Nuro - Series E, $106M
Some people build for the moment. Others build for movement. And then there’s Nuro, quietly engineering the future of mobility while the world plays catch-up.
Let’s talk numbers before we get into the nuance. $106 million raised in a fresh Series E, led by the deep-pocketed minds at T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Investments, Tiger Global, Greylock, and XN. Not a charity case. This is capital chasing conviction. Even in a market where valuations are more fragile than a VC’s ego post-down-round, Nuro clocks in at a $6 billion valuation. Down from $8.6B in 2021? Sure. But context is currency. When the tide goes out, you see who’s got real tech and who was just riding waves.
Founded in 2016 by ex-Waymo royalty, Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson, Nuro didn’t just leave Google’s sandbox. They took the shovel, the blueprints, and built their own autonomous playground. One designed not for people, but for packages. A full pivot to zerooccupant vehicles before most of the industry even understood the question.
And they didn’t stop at robots on wheels. They engineered the Nuro Driver™: an AI first, vehicle agnostic autonomy platform already licensed across seven OEMs. We’re talking Level 4 autonomy on the streets of California and Texas, backed by 50+ patents, NVIDIA’s Thor chips under the hood, and a perception system that reads the road like Carlin read a room; blunt, accurate, and ten steps ahead.
Their shift from manufacturing to licensing wasn’t desperation, it was precision. Why build the whole car when you’ve already built the brain? In the last 4 years, they’ve locked in with Uber Eats, Domino's, FedEx, Kroger, Walmart, and Woven Capital, Toyota's Growth Fund. You don’t get those names unless your tech does more than just pass the demo.
They were the first to get an National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NHTSA exemption for driverless vehicles. California gave them the green light in 2020, and they've been running routes in Houston, Mountain View, and Palo Alto ever since. Now they’re gunning for 53 U.S. cities and international expansion by 2027.
Yes, they took hits, 20% layoffs in 2022, 30% more in 2023. That’s not failure. That’s triage. And it bought them time to double down on what matters: scaling AI, deepening OEM partnerships, and hiring the next generation of ML minds and dealmakers.