Key Takeaways
- A financing round worth $5.6 billion has been closed by Waymo.
- The money was led by Alphabet, the parent corporation.
- Waymo’s robotaxi business and technology will grow as a result of the move.
Waymo claims to have closed a $5.6 billion investment round to help grow its robotaxi service, which is still in its infancy.
Naturally, parent company Alphabet led the “oversubscribed” round, but the company also continued to receive support from Tiger Global, T. Rowe Price, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and Fidelity.
In addition to promising to grow its Waymo One user base in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, as well as its new Uber collaborations in Atlanta and Austin, Waymo did not specify what it will accomplish with the funding. Additionally, you should anticipate ongoing development of the Waymo Driver autonomous driving platform, as it is tailored to a “range” of commercial applications.
That Waymo would continue to receive backing is not surprising. Waymo has long been viewed by Alphabet as a demonstration of its long-term technological goals, and this is now even more evident given the company’s heavy emphasis on massive language AI models like Gemini.
Also, Waymo is getting closer to becoming a completely successful company. It currently claims to have ten times as many paid weekly journeys as it did the previous year, with 100,000. Although that is insignificant in comparison to the approximately 28 million daily trips that Uber made globally in 2023, it is evident that autonomous taxis are more than a test project.
Although the expanded client base undoubtedly helps, the reasons for other Waymo investment partners are less obvious. Some people may find this to be a safer option than GM’s Cruise, which is slowly making a comeback after a pedestrian accident in 2023 but has shelved its Origin taxi and hasn’t fully benefited from former Xbox executive Marc Whitten’s current position as CEO. In short, Waymo is the robotaxi operator with the safest future in the United States.
