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Carasti Expands To Saudi Arabia After Raising $2 Million
To celebrate its recent expansion, Carasti is launching with a Ramadan offer of 50% off the first-month subscription for new Saudi subscribers.
From March 23, 2022, on-demand car subscription service Carasti is available in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The expansion of the UAE-based company into the Kingdom comes after a successful bridge round that helped Carasti raise $2 million from venture firms Net Ventures and Rua Growth.
The bridge round will soon be followed by Carasti’s Series A funding round, which should help it further drive growth and establish itself as a dominant player in the car rental and leasing market in Saudi Arabia, which is expected to reach $2.5 billion by 2026, according to a report by Mordor Intelligence.
“After a successful 2.5 years of rapid growth in the UAE, we are now making it possible for Saudi drivers to get a car without any of the hassles of ownership; our full-subscription model looks set to become the go-to brand for the Kingdom’s automotive needs starting today and into the future” said Claudio Esposito-Aiardo, CEO of Carasti.
Carasti offers a growing selection of new and nearly-new cars, and its subscription process takes less than three minutes to complete. Customers can choose from all-inclusive subscriptions ranging from 1 to 24 months, with prices starting at just SAR 1,799 ($479 USD) per month. The few required documents can be conveniently uploaded using the Carasti app, available to download on both the App Store and Google Play Store.
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To celebrate its recent expansion, Carasti is launching with a Ramadan offer of 50 percent off the first-month subscription for new Saudi subscribers. To take advantage of the offer, simply enter the code “WOW50” when signing up. After completing the quick and easy sign-up process, the selected vehicle can be ready in as little as 4 hours.
All subscriptions include not only the car itself but also all other expenses typically associated with car ownership, such as insurance, warranty, maintenance, and around-the-clock roadside assistance and delivery.
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At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
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