Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Alphabet, has raised $16 billion as it plans to grow its fleet of driverless taxis this year in 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 he said in a blog post Monday. Parent company Alphabet backed the round and retained 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 down. The company recently secured rides to and from San Francisco International Airport and has expanded its robotaxi service throughout Northern California and several major US metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, Austin and Miami.
For years, Google’s former self-driving project has moved slowly forward, testing its autonomous vehicle technology on public roads in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and providing the occasional public demonstration or media demonstration. In 2016, it took its first geographical leap forward and began testing in Phoenix, where it finally got its human safety driver out of vehicles. Phoenix became Waymo’s first robotaxi market, where the public could hail Chrysler Pacific driverless minivans.
Waymo took off the gas in August 2023 after receiving the final necessary approval to operate a robotaxi service — and charge for rides — in California. It started as a limited service in San Francisco, later expanding to much of the greater Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and more recently to the freeways connecting the dozens of cities in the region. It also expanded to Los Angeles. The company launched in Austin and Atlanta in 2025 through a partnership with Uber. It started the year with the expansion to Miami.
The geographic expansion translated into 400,000 rides provided each week in six major US metropolitan areas. The company said that in 2025 alone, it will more than triple 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 on its blog. “We are scaling a commercial reality, setting the stage for transit operations in more than 20 additional cities by 2026, including Tokyo and London.”
The rapid expansion has also led to increased scrutiny and criticism, as Waymo’s robotaxi has made mistakes and the technology creates problems for some residents.
Some robotaxis have shown dangerous behavior especially in school zones. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Crash Investigation as well as the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have launched investigations into Waymo robotaxis’ illegal behavior around school buses. NHTSA also launched another investigation last week after a Waymo robotaxi hit a child near a school. The child, who suffered minor injuries, was hit at about 6 miles per hour.
