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Waymo, Alphabet's automotive subsidiary could raise foreign capital for the first time to "at least several times" an assessment of Cruise, General Motors' self-driving utility, worth nearly $ 15 billion, according to a report released Monday by The Information.
We contacted our sources to confirm. Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Waymo, currently celebrating its tenth anniversary, is a cash-intensive unit. The raising of capital from outside investors, which would have been encouraged by Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, would help contain costs and allow Alphabet to post the Waymo valuation for the first time in several years. However, Alphabet does not want to give up too much equity in the company, previously known as "Project Chauffeur", according to The Information report.
Waymo, a few years ago, represented a value of $ 4.5 billion, although analysts claim that it could exceed a value of up to $ 175 billion on the basis of estimates of future revenues . For the context, a valuation of $ 100 billion north gives Waymo a considerable lead over Uber, Tesla, GM and Ford.
Google, currently selling a market capitalization of $ 817 billion, can afford to support Waymo. However, this is not the first time that the search engine has been looking for third-party investors for its own Moonshot bets, instead of continuing to deploy only its own capital to companies. Verily, a Google-owned life science research and engineering firm, and Makani, a wind power company also from Google X, sold shares in Silver Lake and Shell, respectively .
For its part, Cruise has also sought external capital since its acquisition by GM in 2016 for $ 581 million. In mid-2018, The Vision Fund invested $ 2.25 billion in Cruise, giving SoftBank a nearly 20% stake in GM's self-driving business.
Waymo became a standalone company in 2016 and is now headed by General Manager John Krafcik, Porat, and Chief Technology Officer Dmitry Dolgov. The company made headlines at the end of last year by launching Waymo One, a commercial robotaxi service in the Phoenix area – its first profitable venture. More recently, Waymo announced that it would sell its custom sensors for light detection and telemetry, or LiDAR, to companies not belonging to the autonomous auto industry, in another move aimed at to profitability.
According to estimates, Waymo could generate revenues of $ 114 billion in 2030.
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