The self-driving car dream isn’t dead — it’s just pivoting. Case in point: Nuro, the Silicon Valley startup best known for building brains, not cars. This week, the company announced fresh funding that pushes its Series E round to a hefty $203 million.
The new money pile? About $97 million from a mix of familiar and fresh faces. Existing backer Baillie Gifford doubled down, while Nvidia, Icehouse Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and Pledge Ventures hopped into the passenger seat. Uber, already circling Nuro in a big way, also threw in more fuel for the journey.
This isn’t Nvidia’s first rodeo with Nuro. The two have been tech buddies for years, with Nuro training its AI brains on Nvidia GPUs and now building its latest compute model on Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor platform (yes, it’s as powerful as it sounds).
So, what’s the big picture here? Nuro has raised $2.3 billion total, though its current valuation sits at $6 billion — down from its 2021 high of $8.6 billion. Like most AV startups, Nuro hit some bumps: layoffs in 2022 and 2023, plus a complete strategy pivot in 2024. Instead of owning fleets of cute little delivery bots, Nuro now focuses on licensing its self-driving tech to automakers and ride-hail companies.
That pivot seems to be working. Over the summer, Uber unveiled a robotaxi plan: Lucid Gravity SUVs powered by Nuro’s autonomous tech. Uber didn’t just sign the deal — it backed it with big money. It invested $300M in Lucid and agreed to buy at least 20,000 SUVs over six years. And yes, it also set aside a chunky “multi-hundred-million” sum for Nuro itself.
With ~700 employees and fresh capital, co-founder Dave Ferguson says Nuro is ready to scale globally. Translation? Expect more partnerships, more AV experiments, and maybe one day, your Uber driver could literally be a Lucid SUV running on Nuro’s brain.
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