to represent America at the Winter Olympics the following year in Beijing.

Ziburis was surveilling the Liu home when he called Arthur, falsely claiming that he was a member of the US Olympic Committee who needed to discuss upcoming travel to Beijing, Arthur says. Ziburis was adamant that Arthur fax him copies of his and his daughter’s passports as part of a travel “preparedness check,” Liu tells WIRED. This struck Arthur as odd. In his many years dealing with sports bodies, he had never fielded such a request. Alysa’s agent did not respond to a request for comment.

Ziburis’ surveillance of Arthur and Alysa Liu that November day five years ago was just one episode in a bizarre saga that spanned from California to Beijing, touched New York City mayors and members of the US Congress, and has seen two people plead guilty and two more awaiting trial.

Unbeknownst to Ziburis, as he sat outside Aurthur and Alysa’s Northern California home, he too was being watched.

Ziburis had allegedly been dispatched to Northern California by Frank Liu, a self-styled fixer in the Chinese community from Long Island, New York, who was in turn receiving orders from a person in China named Qiang Sun. According to US authorities, Sun was working at the behest of the Chinese government. A concerned private investigator who once worked for Frank Liu had alerted the FBI to Frank’s escapades and was assisting authorities. Law enforcement was already on to Ziburis by the time he arrived. Anthony Ricco, Ziburis’ lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.

Officers watched as Ziburis surveyed Arthur’s home and visited his law office. The heavy-set man sulking around Arthur’s office also caught the attention of a neighbor, who approached Ziburis and asked him if he needed help, Arthur says. Apparently concerned, the FBI called Arthur to warn him that Ziburis was heading to his home. By then, in part because of the harassment, Arthur and Alysa were boarding a plane to fly out of California. “It was like a movie,” Arthur says.

Alysa’s showing in Beijing in 2022 was disappointing. Burned out, she retired from the sport. Then in February, after returning to the ice after a two year hiatus, Alysa became the first US women’s figure skater to win Olympic gold since 2002—intentionally without her father by her side.

Despite her much-publicized complicated relationship with Arthur, Alysa’s success—punctuated by her signature pierced smile, racoon-tail dye job, and palpable joy for her sport—has reignited interest in the long-running case of transnational repression against her and her father. Human rights advocates and researchers have documented in recent years the lengths Beijing has taken to suppress critical voices, even those residing abroad or whose perceived transgressions date back decades.

It happens in every emerging industry: founders and investors push toward a common goal, until the money starts to roll in and that shared vision begins to diverge.

Cracks are emerging in the fusion power world, which I saw firsthand at The Economist’s Fusion Fest in London last week. It didn’t dampen the overall buoyant mood, lifted by fusion startups’ fundraising haul of $1.6 billion in the last 12 months. But people had differing opinions on two key questions: When should fusion startups go public? And are side businesses a distraction?

Going public was at the top of everyone’s minds. In the last four months, TAE Technologies and General Fusion have announced plans to merge with publicly traded companies. Both stand to receive hundreds of millions of dollars to keep their R&D efforts alive, and investors, some of whom have kept the faith for 20 years, finally see an opportunity to cash out.

Not everyone is in agreement. Most of those who I spoke to were worried these companies were going public far too early and that they hadn’t achieved key milestones that many view as vital in judging the progress of a fusion company.

First, a recap: TAE announced its merger with Trump Media & Technology Group in December. Though the deal isn’t yet completed, the fusion side of the business has already received $200 million of a potential $300 million in cash from the deal, giving it some runway to continue planning its power plant. (The remainder will reportedly land in its bank account once it files the S-4 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.)

General Fusion said in January that it would go public via a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company. The deal could net the company $335 million and value the combined entity at $1 billion. 

Both companies could use the cash.

Before the merger announcement, General Fusion was struggling to raise funds, and around this time last year it laid off 25% of its staff as CEO Greg Twinney posted a public letter pleading for investment. It received a brief reprieve in August when investors threw it a $22 million lifeline, but that sort of money doesn’t last long in the fusion world, where equipment, experiments, and employees don’t come cheap.

