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For the past Two months later, a pair of funny toothy-looking creatures was busy shopping at the Fry's Food supermarket at the home of Scottsdale residents in Arizona. : Nuro, the autonomous start-up that builds and operates tiny PLCs, announced this morning that it has received a $ 940 million investment from SoftBank Vision.
The agreement, the largest investment in a self-sustaining business in recent months, is in line with SoftBank's progress in the transport sector: the Japanese giant has also invested in Uber, Mapbox and the ParkJockey "parking deck". Last year, he injected $ 2.25 billion into General Motor's autonomous arm, Cruise.
Nuro, which focuses on local deliveries, logically complements the SoftBank alignment. The Silicon Valley start-up was founded in 2016 by Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, members of Google's self-driving effort (from the Waymo Autonomous Alphabet). Over the past two and a half years, the company has set up a team of 200 full-time employees and a hundred entrepreneurs, and produced a few copies of its R-1 robot, a little smaller that's a standard sedan. It can carry more things than sidewalk crawlers developed by companies like Marble, and even though it's moving on the street, its slender profile makes traveling safer, Ferguson says.
Last summer, Nuro announced the conclusion of an agreement with the chain of Kroger grocery stores (owner of Fry's Food) to deliver supplies to some Scottsdale customers. In the fall, he launched a version of the service using his technology on modified Toyota Prius cars. keep the safety operators behind the wheel. In December, the team sent two non-human R-1s into the field, each with a staffed pursuit vehicle. The presence of these humans allows Nuro to study the practical elements of the service, such as how customers manage to get the most out of a robot. The next step, says Ferguson, will be to let them go solo and watch them from afar.
Nuro will use SoftBank's money to build an adequate fleet, extend service beyond a single Scottsdale postal code and work with new partners. "Now we are really trying to make it a real thing," says Ferguson. And the company is looking to generate revenue as soon as possible. "We will not do research and development before five years." He refused to indicate where the next service could work, somewhere with a "significant population". Nuro has also granted a software license to the autonomous truck start-up, Ike, and Ferguson says similar offers are a possibility.
Until now, cases of using self-driving technology have mainly focused on taxi services and trucking over long distances, but Nuro seems to be looking for a good niche. The distance traveled by average shipments in the United States has fallen well below 100 miles in recent years. "Last mile delivery is a fast-growing business," said Andrew Tipping, head of PwC's Strategy & Consulting Transportation Team. Grocery shopping is not the easiest thing to do in general – they are heavy, cheap and require varying degrees of refrigeration – but Americans could spend up to $ 100 billion a year in Online grocery store by 2022, according to a study by Neilsen. "It's a very important market, I'm sure one of these companies will tackle," says Tipping.
Indeed, the big delivery man himself made a big step in the autonomous driving space last week: Amazon is now an investor in Aurora Innovation, the start-up barred by Ferguson and the former boss of Liu at Google , Chris Urmson. Because it's good to move a lot of things super efficiently with humans, it's probably best to do them with robots. And while it means that you do not have a human on hand to carry the bags on the doorstep or that you know how to leave them if the customer is not at home, this could make the delivery service cheaper.
It's no wonder that, while Ferguson says Nuro's mission is to extend the benefits of robotics in general, it is currently focused on the delivery industry. People love getting their stuff, especially if it means they do not have to spend their Saturday afternoons with a car full of kids and a trunk filled with food. "There is a remarkable opportunity to give people the best hours of the day," says Ferguson. And his little robot – now very well financed – could be the trick that allows this return. As long as people are always ready to cross their front door to join her at the edge of the sidewalk.
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