According to Gate News bot, Crowdfund Insider reported that the African digital lending platform Carrot has completed a $4.2 million seed round of financing, led by MaC Venture Capital, with co-investment from Partech Africa and Authentic Ventures. Carrot offers innovative lending services, allowing users to use various assets such as stocks, fixed income products, and cryptocurrencies as collateral to obtain credit. The platform is dedicated to addressing the issues of incomplete traditional credit scoring systems in the African market, providing reliable financing channels for individuals and small businesses. Since the platform went live, it has issued over 2 million dollars in loans, serving more than 10,000 users. This round of funding will be used for team expansion, business development, and product development, with a focus on investing in artificial intelligence technology to enhance credit scoring, risk management, and fraud prevention capabilities. Bolu Aiki-Raji, the founder and CEO of Carrot, stated that the company plans to expand its operations to other African countries by the end of 2025.

On September 12th, Carrot, a Decentralized Finance project in the Solana ecosystem, announced the completion of a $600,000 Pre-Seed round of financing, with participation from angel investors such as BOOGLE, DKSVentures, Dead King Society, Retired Chad Dev, etc.

Baidu's driverless taxi platform Radish Run has become a hot topic, driving its Hong Kong stocks up more than 12%. However, JPMorgan analysts believe that the taxi market is premature, and the stock price rally may weaken in the short term. Carrot Run is on track to break even in the city in the second half of 2024, but the impact on the group's finances will remain small until it reaches a larger scale, possibly in the second half of 2025.

Golden Ten Data reported on May 15 that Chen Zhuo, general manager of Baidu's autonomous driving business department, said at Baidu's "Apollo Day 2024" open day that the radish run is very close to the critical point of break-even, and the goal is that by the end of 2024, the carrot run will achieve break-even in Wuhan and fully enter the profit period in 2025.