There are big fundraising rounds, and there are BIG fundraising rounds.
Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent company Alphabet, recently announced that it has raised $2.25 billion in its first external round of funding.
The round was led by Silver Lake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund the Mubadala Investment Company. Andreessen Horowitz and AutoNation also joined the round, as did Alphabet and several other firms.
Waymo CEO John Krafcik said that they’ve always approached their mission “as a team sport,” adding that with the round, they’re “expanding that team, adding financial investors and important strategic partners who bring decades of experience investing in and supporting successful technology companies building transformative products.”
“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.”
The company’s mega-sized fund raise comes hot on the heels of several technical and operational milestones for Waymo. Its cars have driven over 20 million miles on public roads across over 25 cities, and its Detroit plant had just delivered its first vehicles with fifth-gen technology.
Waymo One, the company’s – and the world’s – first public self-driving ride-hailing service, currently serves thousands of customers in Arizona and has already provided “thousands of fully driverless rides to our riders, in a high-speed mixed usage market area larger than San Francisco.”
Source: Waymo