Cruise develops and operates fully autonomous robotaxis and has been relaunching limited, human-supervised fleets in Phoenix, Dallas and Houston to validate its technology. The company paused broad operations after a series of safety incidents, including an October pedestrian injury in San Francisco that led California regulators to suspend its permits. Cruise is operating smaller fleets with human safety drivers while seeking to rebuild public trust and regain regulatory approvals. General Motors announced an $850 million capital infusion to bridge funding as Cruise returns to testing and limited service. GM has cut Cruise spending in 2024 by “hundreds of millions” versus 2023, but company spokespeople say Cruise still needs additional funding to advance the technology. Per Crunchbase, Cruise has raised over $15 billion to date, and GM has spent and lost over $8 billion on Cruise since acquiring it in 2016 (including a $3.48 billion loss in 2023). Cruise operates a driverless robotaxi service, testing autonomous Chevy Bolt vehicles throughout San Francisco. The company has opened its driverless service to the public with free rides available via a public waitlist. Initial operations are limited to certain streets in Haight-Ashbury, the Richmond District, Chinatown, and Pacific Heights and run during night hours (11 pm–5 am) as part of a methodical rollout strategy. Cruise has nearly all permits required by the California DMV to test and deploy drivered and driverless vehicles, including one that allows it to carry the public, and it has applied to the California Public Utilities Commission to charge for rides but has not yet received that permit. The company has allowed employees to nominate members of the public for early rides and previously ran a friends-and-family program under NDA. Cruise recently received a $1.35 billion investment from SoftBank Vision Fund as it moves toward commercialization. Leadership shifted recently with CEO Dan Ammann's departure and co-founder Kyle Vogt now serving as interim CEO and CTO. Cruise is General Motors' self-driving subsidiary building purpose-built electric autonomous vehicles and a ridesharing service. It is developing the Cruise Origin — a shuttle-like, wheel- and pedal-free vehicle designed for highway speeds with a roomy interior and seats that face each other — in a multiyear collaboration with GM and investor Honda. Preproduction of the Origin has begun at GM's Factory ZERO (the renovated Detroit‑Hamtramck plant), and the first 100 preproduction Origins will be assembled over the summer and tested at GM's Milford proving grounds. Commercial production of the Origin is expected to begin in 2023, and hundreds of purpose-built Origins will be purchased as they roll off the assembly line. Cruise tapped a $5 billion line of credit from GM Financial to pay for the vehicles, a financing move that CEO Dan Ammann said pushes Cruise’s total war chest to more than $10 billion as it prepares for commercialization. GM has invested heavily in Factory ZERO — $2.2 billion into the plant plus an additional $800 million in supplier tooling and related projects — and the plant is expected to create more than 2,200 jobs when fully operational. Cruise develops autonomous robotaxis and has run delivery experiments, positioning itself around commercial-scale autonomous mobility and last-mile delivery. The company aims to deploy robotaxis in San Francisco and Dubai and has run pilots using autonomous, electric Chevy Bolt vehicles. In pilots the vehicles have operated autonomously while a human safety operator remained behind the wheel. Cruise partnered with DoorDash in a 2019 delivery pilot and worked with food banks during the COVID-19 pandemic; it also began a Walmart grocery delivery pilot in Scottsdale, Arizona. The company is a GM subsidiary and is backed by investors including Honda, SoftBank Vision Fund and funds managed by T. Rowe Price. Cruise recently completed a large equity fundraising extension and reports a post-money valuation of more than $30 billion. Cruise develops all-electric, self-driving vehicles and is building a ride-hailing service it has not yet launched. The company is moving toward commercialization and recently tapped a former Delta executive as COO. Operating fleets of autonomous vehicles generates a massive amount of data, making cloud and edge computing central to Cruise’s operations. Cruise announced a long-term strategic partnership with Microsoft to use Azure to support its yet-to-be-launched ride-hailing service; the partnership also names Microsoft GM’s preferred public cloud provider. The deal is intended to secure lower cloud pricing for Cruise while giving Microsoft the opportunity to test systems for machine learning and robotics workloads. Cruise raised $2 billion in an equity round that pushed its valuation to $30 billion, with Microsoft, GM, Honda and other institutional investors participating.

Total raised

$11.1B

Funding rounds

9

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jun 2024