Waymo wants to move up a gear. The Alphabet subsidiary specializing in driverless cars announces, on Tuesday, a colossal round of funding of $ 2.25 billion. Carried out for the first time with external investors, this fundraising aims to allow the company to expand on a global scale.
The private equity firm Silver Lake, the Canada pension fund and the sovereign fund of Abu Dhabi (Mubadala Investment Company) are the main financial partners of the operation. Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation and the parent company Alphabet also potted.
The American group is counting on this “injection of capital and expertise” to gain momentum. For the moment, its robot taxi service is only marketed in Chandler, Arizona . But while it has been conducting tests in twenty other American cities for months, and seeing the order for 20,000 electric I-Pace SUVs spent at Jaguar in 2018 , commercial deployment could accelerate given this new supply of new money. Provided that the regulatory context allows it.
An autonomous delivery service
A flagship product of the Google subsidiary, the robot-taxi service is not the only project that Waymo is currently working on, however. The American company took advantage of this fundraiser to unveil Waymo Via, a goods delivery service (by truck, based on the illustrations published by the group), which will ship its autonomous driver technology “Driver “.
Unquestionably ahead of its competitors in the development of driverless vehicles, Waymo has been burning considerable cash since its creation in 2016 in Google’s laboratories. This new fundraising illustrates, if it were still needed, the high capital intensity of this booming sector and the billions that Waymo will still need to get on the roads of the whole world.
Reduced spending at Google
Google, for its part, has been looking for a few months to rationalize the expenses of its “moonshots” projects (autonomous cars, drones, health …) and no longer hesitates to solicit external partners to finance its various subsidiaries. Sundar Pichai, boss of Alphabet and Google, confirmed this to analysts a few weeks ago on the sidelines the presentation of the group’s annual results.
“For certain bets, we brought in external investors, people with a certain expertise,” he explained. I think that with Alphabet, we have a flexible framework, which allows us both to have the independence we need and to create synergies, as for our investments in artificial intelligence. The arrival of a battery of investors from outside Waymo’s capital fully illustrates this new turn.