Uber made waves this week as it announced it would further invest in Chinese autonomous vehicle tech company WeRide.
Venture investors have been more lukewarm this year on autonomous driving tech, seemingly letting big transportation and car companies battle it out for innovation.
The Uber deal will see the rideshare giant invest $100 million into the publicly traded robotaxi service, expanding the companies’ partnership and helping move WeRide services into another 15 cities through the next five years.
Late last year, Uber and WeRide launched a commercial robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi.
The new Uber deal comes just weeks after Tesla CEO Elon Musk pledged on an earnings call to launch commercial robotaxi operations soon — despite questions about the effort’s financial viability and timeframe.
Venture dollars down
Those same doubts may be why venture capitalists seem less willing to spend big on autonomous vehicle startups as of late.
So far this year, investment into VC-backed autonomous vehicle startups has totaled only $1.1 billion, per Crunchbase data. That’s well off last year’s $12.1 billion, and even the $5.9 billion raised by autonomous vehicle startups in 2023.
In addition, the largest round this year did not go to a car tech developer but instead went to a drone maker, when startup Shield AI locked up a $240 million F-1 strategic funding round at a $5.3 billion valuation.
Last year, the biggest round in the space went to autonomous vehicle company Waymo, which raised a $5.6 billion round in October from Alphabet that valued the company at more than $45 billion and was the startup’s first raise since a $2.5 billion round in 2021.
After years of going big on autonomous driving technology, VCs seem willing to let huge public companies in the space spend their money in the sector instead — based on many past investments that may not be a bad idea.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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