Business News Roundup, Jan. 25

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the Los Angeles-area crash of a Tesla Model S that may have been operating under its “Autopilot” system.

The Palo Alto company wouldn’t say if Autopilot was working at the time of the Culver City crash but said Monday that drivers must stay attentive when it’s in use. The company would not comment on the investigation.

It’s the second time the board has looked into a Tesla crash, and it probably means that it wants information about whether Autopilot was on and if its sensors somehow failed to see a stopped firetruck Monday on Interstate 405.

The driver told the California Highway Patrol that he had activated Autopilot before the crash, but the highway patrol said in a news release that it was unable to verify the driver’s statement.

San Jose solar panel maker SunPower Corp. plans to ask for an exemption to the 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels that President Trump approved Monday.

The company that manufactures most of its panels at factories in Asia and Mexico could hire more workers at its headquarters and invest in a “pilot” factory in San Jose if it’s excluded from import duties, CEO Tom Werner said Wednesday.

“We’re working on the next-generation technology at the pilot line, and I’m ready to spend $20 million on that effort,” Werner said. “We can’t afford that with a tariff in place.”

Alphabet outspent all other companies on lobbying Washington bureaucrats and politicians in 2017, a year in which it and other tech giants were hauled before legislators probing Russian influence in the 2016 election.

The Mountain View company doled out $13.6 million on lobbying firms like Prime Policy Group and Gephardt Group, edging out the $13.2 million spent by AT&T, which is facing government opposition to its takeover of Time Warner Inc. for $85 billion. The figures were compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Alphabet’s spending actually fell 12 percent compared to 2016, but AT&T also cut back.

Two freelance journalists have won the first American Mosaic Journalism Prize for stories about the struggles of U.S. immigrants and others that the prize founders say have been underrepresented or misrepresented.

Jaeah Lee of San Francisco and Valeria Fernandez of Arizona will each receive $100,000, making it one of the richest prizes for journalism. By comparison, Pulitzer Prize winners generally receive $15,000.

The prize was created by the Heising-Simons Foundation, a family-run charity in Los Altos.

Lee spent 17 months with a mother whose son was killed in a police shooting, the announcement said. “Her writing “gives readers a keen sense of the voices and concerns of those easily forgotten or neglected in the news,” the prize judges said.

The Heising-Simons Foundation was founded by Mark Heising, a computer chip designer who holds several U.S. patents, and Liz Simons, a Spanish-bilingual teacher who founded an early childhood education program, according to the foundation website.

Both have signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment to contribute more than half their wealth to philanthropy either during their lifetime or in their will, according to a pledge website. Other signatories include Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Cloud data warehouse company Snowflake Computing closed a $263 million round of financing led by Iconiq Capital, Altimeter Capital and Sequoia Capital, the San Mateo firm said.

Snowflake has raised a total of $473 million, at a valuation of $1.5 billion, since its founding in 2012. The company said it will use the financing to hire more engineers and expand operations in North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region.

SoftBank Group Corp. led an $865 million investment in Katerra, a little-known Menlo Park construction-technology startup seeking to shake up the building industry.

Katerra’s valuation is now more than $3 billion, said Michael Marks, the chairman and co-founder. He said the company has about $1.3 billion in bookings for new construction projects.

The investment is the sixth biggest for a U.S. venture-backed company in the past year, according to data from research firm CB Insights. In addition to SoftBank’s Vision Fund, new investors include a fund overseen by Soros Fund Management, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Tavistock Group, and real estate investment funds Navitas Capital and Divco West. Jeffrey Housenbold, a managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, will join Katerra’s board.

The Vision Fund, with a $100 billion target, has taken stakes in scores of companies over the past year, including Uber, Slack, WeWork and Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing. In December, the fund put $450 million into Compass, a real-estate tech firm. The fund made about 100 investments last year with a total value of $36 billion, according to research firm Preqin.

Marks founded Katerra with Jim Davidson, a founder of private-equity firm Silver Lake, and Fritz Wolff, executive chairman of a real-estate investment company. Katerra’s goal is to help build construction projects faster and at lower costs by controlling all aspects of the process from design through construction.

Materials are meant to arrive at building sites only when they’re needed and are ready to assemble.

Chronicle News Services