Wayve Raises $1.5B, Waymo Now In 10 Cities And Uber Builds the AV Platform Layer

Meanwhile: Tesla logged zero California miles. Again.

Mar 02, 2026

👋 Welcome back everyone,

This was arguably a big week in the autonomous vehicle industry. Waymo launched in four new cities simultaneously, bringing its total to 10 US markets. Wayve closed $1.5 billion at an $8.6 billion valuation. Uber unveiled an entirely new division designed to own the commercialization layer of the robotaxi market, and then acquired SpotHero.

We have a lot to cover, let's dive in.

⏱️ ~4100 words, 18 minute read

Community Bonus:

London is becoming Europe’s real-world AV battleground.

Waymo is preparing its first European robotaxi launch. Wayve is running public-road trials with Uber. Baidu Apollo Go is bringing China-scale robotaxi experience to Europe via Uber and Lyft.

That is why the European AV Summit in London this March lands at exactly the right moment.

If you want to understand how robotaxis actually reach European streets, this is the room that matters.

Bonus for my community: you can get 20% off with the code: DANIELAV

Looking forward to see you there!

THREE BUSINESS MODELS, ONE DECISIVE WEEK

Waymo: From 6 to 10 Cities in a Single Day

Think back to where we were a year ago. Every new Waymo city warranted its own press release, its own coverage cycle. Then came the phase where Waymo started launching two cities at once. This week, they did four at once.

On Monday, Waymo opened its robotaxi service to select riders in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando simultaneously. This brings the total to 10 US metros with active commercial service: Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Austin, Miami, plus the four new markets.

Source: Waymo

The new coverage areas tell an interesting story by themselves. Orlando and San Antonio each get roughly 60 square miles of service territory, about on par with the size of Waymo’s original Atlanta and Miami coverage areas. Dallas launches with approximately 50 square miles. Houston, interestingly, starts with just 25 square miles, making it the smallest Waymo coverage area at launch. The company plans to invite more riders on a rolling basis and make all four markets generally available by end of 2026.

The company now operates a fleet of approximately 3,000 vehicles, provides over 400,000 paid trips per week. Total autonomous miles driven now exceed 200 million, doubling from 100 million in roughly eight months. Of those, over 1 million are fully autonomous freeway miles, a milestone that matters as Waymo expands beyond surface streets into higher-speed highway driving. Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said these cities are “critical to our plans, as we lay groundwork for service in 20+ cities.”

The “generalizable Waymo Driver” thesis, that the same autonomous system can be deployed across new environments faster with each iteration, is no longer theoretical. It is operational. The playbook is standardized enough that Waymo doesn’t need to sequence city by city anymore.

And Waymo isn’t done for the week. On Tuesday, the company confirmed it has begun mapping and collecting driving data in Chicago and Charlotte with human drivers behind the wheel.

Waymo Begins Chicago Mapping, Announces Charlotte Driverless Expansion - Drive Tesla

Source: Waymo

Chicago is particularly significant. Until now, Waymo has focused on Sun Belt cities with relatively predictable weather and wide road grids. Chicago offers lake-effect snow, drawbridges, dense pedestrian corridors, and complex bus and bike lane interactions. If Waymo can operate in Chicago, the “it only works in Phoenix” argument dies permanently.

Waymo’s expansion timeline through 2026 now includes: 10 operating cities, testing underway in Chicago, Charlotte, Denver, and Washington D.C., plus international launches planned for London and Tokyo. With $16 billion raised at a $126 billion valuation, the capital is there to scale.

Wayve: The $8.6 Billion Bet on Software Licensing

While Waymo scales its fleet, UK-based Wayve is building a fundamentally different business. This week, the startup announced it raised $1.5 billion in total, valuing the company at $8.6 billion. The round includes $1.2 billion from investors like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Uber, plus additional capital from Uber tied to future deployments of Wayve-powered robotaxis across the globe. The two companies have a deal to launch self-driving vehicles on Uber’s app in over 10 markets worldwide, starting with London this year. A key detail: Uber will own and operate the Wayve-powered fleet in London, not just provide the demand side. That makes Uber a fleet operator in the UK, not just a platform.

To put the valuation in context: Waymo raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation earlier this month. Wayve is valued at roughly 7% of that.

The gap reflects the difference between a company with 3,000 vehicles on the road, 400,000 weekly trips, and $350 million in annualized revenue versus a company that has yet to launch a commercial robotaxi service with its partner Uber. But Wayve’s bet is that its business model, software licensing, can ultimately capture value more efficiently than owning and operating fleets.

