Waymo seeks massive $15 billion raise at $100 billion valuation to fuel robotaxi expansion

Waymo is reportedly looking to raise a massive new round of funding that would value the autonomous driving company at over $100 billion as it accelerates its expansion.

Since Alphabet spun out its self-driving car project into Waymo back in 2016, the company has been seen as the leader in the space, at least when it comes to deploying actual driverless vehicles on public roads without anyone in the driver’s seat.

While Tesla has been promising “Full Self-Driving” for years with a camera-only approach on consumer vehicles, Waymo has taken the more expensive, sensor-heavy robotaxi route.

It has been a capital-intensive journey, but it seems to be paying off in terms of deployment, as it now completes hundreds of thousands of paid autonomous rides per week in half a dozen US cities.

Now, a new report from Bloomberg states that Waymo is looking to raise more than $15 billion in a new funding round.

According to the report, the round is expected to value Waymo at nearly $100 billion:

“Waymo, Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous driving unit, is in discussions to raise more than $15 billion at a valuation near $100 billion, in a financing round led by its parent company. The maker of robotaxis has discussed raising billions in equity from external backers as well as Alphabet, said the people.”

This would be a massive jump in valuation for the company. For context, Waymo raised $5.6 billion just a year ago in October 2024 at a valuation of around $45 billion.

If this new round goes through, it would more than double the company’s valuation in less than a year.

The funding push comes as Waymo aggressively expands its service. The company recently announced that it has completed over 14 million rider-only trips in 2025 alone. It is currently operating fully driverless commercial services in several major markets, including San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin, with plans to expand to cities like Miami and potentially international markets like London and Tokyo by 2026.

Waymo’s fleet currently consists of about 2,500 vehicles, primarily the Jaguar I-PACE, though it is transitioning to a custom-built robotaxi vehicle from Zeekr in the near future.

Electrek’s Take

Waymo can do a lot with $15 billion. It could 40x its fleet with 100,000 vehicles and still have a few billion left for operations.

For a long time, the narrative was that Waymo’s approach, HD maps, LiDAR, expensive sensors, and remote monitoring, was too expensive to scale compared to Tesla’s vision-only global fleet approach.

And while that might still be true in the long run if Tesla solves FSD, which is a big if, the reality on the ground today is that Waymo is the one offering rides with nobody in the front seat.

With 100,000 autonomous vehicles, it could capture 10% of the US ride-hailing market and likely become financially self-sustainable.