Partnering with Waymo to Reshape how the World Moves

1,190,000. That’s the number of road traffic deaths in a year. They are a leading cause of death for children and young adults worldwide. 

Ninety percent. That’s the reduction in serious injury crashes Waymo has achieved across 127 million fully autonomous miles. The technology to prevent most of these tragedies isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s operating at commercial scale across multiple cities, and it’s ready to expand.

Today, we’re honored to announce that Sequoia is co-leading Waymo’s $16 billion investment round alongside Dragoneer and DST Global. It reflects a simple truth: the age of autonomous mobility has arrived.

Why This Matters

The impact of autonomous vehicles will be profound. Beyond the safety improvements, which matter most, autonomous vehicles could return trillions of hours to humanity that are currently spent behind the wheel. They can bring mobility for those who cannot drive. They can offer cleaner, more efficient cities. They may fundamentally reshape urban life for the better.

At Sequoia, we help the daring build legendary companies. It is daring to work to automate a task humans spend trillions of hours on a year. It is legendary to massively decrease the loss of human lives and reshape mobility

The Business Reality

The numbers tell a remarkable story: Waymo delivered more than 15 million paid rides in 2025 alone. Today there are more than 400K rides every week across six major U.S. metropolitan areas. These aren’t test rides or demos. These are people relying on Waymo to get to work, to visit family, to live their lives.

Every mile driven makes the system safer. Every ride makes the experience better. Each city launched creates more value for the next. This is a compounding virtuous data cycle. We believe Waymo has built not only one of the most advanced manifestations of AI in the physical world, but also a vital service that will become as fundamental to modern life as smartphones or the internet itself.

The Market Opportunity

Transportation is a $7 trillion global market, and the shift to autonomous mobility is one of the defining technology transitions of our time.

What drew us to Waymo was not only the technology, but also the operational excellence required to deploy that technology at scale in the real world. Building an autonomous vehicle in a lab is hard. Building one that works safely is harder. Building one that works safely in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, and Las Vegas, in rain and shine, day and night, while maintaining customer delight and regulatory trust, requires a rare combination of technical depth and operational sophistication.

The Team

Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov are exceptional leaders. Tekedra brings operational rigor and regulatory understanding, combined with the community trust-building required to bring autonomous vehicles to new markets. Dmitri is one of the world’s foremost experts in autonomous driving, having led Waymo’s technical development since its inception as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009.

What struck us most in our conversations with the Waymo team was their clarity of purpose. They are building Waymo not as a technology demonstration but as infrastructure that will reshape how the world moves. That mission orientation, combined with their execution track record, gives us tremendous conviction in what they will accomplish in the years ahead.

What’s Next

We’ve watched Waymo achieve something special: moving from cutting-edge research to commercial deployment, with the operational maturity and safety record to support continued expansion. 

We’ve studied Waymo’s safety data, ridden in their vehicles, met their team, and observed their operations firsthand. 

With this capital, Waymo is planning significant expansion. They’re targeting 20 additional cities this year, primarily across the United States with select international markets. The recent Miami launch demonstrated their approach: enter a market, earn trust through safety, scale rapidly through operational excellence. They’re scaling their fleet and building the team required to meet rapidly growing demand for autonomous mobility.

We’re excited to support the Waymo team as they expand the safety and magic of the Waymo Driver to more cities and, over time, to the world.

We’re early on this journey and honored to be part of it. Let’s ride.

To learn more about Waymo, visit waymo.com. To join the team building the future of transportation, see their careers page.