Terawatt Infrastructure is on a quest to develop charging infrastructure for fleets of autonomous rideshare vehicles. One of the chief tasks of Sujoy Haldar, who joined Terawatt as CFO last summer, is securing enough equity and debt financing to power the organization’s buildout of a network of charging hubs, an infrastructure category that in a press release, the company called “still largely untapped.”

“Think of us as being in the very early stages of what will be a really large industry and asset class,” Haldar told CFO Brew. Autonomous ride-sharing companies have expanded from just a few cities to dozens, he said. To widen their reach and “operate at scale in these cities, they need to have access to charging infrastructure. And that’s where we come in.”

Indeed, autonomous ridesharing is on the rise. McKinsey estimates highly automated robotaxis will be available “at a large scale” globally by 2030. CNBC reported in December that Alphabet’s Waymo crossed 450,000 weekly paid rides.

Haldar recently spoke with CFO Brew about the message he takes to prospective investors and the role he plays in acquiring and developing the real estate for Terawatt’s charging hubs.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell me more about your role in raising the capital needed for Terawatt’s growth?

One of [my priorities] will be capital raising. This will take a lot of capital to go and acquire these core sites in different areas. The scale of capital is going to be a lot. We’re talking [about] investing $3 billion to $5 billion over the next few years, probably billions in the near term and trillions once everything moves to autonomous, which will likely happen over the next couple of decades. It’s a lot of capital, and in order to do that, we have to do that with both debt and equity. And so one of my key priorities is putting in the foundation work that allows us to raise capital more scalably.

So what does Haldar want potential investors to see? Keep reading.—AZ

It’s no revelation that the PCAOB has been under fire in recent months. SEC Chair Paul Atkins replaced nearly the entire board, including Chair Erica Williams; cut the board’s budget; and slashed members’ salaries. Recently, the SEC has even posted job openings for a new SOX group, raising suspicions that it plans to assume some of the PCAOB’s functions.

PCAOB chair Demetrios “Jim” Logothetis addressed these concerns during an April 29 meeting of the PCAOB’s Investor Advisory Group. When Logothetis interviewed for the role of chair, he said, he was reassured that the SEC wanted to keep the board around. But he was also told that his mandate was “to do whatever we need to do to regain the credibility that perhaps is missing out there.”

And the board is suffering from a credibility gap, Logothetis suggested. During a recent meeting of the International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators in Paris, Logothetis asked representatives of Big Six auditing firms how audit committees worked with the PCAOB, he said. What he heard did not inspire confidence. One person “inadvertently used the term ‘manage the PCAOB,’” he said, while another reported that “the audit committees have tuned out the PCAOB.”

That could pose a problem, he said: It all “comes down to whether or not these firms that we are regulating take our comments and recommendations seriously. That’s where behavior changes.”

Keep reading for more on how the PCAOB plans to regain that credibility.—CV

PayPal will waive $30 million in processing fees for $1 billion in small business transactions as part of a new settlement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) signed on May 12.

The settlement resolves a DOJ investigation into PayPal over a 2020 program that guaranteed a $530 million investment for Black and minority-owned businesses. The government claimed that the program was unlawful under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which bars credit discrimination based in part on race or ethnicity.

PayPal will launch a new program for veteran-owned small businesses or those in farming, manufacturing, or technology. However, the settlement stipulates that PayPal admits to no wrongdoing and will not pay a separate fine to the federal government.

What kind of message does this send to businesses? Keep reading on HR Brew.—KP