Waymo raises $2.25 billion in first external investment round

March 3, 2020 | AUVSI News

Waymo raised $2.25 billion in its first external investment round.

The investment round was led by Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Mubadala Investment Company. Additional investors included Magna International, Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation and Alphabet.

“Waymo is the proven leader in self-driving technology, is the only autonomous vehicle company with a public ride-hailing service, and is successfully scaling its fully driverless experience,” says Egon Durban, co-CEO, Silver Lake, and nominee for Waymo’s Operating Board.

“We’re deeply aligned with Waymo’s commitment to making our roads safer, and look forward to working together to help advance and scale the Waymo Driver in the U.S. and beyond.”

According to Waymo, the investment round follows a recent string of major operational and technical milestones for the company, including the Waymo Driver surpassing more than 20 million miles driven on public roads across 25-plus cities, and over 10 billion miles in simulation.

Engineers and technicians at Waymo’s Detroit factory have also shipped the first vehicles—electric cars and Class 8 trucks—equipped with fifth-generation hardware, with “all-new, more powerful compute and more capable sensing.” Waymo notes that the factory is the first one in the world dedicated to the mass production of L4 autonomous vehicles.

“With this injection of capital and business acumen, alongside Alphabet, we’ll deepen our investment in our people, our technology, and our operations, all in support of the deployment of the Waymo Driver around the world,” says John Krafcik, CEO, Waymo.

A variety of vehicle platforms and business applications are equipped with the Waymo Driver, including Waymo Via, which focuses on all forms of goods delivery.

Waymo’s public self-driving ride-hailing service, Waymo One, currently serves thousands of customers in Arizona. It has already provided thousands of fully driverless rides to riders in a high-speed mixed usage market area larger than San Francisco.