from Hacker News

Waymo has raised $3B in the last two months

by Rutledge on 5/12/20, 4:51 PM with 215 comments

  • by enitihas on 5/12/20, 5:07 PM

    Can anyone explain why does Waymo need to raise any money? Doesn't Alphabet have practically infinite pockets? If they are confident of Waymo, why would they want to share the profits with anyone else ever?

    Even if Alphabet was reluctant to invest their own profits, can't they borrow cheaply too?

  • by bdcravens on 5/12/20, 5:06 PM

    They've raised $3B in 2 months; this round was $750M. The original headline:

    "Waymo Adds $750 Million to War Chest as Driverless Cars Prove Tough to Deploy"

  • by InTheArena on 5/12/20, 6:51 PM

    Meanwhile, Tesla continues to iterate on a production fleet with a (admit idly rough) new capability rolled out to allow autopilot to obey stop lights and stop signs.

    If I were a investor that invested in individual stocks (which I am not), my money would be on Tesla over the long run here.

  • by daenz on 5/12/20, 11:42 PM

    Does anyone else think that the massive decrease in driving (due to lockdowns) is a game-changer for the outlook on autonomous vehicles? Suppose we can embrace a society with fewer drivers, isn't that better for autonomous vehicles by most metrics?

  • by alokrai on 5/12/20, 5:04 PM

  • by yalogin on 5/13/20, 5:26 AM

    I dont understand Waymo and what they are doing. What is their path to making money on this?

    They are not building their own cars, haven't partnered with any automakers either. In fact they discussed with a bunch of them and couldn't convince any company to partner with them. Most of the automakers already are investing heavily in their own autonomous tech stack. Unless they blow everyone out of the water with their technology I don't see them selling their stuff to automakers.

    The only path then is an Uber competitor. That means they have to acquire a fleet custom made for their solution. That is a huge investment a large undertaking, not sure Waymo has it in them to do it. This is not Google wave to abandon so I am sure they will not do so, however I will not be surprised if people grow frustrated by the lack of clarity.

  • by iamleppert on 5/13/20, 6:57 AM

    Can anyone explain the business model of a self-driving car company? We already have this service, except it’s powered by humans. Humans who own the cars, store the cars, clean them, and take care of all the maintenance.

    A self-driving car company will have to own a huge depreciating asset, and they’ll still need staff to clean & take care of the cars in addition to an enormously expensive engineering team and/or licensing payments.

    What business model are these companies trying to fulfill? It seems like they are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

  • by neonate on 5/12/20, 5:26 PM

  • by supernova87a on 5/12/20, 6:52 PM

    I'm not sure I would be so pleased as an employee or share/optionholder in Waymo about the fundraising. In fact, people forget that fundraising isn't something really to be overly proud of. It's a loan, whether it's phrased that way, or as an equity stake.

    It was all fine when they got free money from Google to power their experiments (cars, people, time). Now they're borrowing from their own value to pay investors for the loan.

    I'd want to see some belt tightening from what is sure to be an overly large engineering team and lots of support staff, if there were ever to be the promise of becoming profitable (and to eventually pay for these loans from investors).

  • by kilroy123 on 5/12/20, 9:18 PM

    It'll be interesting to watch Waymo try to make it on their own.

    I predict they end up focusing on semi-autonomous trucks instead of cars for regular people.

  • by mitfahrener on 5/12/20, 6:30 PM

    Title is misleading.

  • by fl1pP3R on 5/12/20, 7:40 PM

    y

  • by LatteLazy on 5/12/20, 5:51 PM

    They primarily make software right? 3Bn seems like a lot of cash for a software company to need. That’s 2m dollars per employee. What am I missing here? Am I just old and out of touch?

  • by jhpriestley on 5/12/20, 5:45 PM

    One oft-repeated line about driverless cars was that they would improve the world by reducing car accidents, and possibly helping with congestion and parking problems.

    The pandemic has proven that these goals and many more can be accomplished without any complicated, speculative AI technology, simply by taking full advantage of telecommuting and delivery. Obviously there is no profit to be made so it would make no sense for investors to do so, but I wonder what $3B could accomplish if it were put to the purpose of reducing the need to travel, rather than finding new ways to burn gasoline.

  • by KCUOJJQJ on 5/12/20, 5:33 PM

    I'm not a car owner but I wouldn't buy a car from Google or a car that is connected to the internet / saves data into logs that can be read in a garage.

    I wouldn't buy a car from Google because of this [1]. Even if Google promised not to collect data I wouldn't believe them.

    [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location... Google admits it tracked user location data even when the setting was turned off