By Chuck Martin
While self-driving cars are not expected to be a mass-market item anytime soon, that doesn’t mean that all funding heading that way has dried up.
Waymo, originally founded as the Google Self-driving Car Project, just closed an extension of a financing round announced in March, bringing the total size of the round to $3 billion.
T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Perry Creek Capital, Fidelity Management and Research Company and other external investors participated.
“We’ll use this injection of capital to deepen our investment in our people, our technology and our Waymo One and Waymo Via operations,” stated Waymo CEO John Krafcik in a blog post.
Earlier this year, Alphabet’s Waymo announced it was receiving a $2.25 billion investment to grow its driverless car program.
The first external investment, led by Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Mubadala Investment Company, included investments from Magna International, Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation and Alphabet.
Waymo has been at this for some time. The company recently disclosed that it started testing self-driving cars back in 2009, before the regulators were even regulating.
Other, more financially challenged entities aren’t expected to do so well.
