Nuro raises $203M in funding at $6B valuation as Uber and NVIDIA double down on driverless future

Self-driving startup Nuro just locked in a fresh $203 million Series E round, pushing its valuation to $6 billion and signaling investor confidence in its push to bring autonomy to the mainstream. Uber, NVIDIA, Baillie Gifford, Icehouse Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and Pledge Ventures all joined the latest round, with $97 million added on top of the $106 million Nuro announced back in April.

For a company that’s been building toward full-scale deployment for nearly a decade, the new funding marks a critical step. “The closing of our Series E reinforces the strong conviction our investors and strategic partners have in Nuro’s technology, our scalable approach to commercialization, and our vision for the future of autonomy,” said Dave Ferguson, Nuro’s co-founder and president. He added that the new capital will help drive fresh commercial partnerships and bring Nuro’s driverless tech to global markets.

Founded in 2016 by ex-Google engineers Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, Nuro has been developing AI-powered autonomous driving systems that can be slotted into everything from delivery bots to full-scale robotaxis. Its flagship Nuro Driver™ platform is pitched as a cost-effective way for automakers, ride-hailing companies, and mobility providers to integrate self-driving into commercial fleets and personal vehicles.

From Delivery Bots to Global Robotaxis: Self-Driving Startup Nuro Hits $6B Valuation with $203M Raise

Nuro has already raised more than $2.3 billion to date and has years of real-world testing behind it, with deployments running in multiple U.S. states without safety drivers. That track record keeps it in rare company among autonomous vehicle startups still chasing scale.

The company’s network of partners is expanding quickly. Nuro’s relationship with NVIDIA, already a deep technical collaboration, now includes investment. Its latest compute module runs on NVIDIA’s DRIVE AGX Thor platform, and Nuro uses NVIDIA GPUs for large-scale training and data processing. In June, the company joined the NVIDIA Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab to validate safe integration of its systems.

“The closing of our Series E reinforces the strong conviction our investors and strategic partners have in Nuro’s technology, our scalable approach to commercialization, and our vision for the future of autonomy,” said Dave Ferguson, Co-Founder and President of Nuro. “With this new capital, we’re well-positioned to continue our next phase of growth, which will see us focus on delivering new commercial partnerships to realize autonomy at global scale.”

The partnerships aren’t stopping there. In July, Nuro announced a tie-up with Lucid and Uber to roll out a next-generation robotaxi service. The plan calls for more than 20,000 Lucid vehicles running the Nuro Driver™, hitting dozens of markets worldwide starting next year in a major U.S. city. Uber’s investment in this Series E round is part of that larger partnership.

With its valuation climbing and some of the biggest names in tech and mobility backing its vision, Nuro is pressing ahead with the same goal it set nearly a decade ago: bringing full autonomy from pilot programs into everyday use.