Nvidia Invests $2 Billion in Marvell, Deepens Partnership

24:01You can operate them continuously in these dangerous environments while keeping sailors out of harm's way that really give naval commanders optionality to combat some of these threats that they're seeing that aren't countered very easily with manned platforms alone. What is, Dino, you know, we hear so much about the defense industrial base and how we're not building enough here, we're not building fast enough here or efficiently enough. What is the main bottleneck to producing at scale for you? For us, we really rethink the problem from the ground up. It's really how do you redesign the ship so that it's designed for manufacturability?

24:42We've taken a vertically integrated approach so that we can ensure that we get to the scale that this country needs. And again, that all starts with the design. Once you have the design in place, then the workforce, the training, everything else needed to build out the capacity. and then the software and the autonomy that's required to power these vessels at the scale that we're building them at. This is true maritime autonomy that is vertically integrated and delivered as a cohesive capability to the end user. That's what's required. That's what's needed. That's what we're building at Sironic.

25:20All right, Dino, great to get you on the program. Thanks for joining us. Dino Mavrucas there, the CEO of Sironic. Coming up, we're going to speak with Will Ahmed, the CEO of Whoop. As its valuation hits more than$10 billion after its latest funding round, this is Bloomberg Tech.

25:53Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. I'm Matt Miller in for Caroline and Ed here in New York City. The war in Iran is felt across Asia, maybe even more so than here. Chip stocks there are tumbling as investors pull back from the market's biggest winners amid geopolitical tensions. You can see SK Hynix and Samsung down 8 % and 6 % respectively. Meanwhile, SanDisk here in the U.S. is up more than 5 % in today's cash session. And memory stocks have been especially volatile, of course, as they are fueled by surging product prices and high demand. But Asia is especially susceptible to the closure of the street of Hormuz.

26:35Let's switch gears, though, and talk about completely and talk about wearable health tech company, Whoop. It's announced it raised$575 million in a Series G funding that values the company at more than$10 billion in total. And here to discuss the latest round is Will Ahmed, the CEO of Whoop. Will, great to have you on. I'm a longtime Whoop wearer. I'm on a 390-day streak right now. And it's nice to see your valuation up to more than$10 billion. That's around the same, I noticed, as Aura. And so I'm wondering what you think about what must be your biggest competitor. I mean, is there room in this space for two powerful companies, or is this a winner-take-all scenario?

27:18you? Well, thanks for having me on, Matt, and thanks for being a longtime Whoop member. I appreciate that. You know, if I actually just look back over the last decade, because I founded Whoop in 2012, so I've been building this company for 14 years, there's been an enormous number of players in the space over the years. In the early days, you had, you know, big wearable or big sports apparel brands, excuse me. So you had the Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, Puma Crowd. You then had entries from the tech market. So you had Microsoft and Google and Intel and Amazon, Meta. And so there's been a lot of players, I would say, broadly in the wearable space.

27:57Today, there's actually maybe the fewest number of players that I've seen in the last five years. And yet the wearables market has grown enormously. You know, when I first started the company, I think less than 5 million wearables were sold a year. Now that figure is 300 to 400 million devices a year and continues to grow. So we're very excited about where the company's positioned, and we think we're still in the early days despite the maturity of the business. So I'm obviously a customer, and so many people here around me are customers. Do they stay? Do we stay? Are you retaining customers, those that have 12-month subscriptions?

28:33Are they going to 24? Are they renewing? Well, we recently actually launched three membership tiers. So it used to be you can sign up for$240 a year. Now there's a lower plan and a higher plan,$360 a year for Whoop Life. And we've actually seen an overwhelming number of people migrate from our middle tier to our highest tier. And that demonstrates, I think, that our members are willing to pay for enhanced features, premium capabilities, an additional medical sensing portfolio that we've rolled out. So now Whoop has ECG monitoring with AFib detection. We've come out with blood pressure Insights, which were the first wearable to do.

29:09We recently launched Advanced Labs, which is blood testing. So overwhelmingly, we see our members wanting to invest more in their health with Whoop. They're buying additional services. They're moving up in their membership tier. And then in addition to that, we have some of the best user engagement in all of health. Our members are opening the Whoop app eight times a day, which is pretty extraordinary user engagement. We have an 83 % Dow-Mow ratio, which I believe is second only to WhatsApp in terms of how often people are using and engaging with the product. So it really speaks to, I think, the value that we've been able to create and the fact that our members are, in fact, improving their health.

