Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company and a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google's parent company. It began in 2009 as the Google self-driving car project led by Sebastian Thrun and was spun out as an independent Alphabet company named Waymo in 2016. The company's mission is to make it safe and easy for people and goods to move around.
Waymo develops the Waymo Driver, a full-stack autonomous driving system that combines lidar, radar, cameras, and machine-learning-based perception, prediction, and planning. The system powers Waymo One, a commercial ride-hailing robotaxi service that operates fully driverless vehicles in multiple U.S. metropolitan areas, as well as Waymo Via for goods delivery and trucking research.
The company has raised multiple multi-billion-dollar external funding rounds in addition to Alphabet's backing, drawing investors such as institutional and strategic partners to scale fleet operations and expand into new cities. It is widely viewed as the most advanced and operationally mature provider of fully autonomous ride-hailing.
Waymo competes with other autonomous-vehicle and robotaxi efforts, differentiating itself through years of public road testing, a strong safety record relative to human benchmarks, and one of the largest fleets of fully driverless commercial vehicles in operation.
For cities, riders, and partners seeking proven driverless mobility, Waymo is the category leader, though its service is geographically limited and capital-intensive to scale.