Nuro: From R2/R3 Delivery Bots to Licensing Its AV Software

What Is Nuro?

Nuro is a US autonomous-vehicle company founded in 2016 by Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, both former engineers on Google's self-driving car project (the effort that became Waymo). The company set out to build small, occupantless electric vehicles purpose-made to carry goods instead of people, aiming at local delivery rather than ride-hailing.

Nuro's early product was hardware: a line of low-speed, driverless delivery bots called R1, R2, and R3, tested with retail and restaurant partners. In September 2024 the company changed direction, ending plans to manufacture and operate its own delivery fleet and refocusing entirely on licensing its self-driving software stack, called the Nuro Driver, to automakers and mobility companies.

This page covers Nuro's delivery-vehicle era, the 2024 pivot to licensing, the Nuro Driver software, the 2025 Uber-Lucid robotaxi partnership, and the company's funding history.

The R2 And R3 Delivery Vehicles

Nuro's R2 was a compact, low-speed electric vehicle with no steering wheel, pedals, or seats, built solely to carry cargo in two side compartments with gull-wing doors. In February 2020, the R2 became the first vehicle in the US to receive a formal exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's occupant-focused vehicle safety standards, such as mirror and windshield requirements written for human drivers, which let Nuro deploy up to 5,000 R2 units without a driver on board.

The R2 first ran grocery and pizza delivery trials in Houston and later expanded to other Texas and Arizona markets with retail partners. Nuro subsequently developed the R3, a next-generation version of the same occupantless delivery concept, but the R3 program was shelved before Nuro scaled it into a full commercial fleet.

If you're comparing Nuro's old delivery-bot approach with the sidewalk and street delivery robots still operating today, see our delivery robots guide and our food delivery robots guide for who is still running occupantless delivery fleets.

• R1: Nuro's original low-speed delivery prototype.
• R2: occupantless electric bot; first NHTSA driverless-vehicle exemption, Feb. 2020.
• R3: next-generation delivery vehicle; shelved before wide commercial rollout.
• All three were built for cargo only, with no seats, steering wheel, or pedals.

The 2024 Pivot: From Delivery Fleet To Licensing

In September 2024, Nuro announced it was ending its own-and-operate delivery vehicle business, including further R3 production and fleet operations, to concentrate on licensing its fourth-generation Nuro Driver software to other vehicle manufacturers and mobility operators. Reporting at the time described the move as a pivot from building and running delivery bots to selling the autonomy stack underneath them.

The Nuro Driver is described by the company as a Level 4 autonomy system, meaning it is designed to handle driving within a defined operating area without a human driver, but not everywhere or in every condition. Rather than manufacturing its own vehicles going forward, Nuro's business model shifted to integrating that software into vehicles built by partners.

This is a common move in the autonomous-vehicle industry once a company has proven its software works: it is far cheaper to license driving software into someone else's manufacturing and fleet operations than to build, certify, and run a fleet of custom vehicles alone.

The Uber-Lucid Robotaxi Partnership

In July 2025, Nuro announced a partnership with Uber and Lucid Motors to build a global robotaxi program. The plan calls for Uber to deploy up to 20,000 or more Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with the Nuro Driver over six years, available exclusively through the Uber app, with Uber and its fleet partners owning and operating the vehicles rather than Nuro.

As of 2026, prototype robotaxis built on this partnership have been running on Nuro's closed-course testing grounds in Las Vegas, and Nuro has received a California permit to test Lucid Gravity vehicles on public roads without a safety driver. Early rider test rides began in California in April 2026, and the companies have targeted the first commercial robotaxi service for late 2026 in a major US city.

This is Nuro's first large-scale commercial deployment as a pure software licensor rather than a vehicle operator, and it is the clearest sign yet of how the 2024 pivot is playing out in practice. For background on how driverless ride services reach riders once they launch, see our robotaxi service explainer.

Nuro's Founders And Funding

Nuro was co-founded by Dave Ferguson, who led machine learning and computer vision on Google's self-driving program, and Jiajun Zhu, who spent about eight years at Google before co-founding Nuro. Both left Google's self-driving effort, which later became Waymo, to start a company focused specifically on autonomous delivery rather than passenger ride-hailing.

Nuro has raised funding across multiple rounds since 2018, including roughly $940 million from SoftBank's Vision Fund in 2019 at a reported $2.7 billion valuation, and a $600 million Series D in November 2021 led by Tiger Global Management that valued the company at roughly $8.6 billion. A more recent Series E round of about $203 million has been reported at a lower valuation near $6 billion, with backers including Uber, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Greylock Partners, and NVIDIA.

Uber's investment is notable because it sits alongside the operating partnership: Uber is both a customer buying access to the Nuro Driver through the Lucid robotaxi deal and a direct investor in the company. For ongoing coverage of Nuro and other autonomous-vehicle developments, see our robotics news hub.