29:47I think about all this stuff that you can do, and I see the labs myself as well, and the blood pressure monitoring. You can not predict, but you can see whether you're in line for a stroke or a heart attack. Is this a fitness company or is it like a clinical diagnostics tool? Well, we want to build the most powerful personal health platform in the world. And we see that as an evolution from fitness and sports, which is our origins, to now working very broadly across health and medical capabilities. You know, two of our investors in this latest financing were Mayo Clinic and Abbott. Mayo Clinic, of course, being one of the best health institutions in the entire world.

30:31and we're going to be announcing a lot of research with the Mayo Clinic. And Abbott, of course, being one of the best medical device makers in the world and we're going to be announcing more with them as well. And so I think this overall financing really shows the past and the history of Whoop with the athletes coming in, Cristiano Ronaldo, Rory McIlroy, now LeBron James, as well as the future of Whoop with many of these health strategics. You need to get some squash players. You need to sponsor some squash players here. Well, we love squash. I've played squash my entire life. Ali Farag, former world number one, is a good friend and a Whoop member.

31:06So we'll do more in squash. You are cash flow positive. I mean, you're making money. So why raise this additional half a billion dollars plus now? Well, we want to accelerate a lot of the work that we're doing. We think the opportunity to own health monitoring and integrate deeply into the health care system is now just completely up for grabs. And there's only a few players in the market. and we really want to attack the opportunity. So we're going to be leaning in on research and development. We've announced that we're hiring 600 roles this year, really across every single function. So we're actually growing our headcount 80%, which seems to be a counter-narrative move right now.

31:45And then we're also growing internationally. So we've brought in some really great strategic investors from around the world, sovereign wealth funds like QIA and 2.0 and Mubadala and others. and we're going to be investing heavily in growth around the world. How can you put AI to work? And I know you already have an AI assistant on your platform. Obviously, I'm on there many times a day. But how much do you think it can be improved? Well, I think ultimately, Whoop will either make you healthier or it will save your life. And those are really the two areas of development for Whoop. And as we think about coaching and alerting, those are the two areas that we're investing in.

32:26And so we do believe that AI sitting on top of all of this data is going to be able to deliver value in those categories. I think it's inevitable that a huge percentage of humanity will be continuously wearing a health monitor. And it's going to make you healthier or it's going to save your life one day. Will you go public before that? I mean, I think I read Series G, right? We're getting pretty far along in the alphabet. When is the IPO planned for? Well, we still see it on the horizon of 18 to 24 months. You know, fortunately, Whoop's operating cash flow positive. We've just added$575 million to our balance sheet.

33:00So we've got a very strong balance sheet. And it allows us to be, I think, really thoughtful and control our destiny en route to IPO. All right. Will, great having you on set. Thanks so much for joining us. Will Ahmed there, the CEO of Whoop. Coming up, NASA gets ready to send astronauts around the moon to eventually prepare for a trip to that big rock. We'll discuss the milestone for the space agency next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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35:18NASA is sending astronauts on a journey around the moon for the first time in over 50 years. The lunar mission will test the Artemis II spacecraft, paving the way for an actual lunar landing in 2028. Bloomberg Originals takes a look. I think our generation appreciates having a program that now we get a chance to take our own moonshots, what we call great things that humans accomplish. NASA's Artemis program is the space agency's ambitious mission to send humans back to the moon for the first time in more than half a century. The last time NASA sent humans to the moon, they were locked in a space race with the Soviet Union.

35:58This time, NASA wants to go back to the moon to stay in order to learn how to live sustainably off of the lunar surface. Prior to Artemis II, NASA launched the very first major mission in the Artemis program called Artemis I, which sent the Orion crew capsule around the moon to demonstrate that they could work without a crew on board. Now it's time to show that they can actually keep a crew alive while traveling to deep space. Our goal is get to the moon and get back. Four days out, four days back. We are going to do as much science as we can on the way. And on the far side of the moon, we're going to have maybe 45 minutes where we're in a loss of calm with Earth.

