Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving car company Waymo raised $16 billion this year with plans to expand its fleet of driverless taxis to a dozen new cities overseas, including London and Tokyo.
Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global and Sequoia Capital led the funding round, which now values Waymo at $126 billion, the company said in a blog post on Monday. Parent company Alphabet supported the round and remained a majority investor.
In addition to Andreessen Horowitz and Mubadala Capital, the round also included significant investments from Bessemer Venture Partners, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, and T. Rowe Price. Additional investors include BDT & MSD Partners, CapitalG, Fidelity Management & Research Company, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Perry Creek Capital, and Temasek.
Waymo said the funding will be used to fuel its growth, which has accelerated over the past year and shows no signs of slowing down. The company recently secured transportation to and from San Francisco International Airport and expanded its robo-taxi service throughout Northern California and into several major U.S. metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami.
The former Google self-driving project has been moving slowly forward for years, testing self-driving car technology on public roads in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, and offering occasional public and media demos. In 2016, the company took its first geographic leap, starting tests in Phoenix and eventually removing human safety drivers from vehicles. Phoenix became Waymo’s first robotaxi market, allowing the public to hail a self-driving Chrysler Pacific minivan.
Waymo hit the gas pedal in August 2023 after receiving the final permits needed to operate and charge a robotaxi service in California. The company started with limited service in San Francisco, but has since expanded to much of the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and more recently to highways connecting dozens of towns in the region. We have also expanded to Los Angeles. The company launched operations in Austin and Atlanta in 2025 through a partnership with Uber. This year began with an expansion to Miami.
Geographic expansion now offers 400,000 rides weekly in six major U.S. metropolitan areas. The company announced that in 2025 alone, the number of annual rides will more than triple to 15 million, and the number of lifetime rides to date has exceeded 20 million.
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“We are no longer proof of concept,” the company said in a blog post. “We are expanding our commercial reality and are laying the foundations to roll out our ride-hailing service in more than 20 additional cities in 2026, including Tokyo and London.”
The rapid expansion has also led to increased scrutiny and criticism, as Waymo’s robotaxis have made mistakes and the technology has caused problems for some residents.
Some robotaxis exhibit dangerous behavior, especially in school zones. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defect Investigations and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have launched an investigation into illegal activities of Waymo robotaxis around school buses. NHTSA also launched a new investigation after a Waymo robot taxi hit a child near a school last week. The child suffered minor injuries when the vehicle was struck at approximately 6 mph.
