Waymo

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company focused on developing self-driving vehicles. Founded in 2009 as a project within Google, Waymo became a standalone subsidiary of Alphabet in 2016. Waymo focuses on goods and passenger transportation. Its “Waymo One” division focuses on autonomous ride-hailing services powered by “Waymo Driver,” its autonomous driving technology platform. The latest sixth-generation Waymo Driver comes with 13 cameras, four LiDAR sensors, radar, and external audio receivers, and is designed to handle a wider range of weather conditions including extreme heat, fog, rain, hail, and freezing temperatures. Waymo also develops its own LiDAR technology for self-driving vehicles. The product, known as “Laser Bear Honeycomb,” features 95-degree vertical and 360-degree horizontal fields of view, close-range object detection, and customizable specifications. The company was also working on EMMA autonomous driving model (End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving), a training model built using Google's multimodal large language model, Gemini.

Waymo provided over 50,000 paid autonomous rides weekly in locations such as Phoenix (Arizona), San Francisco, Los Angeles (California), and Austin (Texas) and had completed 2 million trips as of July 2024. Its other operational locations with non-commercial limited-time testing or deployments include Atlanta (Georgia), Buffalo (New York), Miami (Florida), Bellevue (Washington), Truckee (California), Upstate New York, and Michigan.

The company also acquired Latent Logic to complement the development of simulation technology for autonomous vehicles and establish its European engineering hub (December 2019).

Key customers and partnerships

Waymo has sales partnerships with Uber (May 2023; went live in October 2023) and Lyft (May 2019) to offer robotaxi and autonomous food delivery services for the respective customers in Pheonix.

Its notable product partnerships include ones with 1) Hyundai to obtain Hyundai IONIQ 5 EVs and retrofit with Waymo’s self-driving technology (October 2024), 2) Chinese automaker Geely to build robotaxis for the US market (December 2021); 3) Jaguar Land Rover to retrofit “Jaguar I-PACE” vehicles with Waymo’s self-driving technology (2018); and 4) Intel for sensor processing, general compute, and connectivity technologies (2017).