Nuro

Nuro is a self-driving technology company headquartered on Terra Bella Avenue in Mountain View, about five miles from downtown Palo Alto. For years it was known for small, car-shaped delivery robots with no seats inside. In 2024 it changed course. It now licenses its self-driving software, the Nuro Driver, to automakers and ride-hailing companies. Its best known deal is a robotaxi plan with Uber and Lucid announced in 2025.

This profile relies on Nuro's own announcements and filings with press wire services, plus reporting summarized on Wikipedia. Dates and figures come from those sources. We do not comment on the company's valuation or prospects.

What Nuro does

Nuro's main product is the Nuro Driver, which the company describes as an AI-first autonomous driving system. It combines software with a compute module and sensors that can be fitted to vehicles built by other companies. Nuro says the system can support three kinds of use.

• Robotaxis, driverless cars that carry paying passengers.
• Personally owned vehicles, where a car buyer's vehicle drives itself in some conditions.
• Goods delivery, building on Nuro's earlier work with delivery robots.

Rather than build and run its own fleet, Nuro now earns money by licensing the system. NVIDIA supplies its DRIVE AGX Thor platform for Nuro's compute module, according to Nuro's August 2025 announcement. The company has tested on public roads in California, Arizona, Texas and Nevada, including the Las Vegas Strip from May 2025. In April 2025 it began collecting driving data in Japan.

Founders and Google roots

Nuro's founders came from Google's self-driving car project, the effort that started inside Google in 2009 and became Waymo. That project grew partly out of Stanford. Sebastian Thrun, who led Stanford's team to victory in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge with a robot car named Stanley, went on to help start Google's program. Our page on Stanford and the history of AI tells that part of the story.

• Jiajun Zhu was a principal software engineer on Google's project.
• Dave Ferguson joined Google's project in 2011 as a principal machine learning engineer. Nuro's 2025 announcement names him co-founder and president.

Both left in 2016 and founded Nuro that September. Their idea was that the first big business for self-driving vehicles might be moving goods, not people. A vehicle with no passengers can be smaller and lighter. It can also be designed around protecting people outside it.

The delivery robot years

Nuro came out of stealth in January 2018 with its first vehicle, the R1. It weighed about 1,500 pounds and was roughly half the width of a sedan. It had compartments for groceries and no space for a driver. Its first funding, $92 million, came from Greylock and Gaorong Capital.

A run of pilots followed.

1. 2018. Grocery delivery with Kroger in Scottsdale, Arizona.
2. 2019. A partnership with Domino's in Houston.
3. 2020. Testing of the second vehicle, the R2, with no steering wheel or pedals. Nuro received an exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for the R2, the first of its kind for a self-driving vehicle.
4. 2020 and 2021. Prescription delivery with CVS and a deal with 7-Eleven.
5. 2022. A ten-year partnership with Uber for autonomous food delivery in California and Texas.

Money flowed in during those years. SoftBank put in $940 million in 2019 at a $2.7 billion valuation. A $500 million round led by T. Rowe Price in November 2020 valued Nuro at $5 billion. In 2021 it announced a $40 million manufacturing site and test track in southern Nevada.

Then the climate changed. Nuro cut about 20 percent of its staff in November 2022 and about 30 percent more in May 2023, when it paused commercial expansion to focus on its autonomy technology.

The pivot to licensing

In September 2024 Nuro announced that it would license the Nuro Driver instead of building its own vehicles. In November 2024 it began running driverless tests with zero occupants. The shift put it in a different business, selling software and hardware designs to companies that already make or operate cars.

Its 2025 funding followed that strategy. Nuro raised a first tranche of $106 million in April 2025 from accounts advised by T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Tiger Global, along with Greylock and XN. In August 2025 it closed a $203 million Series E at a $6 billion valuation. Uber, NVIDIA, Baillie Gifford, Icehouse Ventures, Kindred Ventures and Pledge Ventures took part. Nuro said it had raised more than $2.3 billion in total.

The Uber and Lucid robotaxi plan

In July 2025 Nuro, Lucid and Uber announced a robotaxi partnership. Under the plan, Uber would buy and operate Lucid Gravity SUVs fitted with the Nuro Driver. The companies said they planned to deploy 20,000 or more vehicles over six years across dozens of markets, starting in a major US city in 2026. Uber's investment in Nuro is tied to development and commercial milestones, according to Nuro.

We could not confirm a public launch date for the service as of November 1, 2026. Check announcements from Uber and Nuro for the latest. Our page on robotaxis and rideshare in Palo Alto covers what is available to riders locally today.

Safety approach

Nuro's early delivery robots were designed with people outside the vehicle in mind. They carried no passengers, so the company could build them narrower and lighter than a car. That left more room around the vehicle for pedestrians and cyclists and less mass in a collision.

With the shift to licensing, the safety questions moved to passenger vehicles. Robotaxis built with the Nuro Driver would carry riders, so they face the same federal and state rules as other driverless cars. In California, driverless testing and passenger service need separate permits from the Department of Motor Vehicles and, for paid rides, the California Public Utilities Commission. Readers who want technical detail on Nuro's approach should start with the company's own website.

Ties to Palo Alto and Mountain View

Nuro is one of several self-driving companies within a short drive of Palo Alto. Waymo grew out of Google in Mountain View. Tesla's engineering headquarters is in Stanford Research Park; our Tesla in Palo Alto page covers it. Ford Greenfield Labs is also in Palo Alto. Engineers move between these companies often. Stanford's robotics and AI programs feed all of them.

Terra Bella Avenue sits in north Mountain View, near Highway 101 and Shoreline Boulevard, the road that leads to Google's main campus. Our Mountain View guide covers the city. The Computer History Museum nearby displays Shakey, the early SRI robot that helped launch research on machines that plan their own routes.

Visiting and practical notes

Frequently asked questions