CEO Alex Kendall said the latest funding round is key to pursuing the company’s ambition to license its software to major automakers and robotaxi fleet platforms like Uber. That ambition is taking shape. Three major automakers, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis, are now investors, and all three have signed deals to integrate Wayve’s AI driving software into their vehicles. Nissan will use it for its ProPilot driver assistance system starting in 2027. Mercedes and Stellantis will deploy it for both robotaxis and privately owned vehicles.

Wayve’s approach is counter-positioning in its clearest form. Unlike Waymo, which operates its own fleet, and unlike Tesla, which builds its own vehicles with a closed software stack, Wayve is building a general-purpose AI driver that works across different vehicles, sensor configurations, and driving environments. Kendall stated they’ve driven in more than 500 cities across Europe, North America, and Japan without being trained on city-specific data.

“Everyone wants autonomy, but not everyone wants to buy a Tesla,” Kendall told Business Insider.

In one of our episodes last October, we reported on Wayve’s $8 billion valuation discussions and their Nissan partnership for ProPilot integration. That round has now closed at $8.6 billion with three OEM partners instead of one. Total capital raised stands at $2.5 billion. Kendall predicted that Wayve’s high-margin software model could ultimately be a bigger business than companies that are “one manufacturer selling your own cars or running your own service with the high capex costs related to that.”

The first privately owned vehicles using Wayve’s AI driver will go on sale next year, initially offering a supervised “hands-off” system. The company was talking to “every Western car maker who is not Tesla,” Kendall added.

And London is attracting more than just Wayve and Uber. This week, Singapore-based ComfortDelGro, one of the world's largest land transport companies with record annual revenue of $4 billion, said it is considering bringing robotaxis to London. The company already partnered with Pony.ai to launch autonomous shuttles in Singapore's Punggol district by Q2 2026, and it targets converting 10% of its global taxi fleet to autonomous vehicles by 2030. Chairman Mark Christopher Greaves said the Guangzhou pilot "has given us the confidence to scale the deployment of AVs both in China and here in Singapore." London as a third market would make sense given ComfortDelGro's existing UK bus operations.

Uber: The Fragmentation Strategy

Uber recognized early that autonomy would reshape ride-hailing. In the mid-2010s, the company built its own self-driving unit, Uber ATG, to develop the technology in-house. That effort ended badly. ATG was eventually sold to Aurora. But the strategic reality hasn’t changed: autonomous ride-hailing is potentially the most disruptive force Uber faces. A world where robotaxis operate on someone else’s platform is a world where Uber becomes irrelevant.

Here is the thing: Uber's current business model actually benefits from a fragmented AV market. The more autonomous providers there are competing with each other, the less leverage any single one has over Uber. If Waymo were the only game in town, Waymo could dictate terms. But if Waymo, Nuro, Waabi, WeRide, Avride, and a dozen others all need riders, they need Uber's demand aggregation. This is why Uber has been pursuing what amounts to an AV democratization strategy for some time now. This week's developments underline it with a very thick marker.

Pillar 1: Uber Autonomous Solutions. On Monday, Uber launched a new division offering a comprehensive suite of services for AV operators. The package includes: insurance products tailored for autonomous vehicles, roadside assistance, "AV mission control" software that helps operators monitor their fleets and respond when vehicles encounter issues like road incidents, fleet financing solutions that help partners pay for robotaxis deployed on Uber's network, and mapping data to support AV deployments across new cities. Chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald said the technical hurdles that impaired AVs for a decade have "largely been solved" and that commercial viability is what determines success or failure now.

The new unit is overseen by Sarfraz Maredia, Uber's global head of autonomous mobility and delivery, and draws from multiple internal organizations.

Pillar 2: Uber AV Labs. Announced in late January, this new division is built on a simple premise: self-driving companies are data-hungry, and Uber has access to 600 cities. Despite the name, Uber is not returning to developing its own self-driving technology. Instead, AV Labs will send Uber-owned cars equipped with lidars, radars, and cameras out onto roads to collect driving data for AV partners like Waymo, Waabi, and Lucid Motors.

The context here is important. The AV industry is in the middle of a shift from rules-based driving to reinforcement learning. That makes real-world driving data, especially data covering rare edge cases, hugely valuable. And the size of a company’s fleet creates a physical limit on how much it can collect. Uber’s CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told TechCrunch that their AV partners are “just saying: ‘Give us anything that will be helpful.’ Because the amount of data Uber can collect just outweighs everything that they can possibly do with their own data collection.”

