Waymo has closed a $5.6 billion funding spherical to develop its robotaxi service in and past Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix, the place it operates in the present day.

The autonomous car enterprise is owned by Google dad or mum Alphabet, who led the collection C funding in Waymo, alongside earlier backers together with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Constancy, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger International and T. Rowe Value.

In an announcement to CNBC, Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov stated the funding would go in direction of enlargement and advancing the Waymo Driver for enterprise purposes.

“With this newest funding, we’ll proceed to welcome extra riders into our Waymo One ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and in Austin and Atlanta by our expanded partnership with Uber,” they wrote.

The collection C funding brings Waymo’s whole capital raised to $11.1 billion after it raised $3.2 billion and $2.5 billion in two earlier rounds. Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat introduced in July that the dad or mum firm would decide to a multiyear funding of as much as $5 billion in Waymo.

Whereas many firms are testing autonomous autos, or AVs, on public roads within the U.S., together with well-funded upstarts like Wayve, Waymo is the one one to function a business robotaxi service in a number of main metro areas.

The service has been embraced by some ladies who’ve security considerations driving with unknown human drivers. And it has even been utilized by dad and mom to ship their teens to school when different transit choices felt much less protected or handy.

Waymo now conducts greater than 100,000 weekly journeys for passengers in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, who can hail their robotaxis through the Waymo One app. Extra lately, Waymo partnered with Uber to launch its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas — house of would-be rival Tesla’s headquarters.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made guarantees about self-driving vehicles for greater than a decade. This week, he stated Tesla would provide a driverless ridehailing service in Texas and California subsequent 12 months, as soon as the corporate upgrades the partially automated techniques in its present autos, which nonetheless require a human driver in the present day.

GM-owned Cruise had been Waymo’s closest competitor within the U.S. till it paused operations following an October 2023 incident in San Francisco wherein a pedestrian was dragged 20 ft by a Cruise AV, after she was first struck by a human driver in one other automotive. Cruise is working to reinstate its service and in addition plans to partner with Uber.

Self-driving car makers within the U.S. should nonetheless show their expertise is safer to make use of than taxis and vans with human drivers. As CNBC previously reported, practically two-thirds of U.S. respondents to a Pew Analysis Middle survey stated they might not need to trip in a driverless passenger car if that they had the chance.

Waymo’s self-reported data means that their autos crash “far much less usually than human drivers on public roads,” in keeping with evaluation by Understanding AI writer Timothy B. Lee.

Nonetheless, Waymo has initiated software program recollects to enhance the security of its self-driving techniques, and its AVs have typically blocked visitors, traveled the fallacious means down the road or been concerned in collisions (none leading to a identified fatality or extreme harm).

The following-generation robotaxi from Waymo is a Geely Zeekr that is geared up with its customized sensors and AI “Driver.” Waymo additionally lately agreed to a multiyear strategic partnership with Hyundai that may add the South Korean automaker’s Ioniq 5 electrical car to its robotaxi fleet.

In August, Waymo stated it could additionally check its driverless autos in harsher, winter climate together with in northern California, upstate New York and Michigan, with the hope of providing robotaxi providers past the sunbelt, and finally internationally.