Self-driving car company Zoox is on a growth streak in more than one sense, landing $500 million in new funding and moving into a new Foster City headquarters this year.
Zoox’s $500 million funding round brought its valuation to $3.2 billion. The money will help fuel Zoox’s focus on building an autonomous vehicle from the ground up instead of retrofitting existing vehicles with technology to make them self-driving, as companies like Uber Technologies Inc. and Alphabet’s Waymo are doing. Inside its modern, white manufacturing space, Zoox is developing its VH5 self-driving car — the company’s latest iteration of working toward a reimagined vehicle. Zoox is also outfitting Toyota Highlanders with its autonomous car technology for on-street testing until the VH5s are street-legal.
Look through the gallery above to see Zoox’s vehicles and inside its headquarters.
Zoox has space to grow its team with its recent infusion of funds, too, after moving into its new 126,345-square-foot headquarters at 1149 Chess Drive in Foster City in May. The company spent one year and some $20 million on gutting and renovating the site, as first reported by the San Francisco Business Times.
It was the only property between Cupertino and San Francisco with more than 100,000 square feet and a mix of office and commercial zoning, Zoox CEO Tim Kentley-Klay told the Business Times in May.
The space, with capacity for 600 desks, gives rapidly-growing Zoox a way to bring together much of its team that was previously distributed between several Bay Area offices. Zoox, founded in 2014, has more than 470 employees and moved in 360 of them to the Foster City headquarters, Kentley-Klay said.
“It was a huge project to do on top of everything else we were doing,” Kentley-Klay said.
