Waymo, the autonomous driving company majority-owned by Alphabet, has completed a long-planned funding round, securing $16 billion in new commitments to accelerate the expansion of its robotaxi services, the company said.
The fresh capital was raised from a group of existing and new investors, led by venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group and DST Global, with Alphabet continuing what Waymo described as its “strong and continuous support as majority shareholder.” Including earlier rounds, Waymo has now raised about $27 billion in total funding since it was spun out of Google’s self-driving car project.
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Investors in the latest round valued Waymo at around $126 billion, a level comparable to the combined market capitalisation of some of Europe’s largest carmakers. The valuation underscores investor confidence in the long-term potential of autonomous driving technologies, despite relatively limited current revenues.
“As a technology leader in the trillion dollar transportation market, Waymo has moved beyond research milestones to achieve operational excellence, tripling its weekly paid rides in just one year while maintaining customer delight,” said Konstantine Buhler, a partner at Sequoia Capital. “Waymo is an exceptional business, leveraging its compounding data advantage to usher in a new era of transportation and a safety culture that can save millions of lives.”
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Waymo said it plans to make 2026 a year of rapid expansion, targeting launches in 20 additional cities. Alongside further growth in the United States, the company is preparing its first international deployments, with London and Tokyo named as initial overseas markets. In recent years, Waymo has gradually expanded its commercial robotaxi operations across cities including Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with Miami added in January.
The company reported that it more than tripled annual ride volumes in 2025 to 15 million trips and has now exceeded 20 million rides in total. Waymo currently provides more than 400,000 rides per week across six major U.S. metropolitan areas and has logged over 127 million miles of fully autonomous driving. It claims its vehicles have reduced serious accidents by about 90% compared with human-driven cars, though the company acknowledges that incidents can still occur, citing a recent low-speed collision involving a child in Santa Monica.
