Nuro

Dandy

Nuro

Nuro's business model is delivery-as-a-service. They partner with retailers, restaurants, and grocery chains who pay Nuro to handle last-mile delivery using autonomous vehicles.

Instead of employing human drivers, partners use Nuro's robot fleet.

The economics are compelling on paper. A human delivery driver costs $15-25 per hour including wages, insurance, and vehicle costs.

A Nuro vehicle costs money to build and maintain, but once deployed, it operates nearly 24/7 with no driver wages, no tips, and no breaks. The breakeven point comes when the fleet reaches sufficient utilization in a market.

Revenue also comes from technology licensing. Nuro has partnerships where their autonomy stack could be integrated into other vehicles or platforms.

FedEx, Domino's, Kroger, Walmart, and 7-Eleven have all tested or deployed Nuro vehicles for delivery.

Dandy

Vertical SaaS plus manufacturing. Dandy provides dental practices with intraoral scanners (often subsidized or free to eliminate the switching cost), cloud-based software for managing cases, and its own network of digital dental labs that manufacture the final restorations.

Dentists pay per case — each crown, bridge, veneer, or implant restoration is priced individually. The margin comes from manufacturing efficiency: digital workflows are faster, more precise, and require less manual labor than traditional hand-sculpted methods.

As volume grows, Dandy's labs get more efficient and per-unit costs drop. It's the classic razor-and-blades model — give away the scanner, make money on every restoration.

Nuro

Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu were both principal engineers at Google's self-driving car project (later Waymo). Ferguson led the machine learning and motion planning teams.

Zhu worked on perception — teaching cars to see and understand the world. They were two of the most senior engineers in autonomous driving.

In 2016, they left Google with a contrarian insight: the hardest part of self-driving cars wasn't the technology. It was the stakes.

A robo-taxi carrying passengers needs to be essentially perfect — any accident could injure or kill someone inside and destroy public trust. But a delivery vehicle carrying groceries?

If it gets in a fender bender, the worst case is squished bananas.

By removing the human from the vehicle, Nuro eliminated the most complex variable in autonomous driving safety. Their vehicles are small, light (under 1,200 pounds), and slow (max 25 mph on surface streets).

If one hits a pedestrian, the impact energy is dramatically lower than a 4,000-pound car going 40 mph. This let them get regulatory approval years before full-size robo-taxis.

The first prototype, R1, looked like a cartoon car — about half the width of a normal vehicle, with no windows, no mirrors, and no driver's seat. Just cargo space and sensors.

They revealed it in 2018 and began testing in Scottsdale, Arizona with Kroger for grocery deliveries.

Dandy

Henry Stott was a repeat entrepreneur who had previously co-founded a tech company in the UK. When he looked at the dental industry, he saw a $15 billion lab market that was shockingly analog.

Here's how it worked: a dentist jams a tray of gooey putty into your mouth, waits for it to harden, mails the physical mold to a dental lab, where a technician hand-sculpts your crown out of ceramic. Turnaround: 2 to 3 weeks.

Error rate: high. Patient experience: miserable.

The technology to do this digitally had existed for years — 3D intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM software, CNC milling machines — but nobody had stitched it into a seamless end-to-end platform for the average dental practice. Stott started Dandy in 2020 to be that platform.

Provide the scanner, build the software, run the lab — and make it so easy that any dentist can switch from analog to digital without changing how they practice.

Nuro

Nuro's strategy is to become the default autonomous delivery infrastructure for major retailers. Rather than build a consumer-facing delivery app (competing with DoorDash and Instacart), Nuro provides the robotic fleet that powers deliveries for existing brands.

The partnership-first approach reduces go-to-market friction. Kroger, Walmart, and FedEx already have massive customer bases and order volumes.

Nuro provides the autonomous last-mile delivery layer. The retailer gets lower delivery costs.

Nuro gets guaranteed demand.

