Nuro

Nuro was founded in September 2016 by Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson, two senior engineers who left Google's self-driving car project (later spun out as Waymo) to build autonomous vehicles for goods delivery rather than passenger transport. Zhu had been a principal software engineer and led perception and simulation efforts at Waymo; Ferguson, who holds a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon (and led CMU's winning team in the 2007 DARPA Urban Grand Challenge), was a principal engineer leading computer vision, machine learning, and behavior-prediction teams there. The two believed that a delivery-only vehicle — with no seats, steering wheel, or pedals — could reach the market faster and more safely than a robotaxi, since it eliminated the need to protect human passengers. Nuro launched its first vehicle, the R1, in January 2018 alongside $92 million in Series A funding from Greylock Partners and Gaorong Capital. The R1 began commercial pilots with Kroger (via Fry's Food and Drug in Scottsdale, Arizona) in mid-to-late 2018. In February 2019, Nuro raised a much larger $940 million round from SoftBank's Vision Fund, valuing the company at $2.7 billion — at the time one of the largest-ever funding events for an autonomous vehicle startup — and used the capital to build the R2 (a further redesigned vehicle with no driver controls at all) and to launch partnerships with Domino's Pizza (2019) and CVS Pharmacy (prescription delivery, 2020). Nuro became the first company to receive a federal exemption from certain NHTSA vehicle-safety standards (given the R2 lacked mirrors, a windshield, and other human-driving equipment) and the first company granted a full autonomous-vehicle deployment permit by the California DMV. In November 2020, Nuro closed a $500 million Series C led by T. Rowe Price at a $5 billion valuation, and that December it acquired self-driving trucking startup Ike Robotics, absorbing more than 55 engineers. Growth continued through 2021: Nuro announced a $40 million Nevada manufacturing and test-track facility, added a commercial delivery partnership with 7-Eleven, and in late 2021 raised a $600 million Series D that pushed its valuation to $8.6 billion — its peak. In September 2022, Nuro signed a 10-year partnership with Uber Eats for autonomous food delivery, testing third-party vehicles in California and Texas alongside its own custom fleet. The broader 2022-2023 downturn in AV/growth-stock financing hit Nuro hard: it conducted two rounds of layoffs (roughly 20% of staff in November 2022, then another ~30% in May 2023) and paused a planned large-scale manufacturing partnership with China's BYD for its next-generation R3 vehicle. Nuro's founders said in a May 2023 blog post that AI advances would extend the company's cash runway from 1.5 to 3.5 years. In July 2024, the California DMV approved on-road testing of the R3 in four Bay Area cities, and in September 2024 Nuro announced a fundamental strategic pivot: rather than building and operating its own delivery-robot fleet, it would license its Nuro Driver software/hardware stack — available in a fully autonomous L4 tier and an L2++ driver-assist tier — to automakers, mobility platforms, and delivery fleets, competing more directly with companies like UK-based Wayve. The licensing pivot began bearing fruit through 2025-2026. In April 2025, Nuro opened a Series E round with a $106 million first tranche (T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Tiger Global Management, Greylock Partners, and XN LP), bringing total funding to $2.2 billion at a $6 billion valuation — a down round from the 2021 peak but one the founders framed as reflecting a leaner, capital-efficient go-to-market strategy. In July 2025, Nuro, Uber, and Lucid Motors announced a landmark global robotaxi program: Uber invested $300 million directly in Lucid and agreed to purchase at least 20,000 Lucid Gravity SUVs over six years, equipped with Nuro Driver technology, to be operated exclusively on the Uber platform; Uber also committed an undisclosed 'multi-hundred-million-dollar' investment into Nuro itself. That August, Nuro closed a further $97 million Series E tranche from Baillie Gifford, Icehouse Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Nvidia, Pledge Ventures, and Uber, bringing the combined Series E to $203 million, total funding to roughly $2.3 billion, and reconfirming the $6 billion valuation. Nvidia's investment formalized a long-standing technical relationship: Nuro's compute stack runs on the Nvidia DRIVE AGX Thor platform. Heading into 2026, Nuro has continued to scale its robotaxi ambitions: it unveiled the Lucid-built, Nuro-driven robotaxi at CES 2026, began autonomous on-road testing on the Las Vegas Strip and in the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston, secured a CPUC permit for drivered robotaxi passenger-service testing in California, appointed Mike Mancini as CFO, expanded into Germany as a European base, and named Houston as its second planned robotaxi deployment market (targeting mid-2027, following an anticipated 2026 San Francisco Bay Area launch). The company reports over 2 million autonomous miles driven with zero at-fault incidents, more than six years of continuous L4 public-road operation, and its Nuro Driver technology applied across nine different vehicle platforms.

Business model

B2B technology licensing: Nuro licenses its Nuro Driver™ self-driving software/hardware stack (available in a fully autonomous L4 tier and an assisted-driving L2++ tier) and its Nuro Toolkit developer SDK to automakers, mobility/ride-hail platforms, and commercial delivery fleets, rather than manufacturing or operating its own vehicle fleet (a pivot from its original owned-and-operated delivery robot model, made in September 2024).

Licensing/technology fees and revenue-sharing from OEM and mobility-platform partners (e.g., Lucid Motors, Uber) who build, own, and/or operate vehicles equipped with Nuro Driver; historically (pre-2024) also generated revenue from operating its own contracted delivery service for retail/QSR partners (Kroger, Domino's, CVS, 7-Eleven, Uber Eats).