It’s worth noting: AV Labs is starting scrappy. As of the announcement, they had one car, a Hyundai Ioniq 5, and VP of engineering Danny Guo said his team was still literally screwing on sensors. No contracts are signed yet with partners, and Uber won’t even charge for the data initially. Naga described the goal as “democratizing this data,” arguing that the value of having partners’ AV tech advancing is bigger than the money Uber could make selling it. The plan is to grow the team to a few hundred people within a year and eventually deploy hundreds of data collection vehicles.

Partners won’t receive raw data. Uber will process it into what they call a “semantic understanding” layer. In a particularly interesting twist, Uber plans to plug a partner’s driving software into the AV Labs cars to run in “shadow mode,” where any discrepancy between what the human driver does and what the autonomous software would have done gets flagged. This helps both discover edge cases and train models to drive more like humans.

Now step back and consider the competitive dynamics. The largest AV developers don’t necessarily need Uber’s help. Waymo has Alphabet behind it, one of the world’s largest companies by market cap. Zoox has Amazon. Tesla has millions of customer vehicles collecting data worldwide every day. These companies have the resources, the data pipelines, and the infrastructure to do everything themselves if they choose to. They will use Uber when it’s convenient and bypass it when it’s not.

But Uber also has partnerships with smaller players: Nuro, Waabi, WeRide, Avride, and others. These companies are building serious autonomous technology but lack the scale to handle everything from fleet financing to depot operations to rider acquisition to massive data collection on their own. For them, Uber’s bundled offering is genuinely hard to replicate.

This is where the fragmentation incentive becomes clear. Uber needs as many viable AV providers as possible to prevent any single partner from gaining enough leverage to bypass the platform. The Autonomous Solutions package, the AV Labs data services, and now the SpotHero infrastructure are all designed to lower the barriers for these smaller players, to make sure they survive and thrive. Every additional AV provider on Uber’s platform strengthens Uber’s bargaining position with all of them.

Pillar 3: SpotHero acquisition. Also this week, Uber announced the acquisition of SpotHero, the leading parking reservation app. SpotHero covers 13,000+ garages, lots, and valets across more than 400 cities in the US and Canada. The consumer use case is straightforward: in-app parking for commuters, events, and airports. Even without an AV angle, this probably makes sense as a mobility super-app extension.

But I am convinced this is also an autonomous vehicle infrastructure investment. Here is why. In a world of fleet-owned robotaxis, parking shifts from a consumer inconvenience to a core operational cost center. When a vehicle is autonomous and fleet-managed, the fleet operator bears the cost of every idle hour.

SpotHero’s real value in an AV context is about fleet staging and demand optimization. If Uber can integrate SpotHero’s inventory directly into fleet routing algorithms, parking becomes programmable. Vehicles can stage in locations where demand forecasting predicts the next surge, instead of circling or returning to distant depots. SpotHero’s relationships with 1,600+ parking operators provide ready-made infrastructure for this, without Uber having to build from scratch. Combined with the $100 million charging infrastructure investment Uber announced last week, with partnerships with EVgo, Hubber, Ionity, and Electra, the physical infrastructure layer is taking shape.

Thomas Reiner has written a deep analysis of the SpotHero acquisition’s AV implications that I’d highly recommend. You can find it in the Worth Reading section below.

My take: Step back and look at the full picture of this week. We have three business models making their strongest moves simultaneously. Waymo is proving the vertically integrated fleet operator model works at scale by launching four cities in a single day. Wayve is proving the software licensing model attracts OEM capital by closing $1.5 billion with three automakers on the list. And Uber is proving the platform aggregator model has depth beyond just an app, by building the entire commercialization infrastructure stack from fleet financing and mission control to parking, charging, and data services. Each model has a different answer to who captures the most value as autonomous vehicles scale. None has definitively won yet, but this was the week each made its clearest case.

🔗 Waymo / Electrek / Constellation Research / TechCrunch / TechCrunch (2) / TechCrunch (3) / TechCrunch (4) / TechCrunch (5) / TechCrunch (6) / Business Insider / FT / FT (2) / Forbes / Platform Aeronaut / Road to Autonomy / Fortune

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CHINA CORNER

Baidu Q4 2025 Earnings Call: The Numbers Keep Compounding

Baidu released its Q4 and full-year 2025 results this week, and the Apollo Go numbers confirm that China’s robotaxi market has entered a commercial acceleration phase.

