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).
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