36:34And all we can do is just train our eyes on that moon's surface. The entire Artemis program has come under significant criticism for how much time it's taking to build and how much money it's costing the taxpayer. There is an estimate that between 2012 and 2025, the Artemis program has cost roughly $93 billion. Despite the criticism, it does benefit from strong congressional support. many of the programs that are needed for Artemis are spread across the entire United States and provide a lot of jobs for constituents. While the Artemis II mission is coming up, Artemis III, Artemis IV, Artemis V are all a bit of open question marks at the moment.

37:21There's development that needs to happen for hardware, notably with the landers that will actually take the humans to the surface of the moon. NASA's pulling out all the stops with its contractors, to ensure that a landing occurs no later than 2028, but it remains to be seen if that date will actually be possible. You can watch the full episode online or on the Bloomberg Terminal. And whenever I'm wondering about space, I just watch this show because Ed Ludlow and Lauren Grush know more about going to space than anybody else. Let's talk right now, though, about what to expect from this historic mission tomorrow, what it means for America's broader space ambitions.

38:03For that, we're joined by Esne Uzo Okoro. She is a senior fellow at the Harvard Belfer Center, but also a former NASA executive and a former assistant director for space policy at the White House under the Biden administration. And Esne, thanks so much for joining us. Why do we have to go up there and fly around? I mean, we've already been to the moon. We've already landed on it. Can't we just send another ship up there and go back? Well, we're a bit rusty when it's been 50 years since you've done something. You need to validate some tests and test some life support systems and test some propulsion and communications and navigation systems before you land again.

38:46So that's what this crew will do. Half a century on, I mean, you know, when we first did this, a computer that could do as much as my iPhone wouldn't even fit in this studio. I mean, we've had such incredible technological advances that it seems to me it should be a lot easier this time. But I'm getting the sense that that's not the case. That's right. This is a four billion dollar proof of concept as part of a larger mission that doesn't have a fiscal architecture that we've seen before. This is the first time the Congress will have to sustain a multi-administration program at this scale. for this long.

39:28It just happens to be complicated with multiple vendors and with the technologies that NASA wants to study. As we get more advanced technologies and the missions become more complex, there are obviously a lot of other cultural and systemic issues that come up with the vision. NASA's vision just changed last week. Rather than putting up a gateway, which is a bit like a space station around the moon. They will be landing on the moon with multiple robotic missions and a lunar base soon. So with changing priorities, that also aids or adds to the complexity. I have to say$4 billion sounds like a drop in the bucket from a government that spends like$170 billion to fund ICE.

40:18But I guess it depends what your priorities are. What do we get in return for that money, isn't it? What's the benefit coming out of this program? There are a plethora of experiments. I do want to highlight one for your audience. There is an avatar organ on a chip investigation aboard Artemis II. And what it will do is it will measure human response to deep space radiation. And this is a commercial windfall for the pharmaceutical modeling sector for the biotech R &D sector and for the space bioeconomy at large. And you can conduct this research without having to land on the moon. So that's one of several experiments that the astronauts will conduct.

41:03And we will see a number of games and a number of sectors, including the space sector. You will have SpaceX and Blue Origin also that are preparing to support the Artemis program. So there are a number of large stakes here. We're also not above a little healthy competition. Last time it was the U.S. versus the Soviets. Now the Chinese are looking to get to the moon by the end of this decade. how important is that competition? Do we also work together and who wins? You know, generationally, there seems to be a seismic shift in space races. You're right. 50 years ago, it was about racing to the moon and who had better technology.

41:58But today, with over 50 nations that are signatories to the Artemis Accords, what we're seeing is that countries want to go together. And the question today isn't whether America beats China to the moon, but whether that alliance really holds up. We have a Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hansen, who's joining three U.S. astronauts on this journey, and that's a first for us. And so that alliance is proving to be strong, and we look forward to a strong corporation as we go together, given the geostrategic environment we're facing today. Esna, great to get some intel from you. Hope we can get you in the studio here next time you're in New York.

