Zoox, a secretive driverless car start-up, has raised $500m in new funding as it gears up to take on larger rivals, including Alphabet’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise. The deal valued Zoox at $2.7bn, before the addition of the latest funds raised. Zoox is unusual among the dozens of Silicon Valley companies pursuing self-driving cars because it is planning to build both the autonomous systems and its own electric vehicles.
Founded by Australian designer Tim Kentley-Klay in 2014, Zoox plans to be ready for a full commercial launch of a “robo-taxi” service by as soon as 2020. “By building that system under one roof, we can get to market faster,” Mr Kentley-Klay said in an interview. Mr Kentley-Klay said the new funding, which follows about $300m raised in earlier rounds, would fuel Zoox’s development and testing until “late next year”. The company already has more than 500 employees. More than 50 companies, from traditional automakers to small start-ups, are testing self-driving cars on the streets of California.
Despite fatal crashes involving Tesla and Uber’s autonomous vehicles earlier this year, the sector continues to attract huge amounts of capital, including into Pony.ai, which is based in China and Silicon Valley and has raised more than $200m in recent months, and GM’s Cruise unit, which received a $2.25bn investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in May. The companies are vying for engineering talent with expertise in artificial intelligence, computer vision, navigation and safety.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which oversees autonomous testing in the state, has granted Zoox permits for 14 self-driving cars and 80 test drivers. That makes the company’s public fleet in its home state significantly smaller than those of rivals such as GM Cruise, with 117 cars, Waymo with 72 vehicles, and Apple, which had 66 permits. Nonetheless, Mr Kentley-Klay says his technology is superior to that of rivals, including Cruise, which like Zoox does a lot of testing on the busy, complex streets of downtown San Francisco. Zoox also tests in virtual simulations and on private tracks.