Self-driving car start-up Aurora expected to raise $500m
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Aurora, a self-driving car start-up co-founded by the former head of Alphabet’s Waymo, is raising a new round of funding expected to be led by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, said three people familiar with the matter.
The round, which has not yet been finalised, was expected to exceed $500m and value Aurora at more than $2bn, two of the people said. Aurora and Sequoia declined to comment.
The new fundraising, first reported by Recode, would be a significant increase over the $90m Aurora raised nearly a year ago from Index Ventures and Greylock that valued the start-up in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Aurora is one of a number of competitors racing to develop autonomous driving technology, spanning traditional carmakers such as General Motors and Ford, Silicon Valley giants Alphabet and Apple, and venture-funded companies including Uber and Zoox.
Aurora was founded in 2016 by Chris Urmson, one of the creators of Google’s self-driving car project that later became Waymo; Sterling Anderson, Tesla’s former autopilot chief; and robotics professor Drew Bagnell, a co-founder of Uber’s self-driving car unit.
The company has taken a collaborative approach to carmakers, partnering with Volkswagen, Hyundai and Byton, a Chinese electric vehicle start-up, to integrate its package of sensors and software into their cars. The company has been testing its technology on public roads in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Palo Alto, California.
While optimism runs high among proponents of self-driving technology, who say it will make roads safer and improve access to mobility, expectations of how quickly autonomous cars will appear on roads in significant numbers have cooled. Developing the technology has proved expensive, competition for engineers is steep and questions over safety and regulation continue to dog the industry.
Waymo, considered the furthest along the path to commercialising autonomous vehicles, launched a limited self-driving taxi service in Arizona last month.
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