Technology

A Tesla sedan running on Autopilot mode collided with a parked vehicle belonging to the Laguna Beach Police Department today. No one was in the police car and the Tesla driver had only minor injuries, reports the Los Angeles Times, but the police car was &totaled,& Laguna Beach police sergeant Jim Cota told the newspaper.

Cota also said that a year ago, there had been another incident involving a Tesla colliding with a semi-truck in the same area. &Why do these vehicles keep doing that& he told the LA Times. &We&re just lucky that people aren&t getting injured.&

This morning a Tesla sedan driving outbound Laguna Canyon Road in &autopilot& collides with a parked @LagunaBeachPD unit. Officer was not in the unit at the time of the crash and minor injuries were sustained to the Tesla driver. #lagunabeach #police #tesla pic.twitter.com/7sAs8VgVQ3

— Laguna Beach PD PIO (@LBPD_PIO_45) May 29, 2018

In an emailed statement, a Tesla spokesperson said:

&When using Autopilot, drivers are continuously reminded of their responsibility to keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of the vehicle at all times. Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn&t make the car impervious to all accidents, and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that ‘Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings.&&

This is the latest in several accidents involving a Tesla vehicle in Autopilot mode. These include a crash in Utah earlier this month that occurred while the driver was looking at her phone and two fatal crashes, one in California two months ago and another in 2016 that happened in Florida.

Launched in late 2015, TeslaAutopilot feature is meant to &relieve drivers of the most tedious and potentially dangerous aspects of road travel& and includes standard safety features like automatic emergency braking and collision warnings, but it is not meant to replace navigation by a human driver.

Despite Teslainstructions to drivers before they start using Autopilot, the automakercritics have called on the company to disable the feature until it can be made safer. For example, Consumer Reports said the name Autopilot gives drivers a &false sense of security& and that &these two messages—your vehicle can drive itself, but you may need to take over the controls at a momentnotice—create potential for driver confusion.&

European startup studio eFounders is slowly but surely building a portfolio of successful software-as-a-service startups. The company is behind some of the most promising enterprise startups in recent years.

Over the past six months, six eFounders startups have raised $120 million in total, with Front and Aircall leading the pack with a $66 million and a $29 million round. Spendesk raised $9.9 million. Forest, Slite and Station raised seed rounds.

Some of them also attended Y Combinatormost recent batch. Finally, Technicis acquired TextMaster for an undisclosed sum.

If you don&t know the eFounders model, itquite simple. At first, the core eFounders team comes up with an idea and hires a founding team. In exchange for financial and human resources, eFounders keep a significant stake in its startups.

After a year or two, startups should have proven that they can raise a seed round and operate on their own. This way, eFounders can move on to the next project and start new companies.

eFounders currently lists 14 companies on its website. In addition to the ones I already mentioned, there are Mailjet, Mention, Foxintelligence, Forest, Hivy, Folk, Upflow, Briq and Illustrio.

Based on this list, you&d think that eFounders has a nearly perfect track record. But eFounders had to stop a couple of projects, such as PressKing and Muxi. Illustrio seems to be on pause right now as well.

Nevertheless, itclear that eFounders has cooked up a secret playbook for software-as-a-service startups. More importantly, italso clear that eFounders managed to attract some talented entrepreneurs to lead those startups and transform them into their own startups.

Overall, eFounders companies have raised $175 million in total, have 100,000 clients and 500 employees. Together, they generate $50 million in revenue. eFounders itself has raised $11.4 million.

Itgoing to be a long play for eFounders as the company only generates revenue when therean exit or a secondary market transaction. As long as startups keep raising more money, eFounders doesn&t get anything, and its stake gets diluted. It&ll only make money when therea significant acquisition or an IPO. But the valuation of eFounders& portfolio also keeps growing, so the outcome looks more and more positive.

One week, seven days or 10,080 minutes. No matter how you slice it, time is running short if you want to compete inStartup Battlefield— the premier startup-pitch competition taking place atDisrupt San Francisco 2018onSeptember 5-7. Applications close in just one week, so get yourself together and apply right now.

Why wouldn&t you It won&t cost you anything to apply or to participate. No fees, thatour motto. And because this is our biggest Disrupt event ever, we celebrated by supersizing the grand prize to a very hefty $100,000 (thatequity-free cash, folks).

Still need not sure the benefits of competing outweigh the effort of applying Startup Battlefield is the best platform for launching your company to the world. And thatnot just our opinion. Cathy Han is the CEO of 42 Technologies, an online retail analytics platform. Herewhat she says about her companyStartup Battlefield experience.

&Launching on Battlefield helped us rise above the noise, and it put us on the radar of customers, investors and talent early on. We also met a community of amazing founders and the family at TechCrunch, who have helped us grow ever since. If you&re launching a new company or product, this is the stage you want to be on.&

If you&re selected by our team of highly discriminating editors, you&ll receive expert pitch coaching to get you primed and ready to do battle. Teams get six minutes to make their pitch to an expert panel of judges — and then answer any questions the judges may have for them.

The Battlefield stage has a live audience packed with literally thousands of entrepreneurs, tech founders, investors and media. We also live-stream it to the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And it&ll be available later, on demand. Itthe kind of exposure startup founders dream of experiencing.

And if you do compete, your company becomes part of a very exclusive club: The Startup Battlefield alumni community. This group of more than 800 companies has collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits. You may recognize a few of them: Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Fitbit, Getaround and Cloudflare. Thatsome rarified company.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018takes place onSeptember 5-7 at Moscone Center West. You have just one week left to apply. Why not take your shot Apply to Startup Battlefield today.