TAE’s position wasn’t quite as dire, but it still required some funds. Pre-merger, the company raised nearly $2 billion, which sounds like a lot, but keep in mind the company is nearly 30 years old. What’s more, its valuation pre-merger was $2 billion, according to PitchBook. Investors were breaking even at best.

Neither company has hit scientific breakeven, a key milestone that shows a reactor design has power plant potential. Many observers doubt they’ll hit that mark before other privately held startups do. One executive told me, if they were in those shoes, they’re not sure how they would fill time on quarterly earnings calls if the companies didn’t hit scientific breakeven soon.

If TAE or General Fusion doesn’t deliver results, several people feared the public markets would sour on the entire fusion industry.

Now, not all may be lost. TAE has already started marketing other products, including power electronics and radiation therapy for cancer. That could give the company some near-term revenue to placate shareholders. General Fusion, though, hasn’t revealed any such plans.

And therein lies another divide: fusion companies remain split on whether they should pursue revenue now or wait until they have a working power plant.

Some companies are embracing the opportunity to make money along the way. Not a bad strategy! Fusion is a long game, so why not improve your odds? Both Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Tokamak Energy have said they’ll be selling magnets. TAE and Shine Technologies are both in nuclear medicine.

Other startups are worried that side hustles could become a distraction. Inertia Enterprises, for example, told me that they’re laser-focused on their power plant. That jibes with what another investor told me months ago: — they were worried that fusion startups could get distracted by profitable, but tangential businesses and fall off the lead. 

There wasn’t consensus on the right time to go public either. I heard a few proposed milestones. Some believe startups should first reach that scientific breakeven milestone, in which a fusion reaction generates more energy than it needs to ignite. No startup has achieved that yet. The other possibilities are facility breakeven — when the reactor makes more energy than the entire site needs to operate — and commercial viability — when a reactor makes enough electrons to sell a meaningful amount to the grid.

We may have an answer to that question sooner than later. Commonwealth Fusion Systems expects it will hit scientific breakeven sometime next year, and some think the company might use that as an opportunity to go public.

Lua can ‘build AI agents that solve real problems’ through collaboration with people, regardless of a team or organisation’s technical depth or skill.

Irish co-founded and London-based agentic workforce AI start-up Lua raised $5.8m in funding last week (16 April) in a round led by Norrsken22.

Lua offers customers the opportunity to “build AI agents that solve real problems” through collaboration with people, it claims, regardless of a team or organisation’s technical depth or skill.

The company said it will use the new funding to continue to build out its developer community and the ‘Lua Implementation Network’, which it said is a growing community of independent partners deploying Lua agentic workforces in their own markets around the world.

Other investors included Flourish Ventures, 20VC, P1 Ventures, Phosphor Capital and Y Combinator, along with angels such as Henri Stern, the CEO of Privy; Kaz Nejatian, the CEO of Opendoor; and Med Benmansour, the CEO of Nuitee.

“The companies that will win over the next few years are the ones that build their agent workforce with the same intentionality they bring to their human workforce,” said CEO and co-founder Lorcan O’Cathain.

“Most businesses are either blocked by technical complexity or locked into rigid tools that don’t reflect how their teams actually work.

“Lua is built on the opposite principle: teams own their agents, own their outcomes and build compounding efficiency over time.”

The platform is described as offering “an opinionated, full-stack agent” that is suitable for both technical and non-technical users, to run inside existing systems while “coordinating handoffs between agents and humans”.

In a LinkedIn post regarding the funding announcement, Lua said the number of agents on its platform had grown by 10 times during Q1.

Lua was founded in 2024 by O’Cathain and Stefan Kruger, who is the company’s CTO. The company said it “ has been global since day one, deployed across emerging markets in Africa and Asia alongside customers in the US and Europe”.

The founders of Lua “fundamentally understand how agent and human workforces need to collaborate to get work done”, said Lexi Novitske, a general partner at Norrsken22.

