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Nuro builds small self-driving delivery vehicles and licenses its autonomous driving technology to retailers, logistics partners, and automakers.
Nuro is a robotics company that builds small, driverless delivery vehicles — essentially little boxy cars with no seats, no steering wheel, and no driver — designed to carry groceries, packages, and takeout food on local streets. Picture a rolling locker about the size of a small car that shows up at your curb, you unlock it with your phone, and you take your order out. That is the product. The company also sells something less visible but increasingly important: it licenses its self-driving software and hardware to other companies that want to move goods or people without a human behind the wheel.
The business has two main ways to make money. First, Nuro partners with retailers and delivery companies — it has worked with brands like Walmart, Kroger, and Uber — to haul their goods in Nuro's own vehicles, charging them for the delivery service rather than selling the robots outright. Second, it licenses its autonomous driving technology to logistics partners and automakers, letting them use Nuro's self-driving stack in their own vehicles. Customers choose Nuro because building a safe self-driving system from scratch is brutally hard and expensive, and Nuro has spent years collecting real-world driving data and racking up regulatory approvals that a newcomer cannot easily copy. The company was founded in 2016 by two former Google engineers, Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, who worked on the search giant's early self-driving car project. A turning point came in 2020 when Nuro became the first company to receive a federal exemption from U.S. regulators to deploy a driverless vehicle without side mirrors, windshield wipers, or a human backup driver — a small regulatory milestone that mattered a lot for a machine with no people inside. Over the years it raised billions from investors including SoftBank and Tiger Global, which valued it at roughly $8.6 billion in 2021, and like many high-profile startups it has since had to cut costs and refocus as the hype around self-driving cars cooled.
Nuro's bet is that the boring, low-speed, local delivery run is the safest and most practical place to put a robot on public roads before tackling passengers. That keeps its risk lower than robotaxi companies chasing highways and crowded city centers. The flip side is that it is expensive to build and maintain a fleet, the regulatory path is slow and city-by-city, and rivals range from dedicated robotaxi players to delivery giants testing their own autonomous vehicles. In 2024 the company signaled a strategic shift, emphasizing technology licensing more heavily — selling the brains of the operation rather than only running its own little delivery cars — which could let it grow without owning every vehicle on the road.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026