Nuro Nabs $600M in Series D Funding

Kroger among investors in autonomous-vehicle company

11/3/2021

Nuro Nabs $600M in Series D Funding Kroger

A Series D funding round of $600 million will further allow autonomous-vehicle company Nuro to grow its team, deploy its solution at scale and advance its technology.

Autonomous-vehicle company Nuro has revealed a new round of financing led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Co. LLC, Gaorong Capital, Google, The Kroger Co., SoftBank Vision Fund 1, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., Woven Capital, and other existing investors as part of the company’s Series D funding round. The $600 million in financing will support the development and deployment of Nuro’s autonomous-delivery service in communities across the country.

“We’re thrilled to have the backing of these prominent investors and world class companies, and honored that they support our vision of improving communities and revitalizing local commerce,” said Dave Ferguson, co-founder and president of Mountain View, Calif.-based Nuro. “We believe this investment will allow us to accelerate our commercialization strategy and better everyday life with Nuro’s technology.”

“The arrival of ubiquitous on-demand e-commerce is changing the way we access goods,” noted Griffin Schroeder, partner at New York-based Tiger Global. “Demand for local deliveries is exploding. Nuro is the bridge to an era of sustainable, low-cost, autonomous local delivery.”

The new funding will enable Nuro to continue its commercialization of zero-occupant autonomous-delivery vehicles by helping it address long-standing pain points and evolving consumer trends accelerated by the pandemic.

“Kroger launched its partnership with Nuro in 2018 to explore grocery delivery through autonomous vehicles,” said Yael Cosset, SVP and CIO at the grocer. “Since then, Kroger and Nuro [have] completed thousands of deliveries to our customers — driving innovation that supports our expanding seamless ecosystem by creating consistent and rewarding customer experiences with scalable, sustainable and profitable solutions.”

Nuro has also formed a five-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to support the massive scale and capacity needed to run self-driving simulation workloads, machine learning to boost model accuracy, and storage to manage critical data from the vehicles. The new partnership will also enable Nuro and Google, also based in Mountain View, to explore opportunities together to bolster and transform local commerce.

Earlier this year, Nuro said that it would invest $40 million in the development of two new southern Nevada facilities — an end-of-line manufacturing facility and a closed-course test track — to commercialize and scale production of the company’s third-generation autonomous vehicle. Nuro has also recently embarked on a multiyear partnership with FedEx and piloted pizza delivery with Domino’s in Houston. The latest funding round will further allow the company to grow its team, deploy its solution at scale and advance its technology.

Serving 60 million households annually nationwide through a digital shopping experience and almost 2,800 retail food stores under a variety of banner names, Cincinnati-based Kroger is No. 3 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2021 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America.