(Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
You may see more Waymo self-driving cars zipping around your city after the company raised another $5.6 billion from private investors.
In its announcement, Waymo notes the funding round was "oversubscribed," an indicator that confidence in its self-driving cars is high, at least from investors. Venture capital and private investment firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, and Tiger Global, participated in the funding round.
Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent Alphabet, didn’t specifically mention bringing Waymo to additional US cities. But it said: "With this latest investment, we will continue to welcome more riders into our Waymo One ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and in Austin and Atlanta through our expanded partnership with Uber.”
Still, the same post mentions that Waymo is testing its self-driving tech in more complex environments in "cities like Buffalo, New York, and Washington, D.C."
"We’ll also continue advancing the Waymo Driver—our AI-powered autonomous driving system—to support a variety of business applications over time,” the company added. This has so far included delivering food for Uber Eats orders.
The $5.6 billion in funding doubles the $2.5 billion that the company raised from investors in 2021 when Waymo started offering self-driving car rides in Phoenix, Arizona. The company’s vehicles have since expanded to major cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin. “These efforts have enabled us to provide over 100,000 paid weekly trips—a tenfold increase from last year,” the company noted today.
To serve more markets, Waymo in August also introduced a sixth-generation autonomous driving system, or what’s basically a self-driving van that can handle tougher road conditions and colder environments. The company is testing them on public roads but hasn't said when they'll get a larger rollout.