Waymo is Alphabet's autonomous-vehicle subsidiary and the largest US robotaxi operator. It began in 2009 as the Google self-driving car project and became a standalone Alphabet subsidiary under the Waymo name in 2016; it is reported within Alphabet's "Other Bets" segment and is not separately traded (Source: tsginvest.com). As of mid-2026 the company serves roughly 500,000 paid rides per week across ten US metros and is targeting one million weekly rides by the end of 2026 (Source: sherwood.news; claimsjournal.com).
Snapshot
Valuation
| Date | Valuation | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-02 | $126B | $16B Series D — roughly triple the ~$45B valuation of late 2024 | (Source: forbes.com) |
Users (weekly paid rides)
| Date | Weekly rides | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 (mid) | ~500,000 | (Source: sherwood.news) |
| 2025-12 | 450,000+ | (Source: same) |
| 2025-04 | 250,000 | (Source: same) |
| 2024-08 | 100,000 | (Source: same) |
| 2024-05 | 50,000 | (Source: same) |
| 2023-05 | 10,000 | (Source: same) |
Operations and expansion
Waymo operates paid robotaxi service in ten US metros — Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando — with expansion work under way toward New York, London, and Tokyo (Source: beginnersinai.org). Its Miami service launched in April 2026, three months before Tesla brought its competing Robotaxi service to the same city (Source: theinformation.com). Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana outlined the company's path to one million weekly trips in 2026 (Source: claimsjournal.com).
State regulation shapes where the service reaches. Waymo began manually mapping Portland streets around April 28, 2026 after Oregon's HB 4085 AV-deployment framework died at session end, cited by analysts as an example of state legislative friction shaping which cities receive robotaxis (Source: avmarketstrategist.substack.com). In California, the company cannot charge passengers for rides in its new Zeekr-manufactured Ojai robotaxi because the California Public Utilities Commission has not acted on its January 2026 application to expand its service area and add the vehicle to its fleet; the CPUC's enforcement division and Waymo agreed on an extension through September 25, 2026, after the agency asked in May 2026 for details on emergency-incident response — including a December 2025 San Francisco power outage that stranded more than 60 Waymos — and on unaccompanied minors riding in its cars (Source: wired.com).
On June 11, 2026, Waymo debuted an invite-only $29.99-per-month "Premier" membership offering cash back and faster pickups — its first consumer subscription tier (Source: bloomberg.com).
Funding
In February 2026 Waymo raised $16 billion in a Series D round at a $126 billion valuation, nearly triple its roughly $45 billion valuation of 15 months earlier, to fund global expansion (Source: forbes.com). The round accounted for roughly three-quarters of the $21.4 billion raised by autonomous-vehicle startups across 34 deals through April 15, 2026 (Source: avmarketstrategist.substack.com).
Technology
Waymo uses a lidar-heavy sensor stack, a design positioned against the camera-only approaches of Tesla FSD and XPeng's vision-only robotaxi (Source: avmarketstrategist.substack.com). It combines end-to-end learned models with a conventional rules-and-maps layer, telling Reuters that "end-to-end models aren't enough to guarantee safety at scale" (Source: reuters.com).
In-vehicle compute
Waymo disclosed the architecture of the compute system carried in its robotaxis' trunks for the first time in a blog post on August 20, 2026. Vice president of engineering Satish Jeyachandran and compute lead Daniel Rosenband wrote that the design follows three principles — responsive, ruggedized, and redundant — and that Waymo has scaled its in-vehicle compute twentyfold over the preceding eight years. The system includes a custom 5-nanometer ASIC whose dedicated front-end processing provides 1,000 TOPS. The post names AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, SanDisk, Socionext, and TSMC as hardware suppliers. Waymo operates around 4,000 vehicles in more than ten cities and conducts approximately 500,000 paid trips a week (Source: theverge.com).
Safety record and incidents
On April 22, 2026, Waymo released an independent-auditor analysis of 78 crashes over 100 million autonomous miles, concluding that its robotaxi fleet has a 3.5× lower injury rate than human drivers on comparable routes (Source: waymo.com). In AI as Normal Technology, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor offer Waymo's conservative, transparent safety culture as a case study in safety outcomes among AV developers.
In a January 2026 incident, a Waymo robotaxi struck a child near a Santa Monica school, an event described in coverage as an accountability test for AV liability (TechCrunch, January 29, 2026; see AI Robotics). On July 6, 2026, a Waymo robotaxi reported two 15-year-old passengers to San Mateo police and was remotely steered into a parking lot where officers waited; police determined the reported "gun" was a gel-bead toy (Source: 404media.co). The incident drew attention to robotaxis' capacity to surveil and detain their own passengers (AI and Surveillance) and gave concrete form to the CPUC's pending unaccompanied-minors inquiry.
Relationships
- deploys-in: Transportation — AI Deployment — primary sector page for AV deployment context
- related: Google DeepMind — fellow Alphabet unit; Waymo sits in Alphabet's Other Bets segment
- related: Tesla, Wayve — competing AV developers with camera-only and licensing-based approaches respectively
- regulated-by: DOT — Department of Transportation (AI Deployer) — federal AV oversight; state-level oversight by the California PUC
- related: AI Robotics, AI and Surveillance