The Station - Investors deliver $500M to Nuro, Uber shops ATG and some inside the beltway chatter

Saturday, November 14, 2020 • By Kirsten Korosec

Hi folks, welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B.

Let’s get right to it.

Email me anytime at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.

Deal of the week

Big non-SPAC deals do continue to happen, the latest example being the $500 million haul by autonomous delivery startup Nuro. The company, which was founded by two former Google engineers, is now valued at $5 billion.

The Series C round was led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., with participation from new investors including Fidelity Management & Research Company and Baillie Gifford. The round also includes existing investors such as SoftBank Vision Fund 1 and Greylock.

Nuro’s ability to raise this amount of capital suggests that investors still have the stomach for longer term technological plays. However, this doesn’t mean we’re back in the heady free flowing money days of 2016 and 2017 when it seemed like everyone working on autonomous vehicle technology was being handed cash from investors. Instead, investments are more targeted and seem concentrated on nearer term applications of the technology like delivery.

Other deals that got my attention this week …

DoorDash dropped its S-1 filing ahead of its public market debut. TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm dug into some of the initial numbers. Danny Crichton wrote about the VC and founder winners of the IPO.

Getaround, the peer-to-peer car rental company, secured a $25 million loan from Horizon Technology Finance Corporation. The financing announcement comes one month after Getaround raised $140 million from investors, including SoftBank Vision Fund, Menlo Ventures, Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus’ Reinvent Capital.

Tier raised a whopping $250 million in a Series C round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. As TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet notes, this shows that the Vision Fund team is still focused on high-risk, high-potential bets. While Tier isn’t a well-known brand in the U.S., the company has been expanding rapidly across Europe. It now operates in 80 cities across 10 countries. There are 60,000 electric scooters available in the app. Existing investors Mubadala Capital, Northzone, Goodwater Capital, White Star Capital, Novator and RTP Global are also participating in today’s funding round. According to the Financial Times, the company is now valued just below $1 billion.

Join us at the 14th annual Strategic Growth Forum® - Nov 17-19

Word on the street – or more aptly, inside the beltway – is that the U.S. Department of Transportation plans to make some moves before President-Elect Joe Biden takes office that will affect the autonomous vehicle industry.

Specifically, the DOT wants to establish a more formalized standard for safety cases. UL 4600, a standard created by Underwriters Laboratories that offers a guide for how to build the safety case for an AV design, is rumored to be the front runner.

Junko Yoshida of EE Times has some of the best reporting on the variety of proposed AV standards, of which there are nearly 10 including ISO 26262, IEEE P2846 and SOTIF.

As she explained in one article this year, the authors of UL 4600 have acknowledged that no single standard can solve the world’s autonomous product problem. Instead, the UL 4600 standard aims to create a starting point by asking autonomous product designers to make a safety argument.

Why does this matter? Today, the U.S. is a patchwork of AV guidelines and regulations that vary by state. There isn’t a federal law, or one at the state level, that outlines prescriptive rules or even performance testing for AV technology. Without a means to regulate the technology, formalizing a safety case standard where AV developers have to show their work would provide clarity and certainty for the industry, help reinforce safety norms and build public trust.

Speaking of the federal government, Reuters is reporting that Biden’s transition teams for the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation will include several agency alumni who served under President Barack Obama. Among those named include Patrice Simms, an environmental attorney at Earthjustice who will head the EPA team, and Joe Goffman, general counsel at the agency under Obama EPA chief Gina McCarthy, as well as Cynthia Giles, who was assistant administrator in the EPA’s enforcement office.

Biden’s DOT team will be headed by Phillip Washington, chief executive of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The DOT transition team includes New York City Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, a former Transportation official under Obama, and Therese McMillan, former acting head of the Federal Transit Administration under Obama.

Uber puts up a for sale sign

A story I was busy working on for some time hit the interwebs Friday. In short: Uber has been shopping its self-driving unit Uber Advanced Technologies Group around and it is in serious talks with competing autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation.

