Self-driving has been in the news for more than a decade, but it’s finally created a $100-billion dollar company.
Waymo announced today that it has raised $16 billion in new funding at a post-money valuation of $126 billion, marking one of the largest financing rounds in autonomous vehicle history. The investment was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Mubadala Capital, and a roster of prominent tech investors including Silver Lake, Tiger Global, and T. Rowe Price. Alphabet, Google’s parent company and Waymo’s majority owner, continues to provide strong backing to the venture it spun out of its research labs.
The massive valuation represents a striking validation of Waymo’s technology strategy, particularly its reliance on LiDAR sensors and high-definition mapping. This approach stands in sharp contrast to Tesla’s camera-only vision system, a philosophical divide that has defined the autonomous driving industry for years. While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has called LiDAR a “crutch” and argued that cameras alone can achieve full autonomy, Waymo’s safety record appears to vindicate its more hardware-intensive approach. The company reports a 90% reduction in serious injury crashes across 127 million autonomous miles—a statistical edge that has proven compelling to both investors and regulators.
The numbers behind Waymo’s growth tell the story of a company that has moved decisively from R&D to commercial operations. In 2025, Waymo tripled its annual ride volume to 15 million trips, bringing its lifetime total past 20 million. The service now provides more than 400,000 rides weekly across six major U.S. metropolitan areas, transforming what was once a moonshot project into a transportation service people use daily.
Waymo’s position within the broader Google ecosystem gives it advantages that standalone competitors can’t easily replicate. The company leverages Google’s AI infrastructure and expertise, drawing on the same computational resources and machine learning capabilities that power Search, YouTube recommendations, and other products. Google Maps provides the foundational data for Waymo’s high-definition mapping efforts, while Google Cloud’s infrastructure supports the massive data processing requirements of training autonomous driving models. This integration allows Waymo to benefit from advances across Alphabet’s AI research efforts, including developments in computer vision, sensor fusion, and real-time decision-making systems.
The fresh capital will fuel Waymo’s most aggressive expansion yet. Co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov announced plans to launch in over 20 additional cities in 2026, including international markets like Tokyo and London. This global push, following a recent Miami launch, signals that Waymo is ready to move beyond proving its technology works to demonstrating it can scale profitably across diverse regulatory environments and urban landscapes.
The investor commentary reflects confidence that autonomous driving has reached an inflection point. “Waymo has moved beyond research milestones to achieve operational excellence,” said Konstantine Buhler, partner at Sequoia. DST Global’s Saurabh Gupta emphasized the technology’s potential to “reimagine cities” and boost accessibility, while Dragoneer’s Jared Middleman pointed to Waymo’s engineering lead as durable and defensible.
For the AI industry, Waymo’s $126 billion valuation represents a tangible demonstration that advanced AI systems can create massive enterprise value in the physical world, not just in software. As autonomous vehicles finally transition from perpetual “next year” promises to current-day reality, Waymo has put itself in pole position what investors now see as a trillion-dollar transportation market waiting to be transformed.