Partnering With Waymo
TLDR
- Sequoia co-leads Waymo’s $16B round alongside Dragoneer and DST Global, backing 400K+ weekly autonomous rides across six U.S. cities.
Key Takeaways
- Waymo logged 15M+ paid rides in 2025 and now runs 400K+ rides per week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, and Las Vegas.
- The company has driven 127M fully autonomous miles, achieving a 90% reduction in serious injury crashes versus human drivers.
- Waymo plans to add 20 cities in 2026, primarily U.S. markets with select international expansion, using Miami’s launch as the operational template.
- Co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana (operations, regulatory, community) and Dmitri Dolgov (technical lead since the 2009 Google Self-Driving Car Project) run the company.
- Sequoia frames transportation as a $7T global market and positions autonomous mobility as a defining technology transition comparable to smartphones or the internet.
Why It Matters
- 1.19M people die in road traffic annually; Waymo’s 90% serious-injury-crash reduction, now at commercial scale, converts a safety claim into an auditable operational record.
- Each new city and mile strengthens a compounding data flywheel, giving Waymo structural advantages that are difficult for later entrants to replicate quickly.
- A $16B raise at this stage signals that institutional capital views autonomous ride-hailing as infrastructure, not a moonshot, shifting how future rounds and regulatory conversations will be framed.
Sequoia Capital · 2026-02-02 · Read the original
