A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi drives alongside a road on March 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Pictures
Waymo has closed a $5.6 billion funding spherical to broaden its robotaxi service in and past Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix, the place it operates right now.
The autonomous automobile enterprise is owned by Google mother or father Alphabet, which led the sequence C funding in Waymo, alongside earlier backers together with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Constancy, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger World and T. Rowe Value.
In an announcement to CNBC, Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov stated the funding would go towards growth and advancing the Waymo Driver for enterprise functions.
“With this newest funding, we are going to proceed to welcome extra riders into our Waymo One ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and in Austin and Atlanta by means of our expanded partnership with Uber,” they wrote.
The sequence C funding brings Waymo’s complete capital raised to greater than $11 billion after it raised $3.2 billion and $2.5 billion in two earlier rounds. Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat introduced in July that the mother or father firm would decide to a multiyear funding of as much as $5 billion in Waymo.
Whereas many firms are testing autonomous automobiles, or AVs, on public roads within the U.S., together with well-funded upstarts similar to Wayve, Waymo is the one one to function a business robotaxi service in a number of main metro areas.
The service has been embraced by some girls who’ve security considerations about driving with unknown human drivers. And it has even been utilized by mother and father to ship their teenagers to high school when different transit choices felt much less protected or handy.
Waymo now conducts greater than 100,000 weekly journeys for passengers in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, who can hail their robotaxis by way of the Waymo One app. Extra lately, Waymo partnered with Uber to launch its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas — dwelling of would-be rival Tesla’s headquarters.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made guarantees about self-driving automobiles for greater than a decade. This week, he stated Tesla would supply a driverless ride-hailing service in Texas and California subsequent 12 months, as soon as the corporate upgrades the partially automated methods in its present automobiles, which nonetheless require a human driver right now.
GM-owned Cruise had been Waymo’s closest competitor within the U.S. till it paused operations following an October 2023 incident in San Francisco during which a pedestrian was dragged 20 toes by a Cruise AV, after she was first struck by a human driver in one other automobile. Cruise is working to reinstate its service and likewise plans to associate with Uber.
Self-driving automobile makers within the U.S. should nonetheless show their expertise is safer to make use of than taxis and vehicles with human drivers. As CNBC beforehand reported, almost two-thirds of U.S. respondents to a Pew Analysis Heart survey stated they might not wish to experience in a driverless passenger automobile if that they had the chance.
Waymo’s self-reported knowledge means that their automobiles crash “far much less typically than human drivers on public roads,” in line with evaluation by Understanding AI writer Timothy B. Lee.
Nonetheless, Waymo has initiated software program remembers to enhance the protection of its self-driving methods, and its AVs have typically blocked site visitors, traveled the unsuitable manner down the road, or been concerned in collisions, although none resulted in a identified fatality or extreme damage.
The subsequent-generation robotaxi from Waymo is a Geely Zeekr that is geared up with its customized sensors and AI “Driver.” Waymo additionally lately agreed to a multiyear strategic partnership with Hyundai that can add the South Korean automaker’s Ioniq 5 electrical automobile to its robotaxi fleet.
In August, Waymo stated it might additionally check its driverless automobiles in harsher, winter climate together with in northern California, upstate New York and Michigan, with the hope of providing robotaxi providers past the sunbelt, and finally internationally.
