TechCrunch, April 9, 2025
Nuro’s $106M raise backs its shift from delivery robots to licensing autonomy tech
Nuro has been developing L4 autonomous technology for over seven years. Since our founding in 2016, we’ve deployed our technology on public roads across three states and applied it to eight different autonomous vehicle platforms.
Throughout our company history, our focus has always been on building an industry-leading autonomous driving system that is designed for safety, reliability, and scalability. We believe that Nuro’s core technology — the Nuro Driver™ — is precisely that: a sophisticated autonomous driving system that combines scalable hardware and generalized self-driving software.
Nuro Driver introduction video
Our autonomy stack takes an AI first approach that allows us to develop technology that can scale and operate safely on public roads. Designed to learn and improve through data, the Nuro Driver runs on our ML-first perception and behavior system. We combine scalable, low-cost prior map data with learned robustness to real-world changes for confident navigation in urban environments. ML-first detection, tracking, and segmentation enable our perception engine, which allows the Nuro Driver to navigate complex scenarios. We also ensure accurate predictions by training our system on hundreds of millions of recorded human driving interactions. Finally, we prioritize safety through redundant systems, like rules-based checks on our ML components and a backup parallel autonomy stack.
Our custom hardware consists of an onboard sense and compute optimized over multiple vehicle platforms. Our 360° sensor suite includes cameras, radars, and lidars with proprietary sensor cleaning for all-weather performance. Our high performance computing system is built from automotive grade components and optimized for ML-based workloads. Finally we have a high reliability vehicle interface with a custom triple-redundant module that provides a hardware abstraction layer between the Nuro Driver and vehicle-specific systems such as braking, steering, and acceleration.
The Nuro Driver™ deployed across many vehicle types
Over the past seven years, we’ve deployed the Nuro Driver across eight different vehicle platforms (7 public, 1 confidential), showing its broad applicability on road. Nuro is known in the autonomous vehicle industry for our custom vehicles, which are zero-emission and purpose-built for goods delivery. Our third generation vehicle boasts the latest version of the Nuro Driver and is the culmination of many years of development and testing. We also operate a fleet of Prius vehicles outfitted with the Nuro Driver that we use for mapping and testing with safety drivers. Finally, we’ve deployed the Driver across additional partner platforms such as passenger vehicles and long haul trucks.
The Nuro Driver is proven on public roads and is driving today in California and Texas.
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