Nuro, an autonomous delivery vehicle (ADV) startup, has raised USD 600 million in a Series D funding round led by Tiger Global Management with participation from Google, Toyota Motor Corp’s Woven Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 1, and Kroger, among others. The round values the company at USD 8.6 billion (vs USD 5 billion a year ago ) and brings its total funds raised to USD 2.1 billion.</ul> 

The company plans to use the funds to commercialize its offering nationwide, and scale production of its third-generation ADV at its newly announced facility in Nevada. Nuro expects to begin constructing the facility in December, aiming to complete it by next year.

In conjunction with the funding, Nuro also announced a five-year partnership with Google Cloud— a suite of cloud computing services, to support its self-driving simulations and data management ahead of commercialization. The companies also revealed that they will explore commercial opportunities together; however, neither party disclosed further details.

Analyst QuickTake: Nuro is a pioneer in the last-mile delivery automation space and is by far the highest funded private company in the industry (followed by drone-based delivery service provider Zipline’s USD 483 million funding). Today, Google joins several major brands such as Kroger, Walmart, and FedEx, to have partnered with or invested in Nuro, despite Google’s involvement in the ADV space via its own autonomous vehicle arm Waymo. Interestingly, both of Nuro’s co-founders have previously worked with Google’s self-driving car project (later spun off as Waymo) before establishing Nuro.