Nuro gathers 600 million dollars
The US start-up Nuro, which specialises in autonomous electric vehicles, has closed a financing round of 600 million dollars (around 518 million euros). With the fresh capital, Nuro wants to drive the development and spread of its autonomous delivery services.
According to the company, investors such as Tiger Global Management, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, LLC, Gaorong Capital, Google, Kroger, SoftBank Vision Fund 1 and clients advised by T. Rowe Price Associates participated in the Series D round.
Dave Ferguson, Nuro co-founder and president says: “We believe this investment will allow us to accelerate our commercialisation strategy and better everyday life with Nuro’s technology.” Griffin Schroeder, Partner at Tiger Global, extrapolated: “The arrival of ubiquitous on-demand e-commerce is changing the way we access goods. Demand for local deliveries is exploding. Nuro is the bridge to an era of sustainable, low cost, autonomous local delivery.”
In August, Nuro announced the construction of a production facility for “tens of thousands of delivery vehicles” in southern Nevada, for which the company has not yet offered an update. However, Nuro has revealed a recently agreed partnership with US logistics company FedEx and a policy trial with pizza chain Domino’s to deliver pizzas in Houston.
Nuro also says it has signed a five-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to support the massive scale and capacity required to run self-driving simulation workloads, machine learning to improve model accuracy, and storage to manage important data from the vehicles. In this new partnership, Nuro and Google say they will also explore opportunities to strengthen and transform local commerce.
In February 2020, Nuro first unveiled the second generation of its self-driving electric vehicle called R2. At the time, the company reported it had received permits to begin testing the pod in Houston. At the time, the R2 was an evolution of the R1, unveiled in early 2018, designed for delivery services from restaurants, grocers and other businesses.
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