Driverless delivery startup Nuro raises almost $1 billion

Enlarge / Nuro Founders Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu. (credit: Nuro/Greylock)

The autonomous delivery startup Nuro has raised $940 million from The Softbank Vision Fund, making it one of the most lavishly funded startups in the driverless car sector. The news comes after Nuro became one of the first startups in the world to begin operating a fully driverless commercial service on public roads.

Under a deal announced last year, a Kroger-owned Fry’s Foods store in the Phoenix area is using Nuro’s technology to deliver groceries to nearby customers. Initially, the deliveries were conducted by modified Toyota Priuses. But in December, Nuro added two custom-designed robots to its fleet. These robots are smaller than a conventional car and are fully driverless—they don’t even have space inside for a human driver to sit.

“Our goal this year is to really scale to an entire city worth of operation,” CEO Dave Ferguson told Ars last week.