Despite legions of naysayers in the media, there is strong financial interest in autonomous vehicles as Waymo closed $5.6 billion in an investment round late last week. Led by its parent company Alphabet GOOG -1.56%↓, other investments came from Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, and T. Rowe Price.
The company, in addition to its ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, also continues its partnership with Uber UBER -9.83%↓ in Austin and Atlanta next year. The company will use the investment proceeds to develop its Waymo Driver AI-powered autonomous driving system for business applications.
The company also announced some eye-opening stats. Waymo said fully autonomous freeway operations and in Phoenix and San Francisco have enabled it to provide more than 100,000 paid weekly trips. The company says that number is 10 times the rides it gave last year.
The funding, first announced in July, brings Waymo’s total raised to more than $11 billion after it raised $3.2 billion and $2.5 billion, respectively, in two earlier rounds.
Waymo, which also recently introduced its 6th-generation Waymo Driver, plans to move into such cities as Buffalo, New York, and Washington, D.C., where it says are more complex environments to drive in.
Waymo also said it was going to develop a training model for its robotaxis that is built on Google’s multimodal large language model (MLLM) Gemini. The company hopes the end-to-end training model will help its driverless vehicles make decisions on avoiding obstacles and where to drive.
Waymo isn’t the only autonomous driving giant to receive huge funding. This week, it was announced that Toyota and NTT will invest $3.3 billion in research and development to anticipate accidents via AI software, Nikkei reported.
The companies hope to have a system in place by 2028 to market to other automakers. This includes a driver-assistance feature that monitors traffic around the car through sensors and AI analysis for the data.
