Nuro, a fast-growing company in the autonomous vehicle (AV) segment, has confirmed new funding of $600 million in its Series D round according to sawers venturebeat. It has raised this amount from several leading investors including Google and Tiger Global Management. It has also touched $8.6 billion in valuation, according to reports. This marks a considerable increase from its valuation of $5 billion earlier.
Nuro was established in 2016 and is looking at tapping into changing preferences of consumers. The growth trends have been spurred by the coronavirus outbreak, especially in terms of e-commerce experiences. Customers in various areas of the U.S. directly book orders online with partner entities at Nuro. The zero occupants AVs for delivery then transport all items, including pharmaceuticals and groceries.
Along with Google’s sister entity Waymo, Nuro has become one of the biggest entities in the commercial driverless vehicle segment. It became the first entity in this category to get the California Department of Motor Vehicles permits. This made it possible to charge fees for driverless delivery solutions. Partner at Tiger Global, Griffin Schroeder, stated that on-demand and swift e-commerce trends are rapidly transforming the mechanisms of accessing products. Schroder also stated that Nuro is filling up the gap, and offering affordable and more sustainable local delivery with its autonomous vehicles.
Nuro has also inked a strategic collaboration over five years with Google Cloud. This will help it scale up and meet capacity needs in terms of workloads. It will also help Nuro access more storage and machine-learning features for sizable data churned out through its vehicles. The partners will also look at other opportunities for boosting commerce, as per their statements. Nuro had already raised $1.5 billion earlier and has an extra $600 million at its disposal. The company has suitable funding for the deployment and creation of its AV-based services. It will offer these solutions to leading U.S. brands, while already on-boarding big names like Walmart, Kroger, CVS, and Domino’s. The Series D funding round also saw participants like the SoftBank Vision Fund 1 and Kroger.