Uber has agreed to settle the lawsuit brought against it by Waymo for theft of some of the company’s trade secrets. As part of the settlement Uber has agreed..
Uber has agreed to settle the lawsuit brought against it by Waymo for theft of some of the company’s trade secrets.
As part of the settlement Uber has agreed to work with Waymo to ensure that the company’s LIDAR and software represents just the work of Waymo engineers.
The agreement also comes with a financial settlement of roughly $244 million in stock (that is 0.34% of Uber’s equity, valued at its Series G-1 round which gave the company a $72 billion valuation).
An early morning statement was released from Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi regarding the settlement which Khsorowshahi said was about finding a way to “set the course for the future of the company.”
Khosrowshahi said that he did not believe that any trade secrets actually made their way from Google’s self-driving car program into Uber’s nascent efforts. “But the prospect that a couple of Waymo employees may have inappropriately solicited others to join Otto, and that they may have potentially left with Google files in their possession, in retrospect, raised some hard questions,” Khosrowshahi wrote.
A spokesperson for Waymo said:
The full text of Khosrowshahi’s statement is below.
