Nuro


Nuro is an American robotics company based in Mountain View, California and founded by Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson. Nuro develops autonomous delivery vehicles, and was the first company to receive an autonomous exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration since its vehicles are designed to carry goods instead of humans.

History

Zhu was one of the founding engineers of Google's self driving car project, Waymo, serving as the principal software engineer. Ferguson helped lead Carnegie Mellon University's robotics team to victory in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge before also joining Google's self driving car project in 2011 as its principal computer-vision and machine-learning engineer.
Zhu and Ferguson founded Nuro in September 2016. It has raised a total of $92M from Greylock Partners and Gaorong Capital.
In February 2019 Nuro raised $940M from SoftBank Group, which valued the company at $2.7B. Nuro said it will use the funds to expand its delivery service to new areas, add new partners, expand its fleet and grow its team. In September 2019, the company was ranked No.10 on LinkedIn's Top 50 Startups List for 2019.

Partnerships

In June 2018, Nuro announced its first partnership with Kroger to test the fully autonomous delivery of groceries. On June 17, 2019 Nuro announced its partnership with Domino's Pizza. Nuro and Domino's announced that the service would launch in Houston later in 2019. The company began prescription delivery through CVS Pharmacy in May 2020.

Product

Nuro officially launched in January 2018, revealing its first product, the R1. The R1 is an electric self-driving local commerce delivery vehicle. It weighs, and is just over tall and about half the width of a sedan. This vehicle is designed to carry only cargo, with space for 12 grocery bags in the first model. The pilot launched on August 16, 2018 in Scottsdale, Arizona at a Fry's Food and Drug store. Initially, self-driving Toyota Prius cars were used for the pilot. On December 18, 2018, the R1, a custom unmanned vehicle, was launched into the pilot. In February 2020, Nuro announced its plans to test R2, the second generation of self-driving vehicles, in Houston, Texas.