In Q4 2025, Apollo Go delivered 3.4 million fully driverless operational rides, with weekly rides peaking at over 300,000 during the quarter. Total rides increased by over 200% year-over-year. Cumulative rides now exceed 20 million, with over 300 million autonomous kilometers logged, including 190 million of those fully driverless. The global footprint has expanded to 26 cities.

For perspective, in our issue from late November, we logged Baidu at 17 million cumulative rides and 240 million autonomous kilometers. In roughly three months, Apollo Go has added 3 million rides and 60 million autonomous kilometers. The acceleration is becoming more pronounced with each quarter as fleet size, geographic coverage, and consumer adoption compound together.

Hong Kong: Cross-District Expansion and Growing Vehicle Fleet

Hong Kong’s Transport Department approved Apollo Go’s cross-district trial routes, linking North Lantau Airport Island to Tung Chung town center and Sunny Bay. This is Apollo Go’s fifth route expansion since securing Hong Kong’s first autonomous vehicle pilot license in November 2024.

The details show a regulator growing confident. Authorities increased the number of autonomous vehicles approved to operate simultaneously from 10 to 20 for the airport island trials, and from 3 to 8 for the Tung Chung town center trial. Total approved route length now extends to 43.2 kilometers.

The Hong Kong progression matters beyond the numbers. It demonstrates that Chinese AV companies can scale operations in a regulated, international-standard jurisdiction with complex legal frameworks, not just on the mainland where regulatory alignment with state objectives is more straightforward. Hong Kong serves as a credibility bridge for Apollo Go's ambitions in London, Dubai, and other international markets.

Pony.ai’s Shenzhen Breakout

Pony.ai disclosed that paid orders completed in Shenzhen by February 16, 2026 had already surpassed the city’s entire 2025 total. In a separate press release, the company reported that during the nine-day Chinese New Year holiday, its robotaxis averaged 26 paid orders per vehicle per day across four tier-one cities: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing, and Shanghai.

The headline sounds dramatic, and it may well be. But let’s be precise about what we know and what we don’t. Pony.ai did not disclose how many total rides were completed in Shenzhen in 2025. If the 2025 base was modest, then surpassing it in six weeks is less remarkable than it sounds. It could mean 2026 is starting with explosive demand. Or it could mean 2025 in Shenzhen was simply not that big. Without the absolute numbers, we can’t tell which interpretation is correct.

The 26 orders per vehicle per day figure is more useful, but comes with its own caveat: it’s a holiday peak, not a steady-state average. Chinese New Year is the country’s heaviest travel period. Sustained daily averages outside holiday spikes will be the real indicator.

That said, the number is still noteworthy. In an earlier episode, we reported Pony.ai achieving unit-economic breakeven in Guangzhou at 23 trips per vehicle per day. If anything close to 26 orders per vehicle can be maintained beyond the holiday, the breakeven threshold is being exceeded in multiple cities. We should get clearer data in the upcoming earnings call.

Beijing Drafts Mandatory L3/L4 Safety Standards

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology completed drafting the country’s first mandatory safety standards for L3 and L4 autonomous driving systems. The proposed standards, titled “Intelligent Connected Vehicles, Safety Requirements for Autonomous Driving Systems,” are scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2027.

Key requirements include: an Autonomous Driving Data Recording System, similar to an airplane “black box,” that captures critical operational data for post-incident investigation; autonomous emergency fallback capabilities so the vehicle can safely pull over when systems fail; and driver monitoring systems for L3 vehicles to ensure human readiness when takeover is needed.

The shift from voluntary to mandatory is the headline here. Under the current recommended standard (effective since September 2024), companies can choose whether to comply. Under mandatory standards, non-compliant products are prohibited from production, sale, and import within China. This is a significant regulatory step.

The effect is beneficial for incumbents. Baidu and Pony.ai already meet or exceed these requirements through their operational track records and safety systems. The new standards raise barriers for new entrants and latecomers who haven’t built the requisite safety infrastructure. They also signal to consumers and international partners that China’s regulatory framework for autonomous driving is maturing to match the technology’s commercial scale. For companies like Baidu targeting London and Dubai, this kind of domestic regulatory credibility matters.

🔗 Baidu IR / SCMP / Gasgoo / Gasgoo (2) / Pony.ai / Electrive

💡 Quick Takes

TESLA LOGGED ZERO AUTONOMOUS TEST MILES IN CALIFORNIA FOR SIXTH STRAIGHT YEAR

Reuters reported that Tesla has documented only 562 total miles with California regulators since 2016 and holds only the entry-level DMV permit. Under proposed regulations, Tesla would need at least 50,000 miles with a safety driver before applying for a driverless testing permit. A DMV spokesperson confirmed Tesla has not applied for any additional permits. Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor, stated that Tesla implies “they are ready and regulators are not,” while “regulators are ready, and they are not.” Tesla currently operates supervised ride-hailing only in Austin, Texas.

