Waymo, a self-driving car company, is negotiating to raise funding of $15 billion in the coming year. People familiar with the matter reported that the robotaxi company intends to raise billions of dollars from Alphabet, its parent company, and external investors at an estimated valuation of up to $110 billion in the estimation.
The most recent financing talks are reflective of Waymo being the leader of the pack in the U.S. robotaxi sphere. The firm has been incurring large expenses in strengthening its fleet and proceeding to expand to new areas.
Waymo is either in operation with its robotaxis or intends to roll out its service or begin to test its vehicles in 26 markets, both in the U.S. and globally. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told CNBC on Tuesday that Waymo will “meaningfully” contribute to the financials of Alphabet by 2027.
When the Google sister company manages to raise as much as $15 billion, this would be more than twice the value of its previous funding round. Therefore, it was a Series C round of $5.6 billion at a valuation of $45 billion, which closed in October 2024.
During that time, Alphabet had committed $5 billion in a multiyear investment to Waymo. The round was co-led by Alphabet with prior investors, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, and T. Rowe Price.
During that period, Waymo Co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov announced that the funding would be used to reach its robotaxi service. Eventually, Waymo is now offering paid rides to people in the Austin, San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Los Angeles markets.
In early May, CNBC reported Waymo had passed an estimated 450,000 paid rides per week, and in December, the company estimated that it had serviced 14 million trips in 2025, putting it on course to reach more than 20 million total trips by the end of the year since launching in 2020.
The company intends to roll out service in Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego, and Washington next year, and Waymo also plans to open up its service in London in 2026, marking the first service region in the overseas market.
Amazon’s Zoox this year is starting to provide free rides to the people of the Las Vegas Strip and some neighborhoods in the city of San Francisco.
Tesla has also released a service called Robotaxi in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area, although human operators or safety monitors were still on board as of mid-December.
