Nuro just raised another huge funding round for its autonomous delivery tech. On Tuesday, the Mountain View-based company announced that it raised $600 million in its Series D funding round. Tiger Global Management led the round, with participation from Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Google, Kroger, SoftBank and others.
This comes almost exactly one year after Nuro announced its $500 million Series C.
Nuro has designed and developed a fleet of electric self-driving delivery vehicles. The autonomous vehicle industry is hot right now, and has been for years. But while other self-driving startups are building autonomous cars to transport people, Nuro’s vehicles are meant to transport goods. Its flagship R2 vehicle is too small to fit an adult, but it’s the right size to deliver packages, food or things of that nature.
In fact, Nuro has already signed a handful of partnerships to help deliver goods. It has a pilot program to deliver pizza for Domino’s in Houston. It signed a multi-year partnership with FedEx to help with last-mile delivery for packages. And it has been working with grocery chain Kroger to help deliver groceries.
“Kroger launched its partnership with Nuro in 2018 to explore grocery delivery through autonomous vehicles,” Kroger SVP and Chief Information Officer Yael Cosset said in a statement. “Since then, Kroger and Nuro completed thousands of deliveries to our customers — driving innovation that supports our expanding seamless ecosystem by creating consistent and rewarding customer experiences with scalable, sustainable and profitable solutions.”
Nuro has also signed a partnership with Google Cloud to store the data its vehicles generate in order to improve self-driving functions.
With so many big deals previously announced, Nuro plans to use this new funding to continue scaling its product and support the development and deployment of its vehicles. The company also added that it will use the funding to grow its team, with dozens of open roles across its product, operations, people and software teams.
“We’re thrilled to have the backing of these prominent investors and world class companies, and honored that they support our vision of improving communities and revitalizing local commerce,” Dave Ferguson, Nuro co-founder and president, said in a statement. “We believe this investment will allow us to accelerate our commercialization strategy and better everyday life with Nuro’s technology.”
