You might not think of self-driving technologies and politics having much in common, but at least in one way, they overlap meaningfully: yesterday’s enemy can be tomorrow’s ally. Such was the message we gleaned Thursday night, at a small industry event in San Francisco, where we had the chance to s…
You might not think of self-driving technologies and politics having much in common, but at least in one way, they overlap meaningfully: yesterday’s enemy can be tomorrow’s ally.
Such was the message we gleaned Thursday night, at a small industry event in San Francisco, where we had the chance to sit down with Chris Urmson, the cofounder and CEO of Aurora, a company that (among many others) is trying to transform how both people and goods are moved.
It was a big day for Urmson. Earlier the same day, his two-year-old company announced a whopping $530 million in Series B funding, a round that was led by top firm Sequoia Capital and that included “significant investment” from T. Rowe Price and Amazon.
The round for Aurora — which is building what it calls a “driver” technology that it expects to eventually integrate into cars built by Volkswagen, Hyundai, and China’s Byten, among others — is highly notable, even in a sea of giant fundings. Not only does it represent Sequoia’s first biggest bet yet on any kind of self-driving technology, it’s also an “incredible endorsement” from T. Rowe Price, said Urmson Thursday night, suggesting it shows the outfit “thinks long term and strategically [that] we’re the independent option to self-driving cars.”
Yet perhaps the most interesting facet to the round is that it includes Amazon, one of the world’s most valuable companies, which could lead to variety of scenarios down the road, from Aurora powering delivery fleets overseen by Amazon, to being acquired outright by the company. Amazon has already begun marketing more aggressively to global car companies and Tier 1 suppliers that are focused on building connected products, saying its AWS platform can help them speed their pace of innovation and lower their cost structures. In November, it also debuted a global, autonomous racing league for 1/18th scale, radio-controlled, self-driving four-wheeled race cars that are designed to help developers learn about reinforcement learning, a type of machine learning. Imagine what it could learn from Aurora.
Indeed, at the event, Urmson said that as Aurora had “constructed our funding round, [we were] very much thinking strategically about how to be successful in our mission of building a driver and one thing that a driver can do is move people, but it can also move goods, and it’s harder to think of a company where moving goods is more important than Amazon.” Calling Amazon “incredibly technically savvy,” to boot, he said that “having the opportunity to have them partner with us in this funding round, and [talk about] what we might build in the future is awesome.”
Aurora’s site also now features language about “transforming the way people and goods move.”
The interest of Amazon, T. Rowe, Sequoia and Aurora’s other backers isn’t surprising. Urmson was the formal technical lead of Google’s self-driving car program (now Waymo). One of his cofounders, Drew Bagnell, is a machine learning expert who still teaches at Carnegie Mellon and was formerly the head of Uber’s autonomy and perception team. His third cofounder is Sterling Anderson, the former program manager of Tesla’s Autopilot team.
