Internet conglomerate Alphabet was one of the backers that provided $2.25bn to Waymo, its US-based autonomous driving technology subsidiary, in the company’s first external funding round. Other corporate backers included automotive component manufacturer Magna International and car retailer AutoNation, which invested $50m. Other investors in the round featured venture firms Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the Mubadala Investment Company, which co-led the round. The round came after five years of testing on US roads. The self-driving vehicles are the core of a ride hailing service dubbed Waymo One in addition to a logistics-focused service, Waymo Via where systems are applied to delivery trucks.
Founded in 2009 as part of Alphabet (then Google) and spun off in 2016, Waymo develops a unified autonomous vehicle which aims to combine internally developed technology in areas like cameras and lidar sensors as well as versions of traditional automotive systems covering functions such as brakes and steering.
The company is part of the wider autotech space which has received much attention from corporate investors in the past few years, as the GCV Analytics chart here shows. The number of such rounds increased from 33 in 2014 up to 102 in 2017 and has somewhat fluctuated above 70 ever since. The total estimated capital in such rounds increased multi-fold from $555m in 2014 up to an estimated $9.87bn by the end of last year. We have already seen much bullishness in public markets about Tesla, by far the most well-know developer of electric and autonomous cars today. This bullishness is of course to be found in the VC space as well.
