The latest status report of the two giants of autonomous driving: Waymo attracts investment, Cruise is hiring madly

Leifeng.com New Intelligent Driving Note: In this spring when the weather is still cold, the autonomous driving industry has become a hotbed of big news. Waymo and GM Cruise, which dominate the seven seas and five continents, have both revealed big news: the former will lower its profile to accept external investment, and the latter will recruit talents and add 1,000 engineers to the team before the end of the year.

After launching its self-driving taxi service in Phoenix at the end of last year, everyone thought Waymo was ready to start reaping the fruits of victory.

As a result, the "big brother" of autonomous driving has continued to make moves since the beginning of the year. First, it will build a factory in Michigan to provide a steady stream of new forces for the fleet. Then, Waymo, which is a little anxious about the progress of commercialization, suddenly announced that it will sell lidar to make money.

Now, Waymo has gone a step further and announced that it will raise funds from outside. This is unprecedented, because Waymo, backed by its parent company Alphabet, has always been seen by the outside world as a company with plenty of money.

Foreign technology media The Information quoted insiders as saying that Waymo has been in contact with and seeking support from external investors, and European giants such as Volkswagen may become the driving force for Waymo to continue moving forward. It is understood that in this round of financing, Waymo's valuation will be several times that of Cruise, while Cruise, which is backed by GM, SoftBank and Honda, has a valuation of $15 billion.

Waymo has not yet responded to this news.

Waymo, which is already ten years old, is an absolute money-burning machine. Even without counting various research and development expenses, the 20 million miles of test mileage accumulated by Waymo's test cars on the road have cost a lot of money. According to estimates by its former employees and industry insiders, Waymo may ask Alphabet for $1 billion in "living expenses" a year.

It is reported that this external financing was promoted by Waymo CFO Ruth Porat, who wanted to use this move to cut costs and show the world the value of Waymo. However, Alphabet, which has spent a lot of effort on this project, does not want to "poke" a big hole in Waymo, and the equity it released is quite limited.

A few years ago, Waymo was valued at $4.5 billion, but analysts now believe that the leading autonomous driving company is worth more than $175 billion, easily leaving its main competitors Uber, Tesla, GM and Ford far behind.

By 2030, Waymo's revenue is likely to reach $114 billion.

If it were any other company, the announcement of external financing would not be surprising at all, but Waymo is different. After all, it is backed by Alphabet, which has a market value of US$817 billion. The US$100 billion cash flow on its account is enough to continue to allow Waymo to live a comfortable life.

But it’s typical of Alphabet that many of its devotedly-incubated “moonshot” projects eventually rely on external help, especially after competitors have opened up.

Cruise, which is closely following Waymo, is the best example.

In mid-2018, GM decided to accept a $2.25 billion investment from SoftBank Vision Fund, and Japanese giant Honda also chose to invest in Cruise to buy a ticket for its future. In addition, as the Ford-Volkswagen alliance becomes more solid, Volkswagen may become one of the sponsors of Ford Argo AI in the future.

As the result of Google's self-driving project, Waymo was officially spun off from its parent company in 2016. If external financing goes smoothly, Waymo may completely break away from Alphabet in the future and become a truly independent company.

In the next nine months, General Motors Cruise will also make big moves - the number of engineers will double.

As a company that is going to launch an autonomous driving taxi service by the end of the year, Cruise is really energetic. It seems that SoftBank and Honda's money is quite powerful. The two companies have invested a total of US$5 billion.

In order to promote this "1,000-person recruitment" plan, Cruise also poached Arden Hoffman from Dropbox. This female general made great contributions to Dropbox's expansion, and now she has taken office as Cruise's head of human resources.

Currently, Cruise has more than 1,000 employees and is expanding its San Francisco office to accommodate more employees. In addition to its old headquarters, Cruise is also planning to acquire Dropbox's headquarters this year, which is twice the size of Cruise's current office space.

"Arden has had a tremendous impact on Dropbox over the past four years, helping us scale our team and culture to over 2,300 employees. We will miss her leadership, her decisiveness, and her sense of humor. While we are heartbroken by her departure, we wish her the best of luck at Cruise," a Dropbox spokesperson said in a statement.

Prior to joining Dropbox, Arden Hoffman worked in HR at Google.

This expansion plan is also the result of recent changes in Cruise's senior management.

Last December, General Motors President Dan Ammann became Cruise's CEO. This big shot has been GM's president since 2014, and it was he who led GM's acquisition of Cruise in 2016.

As the co-founder of Cruise, Kyle Vogt gave up the position of CEO and took the position of CTO.

Once upon a time, Cruise was just a small startup with only 40 employees. Now, in addition to attracting talents from Silicon Valley, Cruise has also extended its tentacles to Seattle, where the office will accommodate 200 engineers in the future.

As the battle for autonomous driving gradually deepens - the California Department of Motor Vehicles has issued more than 60 autonomous driving test licenses, the industry's competition for software, robots and AI engineers has entered a white-hot stage. Cruise's plan of "spending money to grab people" may lead to a new round of talent war in the autonomous driving industry.

According to Leifeng.com's New Intelligent Driving, Cruise may adopt a combination of traditional recruitment and acquisition to recruit these 1,000 engineers.

Last year, Cruise acquired Zippy.ai, which has been developing robots for last-mile grocery and package delivery. Interestingly, Cruise did not want Zippy's products or intellectual property, but the company's co-founders, including Gabe Sibley, Alex Flint, and Chris Broaddus, who have now joined the Cruise team. In addition, Cruise also acquired Strobe, a lidar sensor manufacturer, in 2017.

Waymo is raising investment, and Cruise is hiring like crazy. The two companies at the top of the autonomous driving camp are each making their own unique moves, and the battle for funds and talent will intensify.

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