42:36Esna Uzo Okoro there from the Harvard Belfer Center talking to us about the Artemis mission. We'll be following that for you every second of it tomorrow. Don't miss it right here on Bloomberg TV and on your Bloomberg terminal as well. Sticking with space, I'm also watching shares of Rocket Lab. You can see they're up right now about 3.5 % after yesterday Rocket Lab got the okay on an acquisition. So investors are still looking at these highly volatile stocks as an interesting opportunity, at least on updates like today. Coming up, Electric Bike Startup also has reached a$1 billion valuation. We'll talk to the co-founder and president about the latest fundraise and a new partnership with DoorDash to execute the last mile of delivery.

43:22This is Bloomberg Tech.

43:36also is an electric bike and mobility startup that was spun out of the car maker Rivian. It's now reached a$1 billion valuation in its latest funding round. The company raised$200 million and announced a strategic partnership with the delivery firm DoorDash, which is investing. Also, as president and co-founder Chris Yu joins us now. And Chris, you know, we were showing video of some dude ripping up the trails on an electric bike, which is I'm sure possible on your product, but I'm getting from the DoorDash connection that your business case is more about last mile delivery. Is that the case? It's quite broad, yeah.

44:14So we were incubated within Rivian for a couple of years, and just a year ago we spun out as also. An entire thesis that RJ and I had in building also is around building the world's first vertically integrated and software-defined EV platform that's optimized for small form factors. And that goes for consumer use cases, like the fun experience on our e-bike TMB, which we launched in October, as well as importantly for commercial use cases. Because we see that, you know, if you look globally, the vast majority of trips that happen for the movement of people and goods happen in really dense suburban and urban areas where cost per mile and time for deliveries is really important.

44:57So, I mean, first off, just on the bike, because it looks so cool, do you have a clutch in the hub? I mean, how does that work and how much does it cost? Yeah, our bike has a really fun and novel architecture behind it. So we have our propulsion system. It's in-house. It's called DreamRide, and it's actually pedal by wire. And so when you're pedaling into it, you're pedaling into a generator that gives a really incredible force feedback that simulates the feeling of a bike. but importantly through software allows for really an infinite set of different experiences. And so that architecture is really what underpins our vertically integrated small EV platform that is now going into these other form factors.

45:41So what's the ballpark price for the end consumer? Yeah, so TMB starts at$3 ,500 and you can outfit it from there. So it's a really, really highly capable product at that price point. And I guess I'm guessing DoorDash will use these as part of your partnership or you'll supply them. Is this a pilot program or is it a more meaningful path to deploy at scale? Yeah, if I back up for a second, we constructed also really we think of our first phase of our business to address the this massive wave of electrification of the existing small form factors. So if you look at how trips happen today globally, the vast majority happen in things that are smaller than a car.

46:23And very few of those things are electric today. And so phase one of also is building a purpose-built EV platform to accelerate the electrification of these modes. Now, as the world becomes increasingly autonomous, we believe that factors that drive towards small form factors, meaning congestion and cost per mile, still exist. And so one of the key things about our partnership with DoorDash that we're really, really excited about is to deploy autonomous delivery at scale, utilizing these much, much more optimized, smaller form factors. I see. So it's beyond the DoorDash ideas, beyond electric bikes that human pedals and more about autonomous delivery.

47:05What, using bike lanes in urban settings? Yeah, correct. If you look at our e-bike architecture or our pedal quad architecture, these are highly capable EVs that have really car-like capabilities in some sense, meaning car-like speeds, payloads, range. And if you look at how deliveries happen, happening in relatively dense suburban urban areas, increasingly congestion and the total cost of operation of these vehicles is quite critical and quite important. And so we believe in working with DoorDash that the optimal answer often are vehicles that can traverse the intersection of roadways and road adjacent spaces like bike lanes, shoulders and curbsides.

47:49All right, Chris, we'll be following along with interest. Thanks so much for joining us. Chris Yu there is the president of ALSO after raising funding at a billion dollar valuation and doing a deal with DoorDash as well. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. Don't forget to check out our podcast. You can find that on the Bloomberg Terminal as well as online on Apple, Spotify and iHeart. We're looking at a pretty major rally underway today, especially for the tech stocks with the Nasdaq gaining one and a half percent right now at 23 ,296. The Mag 7 coming back from what has been a loss so far this year and the Sox index up two and a half percent as well.

48:31This is Bloomberg.

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