Lua proposes solution for customers in healthcare, financial services, retail, manufacturing and real estate. The integration of AI into the workforce and workplace is a topical issue for a variety of reasons.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Microsoft has released out-of-band (OOB) updates to fix issues affecting Windows Server systems after installing the April 2026 security updates.

As Microsoft confirmed last week, some admins may experience failures when installing the KB5082063 security update on Windows Server 2025 devices.

Additionally, this month’s Patch Tuesday cumulative updates are causing some Windows servers with domain controller roles to enter a restart loop due to crashes of the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS).

Microsoft also warned that this issue may also occur when setting up new domain controllers (or even on existing ones) if the server processes authentication requests very early during startup.

To address these two known issues, Microsoft has released emergency updates for the following affected Windows Server versions:

“The Windows Server 2025 OOB update (KB5091157) addresses both the installation failure issue and the domain controller restart issue,” Microsoft explained. “OOB updates released for other supported Windows Server versions address only the domain controller restart issue.”

On Wednesday, Microsoft also warned admins that some Windows Server 2025 devices will boot into BitLocker recovery and prompt users to enter a BitLocker key after installing the KB5082063 Windows security update.

Additionally, last week, it finally addressed a bug that has been plaguing Windows servers since September 2024, causing devices running Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022 to upgrade to Windows Server 2025 “unexpectedly.”

Since the start of the year, Microsoft has also released emergency updates to resolve a Bluetooth device visibility bug and patch security vulnerabilities in the Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) management tool that affect hotpatch-enabled Windows 11 Enterprise devices.

Two other sets of out-of-band updates addressed broken sign-ins with Microsoft accounts and update installation issues affecting the March 2026 non-security preview update.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

Claim Your Spot

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Uber seemed to be everywhere, all at once in the emerging autonomous vehicle technology sector. The Financial Times has now put a number on it. The FT calculated that Uber has committed more than $10 billion to buying autonomous vehicles and taking equity stakes in the companies developing the tech, according to public records and discussions with folks behind the scenes. About $2.5 billion of that is in direct investments, with the remaining $7.5 billion to be spent on buying robotaxis over the next few years, the outlet reported.

We’ve reported on Uber’s numerous investments and deals with autonomous vehicle companies across drones, robotaxis, and freight. Some of its investments include WeRide, Lucid and Nuro, Rivian, and Wayve. 

This rather large number (and particularly that $7.5 billion) got me thinking about another transformative era in Uber’s history and how it has visited these asset-heavy shores before. Uber might have started with a plan to be asset light, but for a brief period it did quite the opposite.

Uber went on a moonshot spree between 2015 and 2018. It launched electric air taxi developer Uber Elevate and the in-house autonomous vehicle unit Uber ATG, which would be boosted by its acquisition of Otto in 2016. It also snapped up micromobility startup Jump in 2018. 

And then in 2020, Uber pulled the asset-heavy rip cord, ostensibly leaving all of those moonshots behind. Uber sold Uber ATG to Aurora, Jump to Lime, and Elevate to Joby Aviation. But it didn’t completely divest; it kept equity stakes in all of them.

Uber is now entering into a new and different asset-heavy era. It’s not plunking down millions, or even billions, to develop the technology in-house, although I’m sure folks there would be quick to pipe up that there is always R&D happening over at Uber. Instead, it appears to be focused on owning (or perhaps leasing) the physical assets. 

That could mean interesting line items on Uber’s balance sheet in the future. 

Owning fleets of robotaxis built by other companies might not have been the original vision of Uber, or its former CEO Travis Kalanick, who has said the company made a mistake when it abandoned its AV development program. But this new approach could still get it to the same end point.

A little bird

Earlier this month, I interviewed Eclipse partner Jiten Behl about the venture firm’s new $1.3 billion fund and where that money might be headed. The firm, as I wrote, intends to incubate more startups (e.g., it was behind the Rivian spinout Also). Behl wouldn’t give me details, only stating, “We’re definitely working on a couple of really cool ideas.” He also said Eclipse is particularly interested in startups that work across enterprises.