Geographic expansion follows a city-by-city playbook. Nuro maps a market, gets regulatory approval, deploys a small fleet, proves reliability, then scales up.

Houston and Mountain View were early markets. The goal is to have fleets operating in major metros across the US.

Dandy

Land-and-expand with dental practices. Dandy gives practices the scanner for free or at heavy discount, which eliminates the biggest barrier to switching from analog.

Once a practice starts submitting digital scans, they become recurring revenue — every patient who needs a crown is a Dandy order. Sales team targets mid-size practices (3 to 10 dentists) that are high-volume but haven't invested in digital yet.

Referral programs where existing dentists recommend Dandy to colleagues. Geographic density strategy — build lab capacity in a region, then saturate practices nearby to optimize logistics and turnaround times.

Content marketing educating dentists on why digital is better, faster, and more profitable than analog workflows.

Nuro

The technology still has limitations in complex scenarios. Nuro vehicles operate on surface streets at low speeds — they can't handle highways, heavy snow, or extremely dense urban environments like Manhattan.

This limits the addressable market to suburban deliveries in good weather, which is a large market but not the whole market.

The path to profitability is long. Building custom autonomous vehicles is extraordinarily capital-intensive.

Each generation of vehicle requires hundreds of millions in design, engineering, testing, and manufacturing. Nuro has burned through most of its $2.1 billion in funding and laid off 30% of staff in 2023, signaling the cash crunch is real.

Competition comes from multiple directions. Amazon is developing its own delivery robots (Scout, though paused).

Waymo and Cruise could pivot to autonomous delivery. Established delivery companies could partner with other autonomy providers.

And human drivers remain cheaper than robots at current scale — the economics only flip once Nuro has hundreds or thousands of vehicles per market.

Dandy

Dental practices are notoriously resistant to change — many dentists have used the same lab for 20 years and switching feels risky. The scanner hardware is expensive to subsidize at scale, creating a capital-intensive land grab.

Quality control across distributed manufacturing is hard — a crown that doesn't fit means a remake, an unhappy patient, and a dentist who might switch back to their old lab. Competition from established digital players like Align Technology and legacy lab companies investing in their own digital capabilities.

The dental industry is fragmented — 200,000+ practices in the US, mostly small businesses, which means enterprise-style sales don't work. Each practice is its own decision maker with its own habits.

Nuro

Nuro R3 — the third-generation autonomous delivery vehicle, purpose-built with no passenger compartment. Larger cargo capacity than R2, improved sensor suite, and designed for commercial-scale manufacturing.

Nuro Autonomy Platform — the self-driving software stack including perception, prediction, planning, and control that runs Nuro's vehicles. Nuro Driver — the AI system that handles all driving decisions in real-time, combining lidar, cameras, radar, and thermal sensors.

Nuro Fleet Management — cloud-based tools for partners to monitor, dispatch, and manage Nuro vehicles across delivery zones.

Dandy

Dandy Scanner — provided to dental practices, captures a full 3D digital impression of the patient's mouth in minutes. No more putty molds.

Cloud-based case management platform where dentists submit scans, approve designs, and track orders. AI-powered restoration design that generates crown and veneer designs automatically from 3D scans, reducing turnaround from weeks to days.

Digital dental lab network with automated CNC milling and 3D printing for manufacturing restorations. Shade matching technology using AI to color-match restorations to surrounding teeth.

Integration with practice management software so cases flow seamlessly from scan to delivery.

Nuro

SoftBank Vision Fund led the massive $940 million Series B in 2019. Tiger Global led the Series C at an $8.6 billion valuation.

Greylock Partners and Gaorong Capital were early investors. Alphabet (Google's parent) invested through its venture arm.

Woven Capital (Toyota's investment fund) participated, reflecting automotive industry interest. The company has raised approximately $2.1 billion total.

Dandy

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, DST Global, and IA Ventures. Series C in 2023 valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.