Self-driving tech company Waymo unveiled a new $16 billion funding round, valuing the company at $126 billion.
The robotaxi pioneer, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet, has expanded dramatically over the past few years and now offers driverless cabs at locations across the US, including the United States. san francisco bay areaThe Phoenix metropolitan area, los angeles And Miami. Autonomous Waymo cabs are also offered through Uber in austin And atlanta.
Waymo’s previous funding round was a Series C in October 2024, which raised $5.6 billion at a valuation of $45 billion.
Along with lead investor Alphabet, other investors this time include Dragoneer Investments, DST Global, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global and Google Ventures.
While many Chinese robotaxi companies are making progress in their domestic market and including the Middle East and Asia we rodeBaidu’s apollo go And pony.aiWaymo has emerged as a clear leader in the West.
It overtook rival General Motors Cruises, which is the automaker Funding stopped after the fall of an incident In which a pedestrian was injured in San Francisco in October 2023. This goes even further than Tesla, which has so far largely failed to deliver on its robotaxi promises, as seen Soft launch of a service in Austin With human security operators last year.
Waymo said its success is based on its safety record, which it described as “statistically superior” to human driving. According to the blog post, “In 127 million miles of fully autonomous operations – the equivalent of going to the Moon and back more than 260 times – we have achieved a 90% reduction in serious injury accidents.”
It has advocated a “rules-based” approach to autonomous driving, where its AI processes images and text signals along with data from cameras, lidar, radar and other sensors in pre-mapped areas. It provides automated functionality through predictions based on data derived from past scenarios and engineered logic.
This is in contrast to the “end-to-end” AI favored by Tesla and others, which is a neural network-based system that makes cars “think” like humans and is less dependent on sensors. This generalized AI is trained on videos and requires little coding.
With its latest funding secured, Waymo plans expansion by 2026 to include several US cities including Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego and Washington – all targeted for ride-hailing services. Waymo is also preparing for its first international operations in London and Tokyo.