🔗 Reuters

BOT AUTO AND RYAN TRANSPORTATION TO LAUNCH FULLY DRIVERLESS OVERNIGHT FREIGHT HOUSTON-DALLAS

Houston-based Bot Auto is partnering with Ryan Transportation, ranked #19 on the Transport Topics Top 100 Freight Brokerage list, to launch fully driverless overnight freight runs on the roughly 200-mile Houston-Dallas corridor starting Spring 2026. The route specifically targets overnight lanes with tight delivery windows that are difficult to service due to federal hours-of-service limits for human drivers. If successful, this becomes a template for the industry: driverless trucks running the shifts humans can’t.

🔗 FreightWaves

ABU DHABI LAUNCHES MENA’S FIRST AUTONOMOUS FREIGHT TRUCK PILOT

Abu Dhabi’s Integrated Transport Centre, in partnership with Autotech and AD Ports Group, has launched a pilot program for autonomous freight trucks operating within KEZAD, one of the region’s largest industrial and logistics zones. This is the first autonomous truck operation in the Middle East and North Africa. Developers spent 2025 adjusting the AI systems for local road conditions and freight requirements under Abu Dhabi Mobility’s supervision. The pilot operates along fixed routes within the industrial zone under approved safety protocols. It’s a controlled-environment test, not open-road deployment, but it signals that Gulf states are moving past passenger robotaxis into freight logistics, where the economics of autonomy are arguably stronger.

🔗 Gulf News

EINRIDE RAISES $113M OVERSUBSCRIBED PIPE AHEAD OF NYSE LISTING

Einride announced an oversubscribed $113 million PIPE financing ahead of its SPAC merger with Legato Merger Corp. III. The deal values Einride at $1.35 billion and is expected to deliver approximately $333 million in gross proceeds. Shares are expected to list on NYSE under ticker “ENRD” in the first half of 2026. Investors including EQT Ventures participated.

🔗 Einride Press Release

HARBINGER ACQUIRES PHANTOM AI, SECURES ZF LICENSING DEAL

Electric truck manufacturer Harbinger acquired autonomous driving startup Phantom AI and simultaneously secured a licensing agreement with ZF Group. ZF will license Phantom AI’s computer vision technology for its passenger car ADAS products, creating a new software revenue stream for Harbinger. Phantom AI was co-founded by former Tesla and Hyundai engineers.

🔗 TechCrunch

TORC ROBOTICS EXPANDS AUTONOMOUS TRUCK TESTING TO MICHIGAN PUBLIC ROADS

Daimler Truck subsidiary Torc Robotics is now testing its latest-generation Freightliner Cascadia autonomous trucks on public roads around Ann Arbor, Michigan. The expansion adds to Torc’s existing testing operations in Dallas-Fort Worth and Blacksburg, Virginia. Michigan’s winter conditions provide critical validation data for seasonal hardware and software performance. The partnership with Michigan Economic Development Corporation and the state DOT reflects institutional support for autonomous trucking development.

🔗 Torc Robotics

ELEKTROBIT AND MOBILEYE COLLABORATE ON SAFETY-CERTIFIED LINUX FOR L4 AUTONOMY

Elektrobit and Mobileye announced a collaboration to deliver the first open-source OS solution assessed for ASIL B/SIL2 automotive safety, integrated into Mobileye’s Drive platform. This matters for OEMs looking to deploy robotaxis: a safety-certified Linux foundation reduces software development costs and time-to-market for production L4 vehicles. Standardized software infrastructure is one of the unglamorous but critical enablers of fleet-scale autonomous deployment.

🔗 PR Newswire

TIER IV JOINS JAPAN MINISTRY OF DEFENSE UGV PROJECT

Japanese autonomous driving software company TIER IV was selected for the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force’s unmanned ground vehicle project, with the goal of reducing manpower by approximately 1,000 personnel per day across military facilities. The project applies TIER IV’s Autoware open-source autonomous driving stack to military logistics. Defense applications continue to represent an underappreciated revenue stream for autonomous driving technology companies.

🔗 PR Newswire

📚 Worth Reading/Listening

Thomas Reiner: Uber's SpotHero Acquisition Is an Autonomous Infrastructure Bet 🔗 Platform Aeronaut

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Note: Stock performance data as of March 1st, 2026. Past performance does not indicate future returns.

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