Dave Ferguson, the Kiwi founder of US self-driving car startup called Nuro, pictured during a September 2022 visit to the Herald's office in Auckland. Photo / Dean Purcell.
Dave Ferguson, the Kiwi founder of US self-driving car startup called Nuro, pictured during a September 2022 visit to the Herald's office in Auckland. Photo / Dean Purcell.
Nuro, a US maker of self-driving car technology founded by New Zealander Dave Ferguson, has raised US$203 million ($346m) in a funding round supported by Uber, plus the world’s most valuable company: AI chip maker Nvidia.
The money was raised at a US$6 billion ($10.2b) valuation - a staggering sumbut actually more a third less than the time of Nuro’s last venture capital raise three years ago, at the height of the pandemic, low-interest rate venture capital bubble.
Dave Ferguson, the Kiwi founder of US self-driving car startup called Nuro, pictured during a September 2022 visit to the Herald's office in Auckland. Photo / Dean Purcell.
The deal, announced by the companies overnight, is part of a wider scheme that last month saw Uber order 20,000 vehicles from US EV start-up Lucid as part of Uber’s putative push into self-driving robotaxis.
The Lucid cars will self-drive using the AI software platform developed by Nuro.
Nuro honed its self-driving tech during a pilot programme that saw it develop autonomous delivery vehicles for Domino’s and grocery and pharmacy chain Kroger over 2021 and 2022 in Houston (see video above).
Nuro took a stock-standard car from US EV maker Lucid, then added its self-driving hardware and software to turn it into a robotaxi. Uber has ordered 20,000 of the converted vehicles. A prototype is being tested in Nevada.
But it has now supplied the self-driving smarts for Lucid’s prototype robotaxi, being tested on closed roads in Las Vegas in collaboration with Uber.
In a company video, Ferguson says Nuro took a stock-standard Lucid Gravity EV, then added its self-driving hardware and software in just five weeks.
His firm plans to provide its autonomous driving technology to multiple car makers.
He arrived at Otago University in 1997 with plans to complete an LLB, he told the Herald during a visit to Auckland in September 2022, during a post-lockdown visit to accept a Kea World Class Award
Said snowballing led to a PhD in Robotics and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. “It was like a Disney World of robotics, it was and still is, and I just was totally hooked,” Ferguson says.
“I participated in a bunch of different robot applications, including a big competition called the Darpa Urban Challenge, where we had robots racing each other in a mock urban environment. And from that point, I really became very, very excited about self-driving vehicles in particular.”
(Darpa is the US Government’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which supports R&D across a broad spectrum of startups. It provided key funding during Rocket Lab’s early stages.)
Ferguson went on to join Google’s self-driving car project - today known as Waymo - as a principal engineer and machine-learning lead before leaving in 2016 to co-found Nuro with Zhu (also a principal engineer on Google’s driverless car project).
The pair’s first-generation driverless car was a modified Prius. Now, with their third-gen model, they designed their own vehicle from scratch.
“We use both short and long-range cameras - similar to the eyes we have - and lidar [laser imaging, detection and ranging] to shoot lasers and create a 3D point cloud of the whole environment. We also use radar to get distance and velocity measurements for other vehicles,” Ferguson told the Herald in 2022.
Thermal cameras are also in the mix, used to detect the heat signature of people and animals - particularly at night.
“And we also have microphones for emergency vehicles or siren detection,” Ferguson says.
The plethora of complementary sensors adds up to a system that can maintain a detailed virtual map of the Nuro-controlled vehicle’s world at all times.
Ex-pats make AI splash
Ferguson is one of several ex-pat Kiwis who’ve made a splash on the international AI scene.
Others include Paul Copplestone, whose US-based start-up Supabase - whose technology helps with “vibe coding” recently raised US$200m, Nic Lane, whose UK-based start-up Flower helps AI makers train their software, and Alex Kendall, cofounder of another self-driving tech firm, UK-based Wayve, which last year raised US$1.05b in a round backed by Microsoft and Nvidia.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
