Waymo is raising $15 billion and it could reshape the robotaxi market

Waymo is raising $15 billion and it could reshape the robotaxi market

Alphabet-owned Waymo is in discussions to raise more than $15 billion in a new funding round that could land in early 2026, according to people familiar with the talks. If the round is priced at the top end, it would value Waymo at as much as $110 billion, a steep jump from its last fundraising milestone in 2024, according to a CNBC report.

For Waymo, the size of the round is the story. The company has spent years building and refining its self-driving system, but the current phase is less about proving the technology works and more about paying for the expensive work of expanding it: more vehicles, more cities, and the operational backbone required to run a ride service without human drivers.

A sharp jump from the 2024 valuation

Waymo’s last major funding round closed in October 2024. It raised $5.6 billion at a $45 billion valuation. Alphabet led that round and committed $5 billion as part of a multi-year plan, alongside existing investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, Silver Lake, Tiger Global and T. Rowe Price.

At the time, Waymo’s co-CEOs said the funding would be used to expand robotaxi operations. The latest talks suggest that the expansion push is moving faster and now needs a larger pool of capital, especially as the company tries to widen its lead before rivals catch up.

Robotaxi operations are scaling rapidly

Waymo currently provides paid, fully driverless rides to the public in multiple US markets, including Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta. In these locations, riders can take trips in vehicles operating without a human safety operator behind the wheel, which remains a meaningful differentiator in a sector where many services are still supervised.

The company has also been putting out numbers that point to growing utilisation. It recently crossed an estimated 450,000 paid rides per week. Waymo said it delivered 14 million trips during 2025 and is on track to end the year with more than 20 million total trips since the commercial service began in 2020.

Waymo’s footprint is also widening beyond the handful of cities where it already carries paying passengers. The company has said it is either operating, testing, or preparing to launch in 26 markets in the US and abroad, a signal that it is treating expansion as a pipeline rather than a series of one-off pilots.

Aggressive expansion plans for 2026

Waymo has laid out plans to open service next year in Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego and Washington, D.C. It has also announced an intention to launch in London in 2026, which would be its first service region outside the United States.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has indicated that Waymo could begin contributing “meaningfully” to Alphabet’s financials as soon as 2027. That timeline matters because it frames the fundraising not just as a technology bet, but as a bridge to a period when Waymo is expected to start showing a clearer business impact within Alphabet.

Competition is intensifying but gaps remain

The robotaxi race is no longer a quiet contest between startups. Amazon-owned Zoox has begun offering free driverless rides to the public in limited areas around the Las Vegas Strip and certain San Francisco neighbourhoods. Tesla has launched a Robotaxi-branded service in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area, but as of mid-December the vehicles still had human drivers or safety supervisors onboard.

Those differences underline where the competitive gap sits today. Waymo is trying to deepen its position in fully driverless commercial service, while many rivals are still working through the transition from supervised autonomy to true driverless operations at scale.

Why the funding matters

A $15 billion raise would give Waymo a larger war chest to build fleet capacity, support launches across multiple cities at once and manage the high costs that come with autonomous driving operations. The valuation being discussed also signals something broader: that major investors may be warming to the idea that robotaxis are nearing a phase where scale and execution matter as much as the underlying software.

The fundraising plans were first reported by The Information and later confirmed by CNBC. If the round is completed anywhere near the numbers being discussed, it would rank among the largest private capital raises in the autonomous vehicle sector, and it would reinforce Waymo’s role as the company setting the pace in the US robotaxi market.