For those who want to read the entire article, click the “read more” link below. Here are the important bits for all of those skimmers out there.

Uber ATG’s last known valuation of $7.25 billion was based on a $1 billion investment in spring 2019 from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The talks with Aurora could falter, but according to several sources, the two companies are far along in the process. If successful, they have the potential to triple Aurora’s headcount and allow Uber to unload an expensive long-term play that has sustained several controversies in its short life.

Since the article published, I’ve had a few sources reach out who have shared versions of this thought “Uber is giving ATG away.” I don’t know if that’s true and can’t weigh in without seeing the financial terms.

What I can confidently say is that Aurora doesn’t have the cash on hand to buy Uber ATG even with the expected depletion in its valuation. That suggests that Aurora has been able to secure additional outside investment or structure the deal in a way that would allow Uber to keep some equity.

Notable reads and other tidbits

I thought the news always slowed down as Thanksgiving approached? I guess not. Lots of electric vehicle announcements, a smattering of autonomous news and a few executive changes.

Boston Dynamics could be sold to Korean automaker Hyundai, Bloomberg reported. If the deal goes through this would be the third company in seven years to own the robotics firm, following sales to Google and SoftBank Group.

BMW announced that the BMW iX, its new all-electric flagship, will launch at the end of 2021. The iX will get a new look — and new kidney grille design — but its dimensions will be similar to the existing X5 or X6 SUVs. The company promises about 300 miles of range and 0-60 mph acceleration time of just under five seconds.

Electrify America said it has opened more than 500 electric vehicle charging stations, making more than 2,200 individual DC fast chargers available to the public in the United States.

Elon Musk’s tunneling and transportation startup The Boring Company is eyeing Austin for its next project based on several new job postings.

Fiat Chrysler and Engie EPS, a division of French utility Engie plan to set up a joint venture focused on electric mobility, Reuters reported. The venture will offer a full range of products including residential, business and public charging infrastructure.

Ford revealed the E-Transit, a configurable all-electric cargo van that it’s betting will be the new go-to workhorse for commercial customers.

Glovo, Spain’s on-demand delivery app, announced the launch of a new business unit, called Q-Commerce. The B2B service will stock third parties’ products in its warehouses and have the couriers that operate on its on-demand platform make deliveries for other businesses too.

Honda claimed it will be the first automaker to mass-produce vehicles with automated driving capabilities that meet SAE Level 3 standards, with plans to begin producing and selling a version of its Honda Legend luxury sedan in Japan next March.

Proterra announced that Gareth Joyce will be president of its Proterra Powered and Energy business units.

Rivian released a bunch of updates this week on its upcoming R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV on its website. A few items that caught my eye: there will be an initial three editions of each vehicle that start as low as $67,500 and with a battery range of more than 300 miles; more options will follow, including a base version that will have a smaller range of at least 250 miles and a price below $67,000; and finally all of its vehicles will come standard with a robust looking advanced driver assistance system.

Uber launched a new feature this week, starting in 20 U.S. cities, that lets users reserve rides up to 30 days in advance and pick their favorite driver for the trip. The new option, called Uber Reserve, is designed for users who want to book a ride at least two hours in advance.

VW Group said in a statement that it will increase spending on electric vehicles, automated driving and other future technologies to about 73 billion euros ($86 billion).

Walmart and autonomous vehicle company Cruise are pairing up to test grocery delivery in Scottsdale, Arizona. Under the pilot program, customers will be able to place an order from their local Walmart store and have it delivered via one of Cruise’s autonomous, electric Chevy Bolt cars. While the vehicles will operate autonomously, a human safety operator will always be behind the wheel.

Waze CEO Noam Bardin, who joined the company nearly 12 years ago and led it through its acquisition by Google to become a crowdsourced navigation app with millions of active users, is stepping down early next year. I spoke to Bardin for a bit on why he’s leaving now and who he thinks should lead Waze next.