Autonomous delivery startup Nuro lays off employees amid unfavourable fundraising environment
Nuro is set to lay off 30% of its employees, or about 340 people, across the company.
Co-founders Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu said in a blog post that the plan was to shift resources away from commercial operations and toward R&D.
“For most of Nuro’s existence, we have operated in a favourable fundraising environment and have been fortunate to attract significant funding from top investors,” they commented.
“But over the past year and a half, capital markets in general, and deep tech funding in particular, have significantly retracted. Recent bank failures and talk about an impending US recession signal that this shift isn’t going to revert soon.”
“We’ve entered a new capital environment that will shape the next few years or more. In this new reality, we need to be more efficient with our balance sheet.”
They added: “There is a fundamental tension in the development of self driving between capital efficiency and speed to building an initial service. We have historically invested heavily in deploying commercial services and have learned a great deal from our customers.”
“But commercial deployments come at a significant cost, both in terms of resources and autonomy focus. And until the unit economics of these services make sense, we think it is prudent to focus on what we can do efficiently as a startup.”
While Nuro previously developed autonomy systems, designed and built custom vehicles, and deployed commercial pilots with partners in parallel, it will now pursue “a more sequential development model”.
The blog post noted: “Recent advancements in AI have increased our confidence and ability to reach true generalised and scaled autonomy faster. We have invested in AI and ML from day one, and a large portion of our autonomy stack is already directly learnable from data.”
‘Our focus now will be on making our autonomy stack even more data driven, enabling us to scale to larger operating areas even more rapidly.”
“In addition, we will delay the previously planned production line of our third generation vehicle, reduce the scale of our commercial pilots in the near-term, and explore more efficient deployment models with partners.”
“This focus on accelerating autonomy progress and sequential development of our service will provide a leaner model for AV development, and will more than double our runway from about 1.5 years to nearly 3.5 years.”
The blog post concluded: “We firmly believe a future where autonomous vehicles improve daily life is both exciting and inevitable. With our new approach, we will not only get through this economic downturn, but we hope to emerge stronger on the other side.”
“Our mission to better everyday life through robotics and our product vision to build a local autonomous delivery service remain intact, and our dedication and resolve to achieve them is stronger than ever.”
This is the second time in less than a year that Nuro, which has raised $2.13 billion in total to date, has let workers go in a bid to cut costs and extend capital runway.
In November, it laid off around 300 people, or 20%, of its workforce.
Continue reading…