Waymo crosses major threshold amid nagging issues | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

A private company valued at $1 billion or more used to be so rare that venture capitalists began referring to such firms as “unicorns,” connoting something hardly ever seen.

Globally, there are nearly 1,700 privately held companies with valuations of at least $1 billion. They have raised a total of $1.23 trillion from private investors, with a combined total value of $7.8 trillion.

Back in 2013, when venture capital investor Aileen Lee coined the term, there were only 39 unicorns, according to a Railwaymen blog post. Yet stock prices have exploded so much over the past decade-plus that there were 91 decacorns (unicorns valued at more than $100 billion) in 2025.

SpaceX is the most valuable private company in the world, with a “post-money value” valuation of $800 billion, followed by OpenAI and ByteDance with valuations of $500 billion and $480 billion, respectively, according to Crunchbase.

Google subsidiary and autonomous driving startup Waymo is one of those decacorns, with a post-money valuation of $126 billion following its latest funding round.

Google’s Waymo is a fundraising powerhouse.

Photo by PATRICK T&period; FALLON on Getty Images

Waymo raises $16 billion in funding round

It has been only about a year and a half since Waymo last raised money, yet its most recent funding round shows just how much progress the company has made in that short time.

The 2024 series C round raised $5.6 billion at a $45 billion valuation. This time around, the company raised $16 billion at a $126 billion post-money valuation.

A $5 billion multi-year investment from its parent company, Alphabet, led the last round. This time around, in addition to a round led by Alphabet, new investors such as Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital joined previous institutional investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, and others.

“We are no longer proving a concept; we are scaling a commercial reality,” Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov said in a blog post.

“As a technology leader in the trillion-dollar transportation market, Waymo has moved beyond research milestones to achieve operational excellence, tripling its weekly paid rides in just one year while maintaining customer delight,” said Konstantine Buhler, Partner at Sequoia.

While Waymo’s financial future has been secured for years to come, its regulatory future has been less secure after recent hiccups.

Despite recall, Waymo can’t seem to shake dangerous school bus issue

In December, after weeks of pressure from the Austin Independent School District, Waymo issued a voluntary recall of its autonomous vehicles due to a software issue that it said it had already patched.

Waymo quick facts:

Waymo One available 24/7 to customers in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area, as of July 2025.
Founded in 2009.
Passed first U.S. state self-driving test in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2012, reported IEEE Spectrum.
Spun out from Alphabet as a separate subsidiary in 2016.

In November, the Austin Independent School District publicized videos of the company’s robotaxis driving past Austin school buses with their stop signs and crossing bars deployed.

Waymo robotaxis were committing school bus traffic violations an average of 1.5 times per week in Austin, Texas, from the start of the school year to November 20.

On Dec. 5, Waymo announced that it will file for a voluntary recall “early next week” to address the issue.

At the time, the company said it had identified the issue that caused the violations. The company also said it believes the software updates it implemented by November 17 “have meaningfully improved performance to a level better than human drivers in this important area.”

But this wasn’t the first time Waymo faced scrutiny for this issue.

The NHTSA opened a Preliminary Evaluation in October to investigate an estimated 2,000 Waymo 5th-gen automated driving system-equipped vehicles, following a Georgia media report that revealed the same school bus violation.

The agency opened another investigation following the Austin ISD’s actions.

“We’re incredibly proud of our safety record, which shows Waymo is helping make roads safer where we operate,” Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina told TheStreet.

“We are committed to constantly improving, partnering closely with the local communities we serve, and working with leaders across the country to make transportation safer and more accessible for all.”

Waymo admits that fatal crash mitigation data are incomplete

After consistently declining for 30 years, roadway fatalities in the U.S. have risen over the past decade.

Fatalities jumped to nearly 35,000 in 2015, an 8% increase from the year prior, and rose another 6.5% the following year, according to U.S. Transportation Department data. Fatalities peaked in 2021 at 43,230, representing a 10.8% year-over-year increase from the previous year.

Waymo, the most widely adopted autonomous driving company, has the most passenger miles under its belt, so it gets more scrutiny than its rivals, Tesla Robotaxi and Zoox.

“Waymo is already improving road safety in the cities where we operate, achieving more than a tenfold reduction in serious injury or worse crashes,” Trent Victor, Waymo’s director of safety research and best practices, recently told Bloomberg.

Waymo has driven approximately 127 million miles across its fleet and has been involved in at least two crashes with fatalities, MSN reported. However, the autonomous vehicle was not directly found responsible for either of them.

The problem is that this actually represents a higher death-per-mile rate than that of average American drivers, who travel about 123 million miles for every fatality, according to Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Victor acknowledged that “there is not yet sufficient mileage to make statistical conclusions about fatal crashes alone,” adding that “as we accumulate more mileage, it will become possible to make statistically significant conclusions on other subsets of data, including fatal crashes as its own category.”