Uber Made Waves this week, because he announced that he would proceed to invest in the Chinese technology company of the vehicle Weride.
This 12 months’s investors were more summer for autonomous driving technology, allowing large transport and automobile firms to fight for innovation.
Uber Giant Rideshare will invest $ 100 million in the publicly recorded Robotaxi service in the Uber Giant Rideshare agreement, expanding the partnership of firms and helping to transfer Weride services to the next 15 cities for the next five years.
At the end of last 12 months, Uber and Weride launched a business Robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi.
The latest Uber offer appears only a few weeks Tesla CEO Elon Musk He promised a call to earnings in order to soon launch business Robotaxi operations – despite questions about financial profitability and time of the time of effort.
Dollars of the enterprise down
The same doubts may mean that Venture Capital appears to be less inclined to spend large on autonomous vehicle startups.
So far, this 12 months’s investments in autonomous vehicle startups supported by VC amounted to only $ 1.1 billion, on Crunchbase data. This is a good last 12 months $ 12.1 billion, and even $ 5.9 billion collected by autonomous vehicle startups in 2023.
In addition, the largest round this 12 months didn’t go to the developer of automobile technologies, but as a substitute went to the drone manufacturer when the startup AI shield He closed the strategic F-1 strategic financing round with a value of $ 240 million with a valuation of $ 5.3 billion.
Last 12 months, the largest round in space went to the autonomous company of the vehicle Waymowhich in October collected a round of $ 5.6 billion Alphabet This valued the company for over $ 45 billion and was the first increase in the startup from a round price $ 2.5 billion in 2021.
After years of huge VC autonomous driving technologies, they appear willing to permit huge public firms in the space of spending money in the sector – based on much earlier investments that might not be a bad idea.