Nuro raises $500M in new funding

November 17, 2020: Autonomous delivery company Nuro has backed $500M funding as announced on Monday. The company is now valued at $5billion, according to PitchBook. The companies R2 vehicle received first and so far only federal government approval from which is currently running in three states- California, Texas, and Arizona.

The current pandemic and the contactless delivery systems have helped the company in the corporate partnership and were successful with the Series C funding. As the online retail sales increased in the pandemic, now people are used to the new way of shopping and not the regular store visit shopping. The changes have to lead the technology companies to focus more on the research and development part to address the new normal.

Companies like Nuro is getting more investors as this will be the future in the retail industry. Retail giants like Walmart, Amazon are already working on a contact-less delivery system by investing in autonomous vehicles.

Nuro is working on selling this vehicle for commercial use. It is working on developing the third generation R3 vehicle that will be the mainstream and fully scalable vehicle. When we look at the innovation and, another side we would look at the cost of the technology as well. The current autonomous driving vehicles are costly to adapt, and the current funding to Nuro has kept some hope alive to come up with an economical vehicle concept.

Nuro is running the pilot project by delivering Kroger customer orders. The orders are delivered in a Toyota Prius vehicle with Nuro technology installed. Once the order arrives at the shopper’s door they get a text message to go out and collect the order. With the advanced technology from Nuro, the Retail industry wait for the best technology for contact-less delivery running in the streets shortly.