(Bloomberg / Natalie Lung) — Nuro Inc., the self-driving tech startup founded by two former Waymo engineers, announced a new funding round that it said will support its commercial expansion plans in additional US cities and internationally through 2027.
The Mountain View, California-based company raised $106 million in a Series E round from a mix of new and returning investors, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Existing backers who participated in the raise include T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Management & Research Co., Tiger Global Management, Greylock Partners and XN LP. The latest financing values the company at $6 billion, down from $8.6 billion following a 2021 round that included SoftBank Group Corp. and Google.
The company plans to disclose the new investors along with some strategic partners in an upcoming announcement, it added.
Nuro has had to weather a broader downturn in capital funding by carrying out cost cuts. In 2023, it announced it was pivoting from building and scaling custom autonomous vehicles, or AVs, to focusing on developing autonomous software. In late 2024, co-founders Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson said the company was again shifting its business model, this time licensing its software to carmakers. It has also slashed its workforce to about 700 through multiple rounds of layoffs, down from its peak of around 1,400 in late 2022.
“The AV industry has certainly gone through its ups and downs over the last few years,” Chief Operating Officer Andrew Chapin said in an interview. “The fact that Nuro has emerged from a difficult period of the industry with really impressive technical progress, some really solid commercial partnerships that we’ll announce soon, and we are now raising this new round from top-tier blue-chip investors, all of that speaks to where we are going and the momentum that we have.”
Chapin added that the new funding combined with the company’s current balance sheet would extend its runway into 2027, a “timeline on which we believe we can transition to start scaling commercially.”
More details about the company’s auto-industry partnerships will be shared “in the coming weeks and months,” he added.
Nuro has so far not announced a car manufacturer partner for a commercial launch, but it’s been testing its technology on a small fleet of Toyota Priuses, along with its own delivery robots, in Houston and parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, including Mountain View and Palo Alto. Chapin said a 10-year food delivery partnership with Uber Technologies Inc. announced in 2022 is still active, with Nuro offering autonomous delivery using the Priuses in select areas in those three markets.
As part of its cost-cutting strategy, Chapin said the company has no plans to expand production of its custom, third-generation delivery robot R3, but it’s keeping the fleet for commercial testing and research and development.
Commercial competition in the self-driving technology sector is poised to heat up as the technology is shifting from test fleets to consumer-ready vehicles available through ridehailing and delivery services. Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, the only autonomous ridehailing service available to a broad swath of the US market, said in late February it was making 200,000 trips each week in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles. It’s also offering rides through the Uber app in Austin, to be followed by Atlanta later this year. Waymo was valued at more than $45 billion after its latest funding round of $5.6 billion in late 2024, Bloomberg reported.
Other self-driving technology software providers have also been testing their software on various vehicle types as they prepare for commercial launches. UK-based, SoftBank-backed Wayve Technologies Ltd. said it was nearing a commercial debut with automakers. Austin-based Avride announced last month a strategic alliance with manufacturer Hyundai Motor Co. to make driverless cars in the US, with the fleet planned for deployment through the Uber app in Dallas later this year.
Intel Corp. spinoff Mobileye Global Inc. has meanwhile been working with Volkswagen Group on driver-assistance systems, and has yet to announce a manufacturer for its autonomous vehicle partnership with Lyft Inc., which is due to launch in Dallas as soon as 2026.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.