Thanks to one little bird and some document diving by senior reporter Sean O’Kane, it looks like a seed round announcement is imminent for a San Francisco-based startup working on an autonomous hauler that I’ve been told doesn’t have a driver cab. This sounds similar to what Einride has built, but since we haven’t seen it, we’ll have to wait. 

The company’s roster isn’t big, but it is chock-full of Silicon Valley tech elite, including a founder who was at Uber ATG, Pronto, and Waabi. Stay tuned for more. 

Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.

Deals!

Slate is back with more capital as it prepares to put its first affordable pickup trucks into production by the end of 2026.

The electric vehicle startup, which got its start with backing from Jeff Bezos, raised another $650 million in a Series C funding round led by TWG Global. Keep your eye on TWG. This is the firm run by Guggenheim Partners chief executive (and Los Angeles Dodgers owner) Mark Walter and investor Thomas Tull. 

Slate has raised about $1.4 billion to date, and its previous investors include General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos’ family office, VC firm Slauson & Co., and former Amazon executive Diego Piacentini, as TechCrunch first reported last year.

Other deals that got my attention …

Glydways, a San Francisco-based startup developing personal autonomous pods designed to operate on dedicated 2-meter-wide lanes in cities, raised $170 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Suzuki Motor Corporation, ACS Group, and Khosla Ventures. Existing investors Mitsui Chemicals and Gates Frontier and new investor Obayashi Corporation also participated. But wait, there’s more. 

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GM and Ford are reportedly talking to the Pentagon about whether the auto industry can help the military revamp its procurement program and find cheaper, faster ways to buy vehicles, munitions, or other hardware, the New York Times reported, citing anonymous sources.

Loop, a San Francisco-based startup, raised $95 million in a Series C funding round led by Valor Equity Partners and the Valor Atreides AI Fund, and includes investments from 8VC, Founders Fund, Index Ventures, and J.P. Morgan’s late-stage fund, Growth Equity Partners.

Monarch Tractor, the startup developing electric, autonomous tractors, has moved on to (ahem) a different pasture. The startup’s assets have been acquired by Caterpillar after struggling to pivot to a software services business.

Uber is increasing its stake in Delivery Hero by 4.5%, the Financial Times reported. Uber agreed to buy about 270 million euros in shares from Prosus, the Dutch investment group and Delivery Hero’s largest shareholder.

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Notable reads and other tidbits

Doug Field, the high-profile executive who shaped Ford’s electric vehicle and technology strategies over the past five years, is leaving. Notably, Ford is shaking up the organization as well, creating a “product creation and industrialization” team to be led by COO Kumar Galhotra. Any guesses where Field is headed next? Perhaps he’ll return to Silicon Valley. 

Lightship, the all-electric RV startup, is expanding its Colorado-based factory by another 44,000 square feet, which will allow it to quadruple its manufacturing capacity.

Rivian and battery recycling and materials startup Redwood Materials partnered years ago. We’re now seeing the fruits of that relationship. Redwood is installing battery energy storage at Rivian’s factory in Illinois. The catch? Redwood is using 100 second-life Rivian battery packs, which will provide 10 megawatt-hours (MWh) of dispatchable energy to reduce cost and grid load during peak demand periods.

Tesla created a new self-driving app that makes it easier for owners to subscribe to its Full Self-Driving software and see statistics on how — and how often — they use it. This may not be huge news, but it did catch my eye because of the gamified qualities of these new stats. 

Waymo, as per usual, has a few news items this week. The Alphabet-owned company started testing its autonomous vehicles on public roads in London. It also removed its waitlist in Miami and Orlando to scale its robotaxi services in the two cities. 

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One more thing …

This newsletter isn’t my only project that is leaning more heavily into robotics. My podcast, the Autonocast, is too, as the worlds of autonomous vehicles, AI, and robotics mash together. Check out this interview with Foxglove founder Adrian MacNeil, who previously worked at Cruise.