Waymo, the Alphabet-owned autonomous vehicle company, has raised $16 billion as it plans to grow its fleet of driverless taxicabs this year to more than a dozen new cities internationally, including London and Tokyo.
Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital led the funding round, which now values Waymo at $126 billion, the company said in a blog post Monday. Parent company Alphabet supported the round and maintained its position as majority investor.
The round also included significant investments from Andreessen Horowitz and Mubadala Capital, as well as Bessemer Venture Partners, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, and T. Rowe Price. Additional investors included BDT & MSD Partners, CapitalG, Fidelity Management & Research Company, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Perry Creek Capital, and Temasek.
Waymo said the funds will be used to fuel its growth, which has accelerated over the past year and doesn’t appear to be slowing. The company recently secured rides to and from San Francisco International Airport and has expanded its robotaxi service throughout Northern California and several major metropolitan areas in the U.S., including Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami.
For years, the former Google self-driving project slowly progressed forward, testing its autonomous vehicle tech on public roads in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and providing the occasional public or media demo. In 2016, it made its first geographic leap forward and began testing in Phoenix, where it eventually pulled its human safety driver out of the vehicles. Phoenix became Waymo’s first robotaxi market, in which the public could hail driverless Chrysler Pacifica minivans.
Waymo pushed down the accelerator in August 2023 after receiving the final necessary permit to operate a robotaxi service — and charge for rides — in California. It launched a limited service in San Francisco, later expanding to much of the greater Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and more recently to the freeways that connect the dozens of towns in the area. It also expanded to Los Angeles. The company launched in Austin and Atlanta in 2025 through a partnership with Uber. It kicked off the year by expanding to Miami.
The geographic expansion has translated to 400,000 rides provided every week across six major U.S. metropolitan areas. The company said that in 2025 alone, it more than tripled its annual volume to 15 million rides, surpassing 20 million lifetime rides to date.
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“We are no longer proving a concept,” the company wrote in its blog post. “We are scaling a commercial reality, laying the groundwork for ride-hailing operations in over 20 additional cities in 2026, including Tokyo and London.”
The rapid expansion has also led to increased scrutiny and criticism as Waymo’s robotaxis have made missteps and the technology creates problems for some residents.
Some robotaxis have exhibited dangerous behaviors particularly in school zones. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation as well as the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have opened investigations into the illegal behavior of Waymo robotaxis around school buses. The NHTSA also launched another investigation last week after a Waymo robotaxi hit a child near a school. The child, who sustained minor injuries, was struck at about 6 mph.
Source: techcrunch.com
