Autonomous delivery vehicle maker Nuro raised $600 million in its latest funding round, the Silicon Valley-based startup said on Tuesday, bringing on board Alphabet Inc.’s Google as an investor.
The funding round, led by Tiger Global Management, lifted Nuro’s valuation to $8.6 billion from $5 billion previously, according to a person close to the deal.
Toyota Motor Corp.’s Woven Capital, SoftBank Group Corp’s Vision Fund 1 and Kroger Co. were among other investors.
Self-driving startups are racing to build war chests to develop and commercialize technology, an expensive and time-consuming process. Alphabet’s self-driving unit Waymo in June raised $2.5 billion.
Nuro, whose R2 unit has no pedals or steering wheel and only room for packages, said it has signed a five-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to support self-driving simulation and data management.
