Waymo
Canvas Category Software : Operational Technology : Transportation
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World’s Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo One, a fully autonomous ride-hailing service, and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over one million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving tens of millions of miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 13+ U.S. states.At Waymo, we are mission-driven and believe deeply in the opportunity of autonomous driving technology to improve mobility and make people’s lives better. We are united by purpose and responsibility (for our employees and riders alike). We are looking for kind, committed, employees who have integrity, dream big, work together as one team and create a sense of belonging for one another that is the foundation of our culture. We want each team member to feel welcomed and included in every step of our exciting journey.
Assembly Line
Introducing Waymo's Research on an End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving
At Waymo, we have been at the forefront of AI and ML in autonomous driving for over 15 years, and are continuously contributing to advancing research in the field. Now, we are sharing our latest research paper on an End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving (EMMA).
Powered by Gemini, a multimodal large language model developed by Google, EMMA employs a unified, end-to-end trained model to generate future trajectories for autonomous vehicles directly from sensor data. Trained and fine-tuned specifically for autonomous driving, EMMA leverages Gemini’s extensive world knowledge to better understand complex scenarios on the road.
Our research demonstrates how multimodal models, such as Gemini, can be applied to autonomous driving and explores pros and cons of the pure end-to-end approach. It highlights the benefit of incorporating multimodal world knowledge, even when the model is fine-tuned for autonomous driving tasks that require good spatial understanding and reasoning skills. Notably, EMMA demonstrates positive task transfer across several key autonomous driving tasks: training it jointly on planner trajectory prediction, object detection, and road graph understanding leads to improved performance compared to training individual models for each task. This suggests a promising avenue of future research, where even more core autonomous driving tasks could be combined in a similar, scaled-up setup.
Investing to bring the Waymo Driver to more riders
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve closed an oversubscribed investment round of $5.6 billion, led by Alphabet, with continued participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, and T. Rowe Price. With this latest investment, we will continue to welcome more riders into our Waymo One ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and in Austin and Atlanta through our expanded partnership with Uber. We’ll also continue advancing the Waymo Driver — our AI-powered autonomous driving system — to support a variety of business applications over time.
Alphabet to invest $5B in Waymo, its self-driving vehicle unit
Google parent company Alphabet plans to invest $5 billion in Waymo, its unit for autonomous vehicles, over the next few years. Alphabet CTO Ruth Porat announced the news during the company’s quarterly financial results call.
Prior to this, Waymo raised $2.25 billion in its first external funding round in 2020. The company raised another $2.5 billion in 2021 in a round that included funding from Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity Management & Research Company and more.
The new funding round will enable Waymo to continue to build the world’s leading autonomous driving company, he said.