Nuro

Sierra

Nuro

For most of its life Nuro sold delivery-as-a-service. Retailers, restaurants and grocery chains paid Nuro to handle the last mile with autonomous vehicles, so instead of employing human drivers a partner simply used 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.

That was the plan, anyway. In 2024 Nuro changed course and stopped trying to run a delivery service itself.

The business now is licensing the autonomy stack — the Nuro Driver — to carmakers and mobility companies, which is a far cheaper way to grow than building and operating your own fleet. FedEx, Domino's, Kroger, Walmart and 7-Eleven had all tested or deployed the delivery bots before the pivot.

Sierra

Companies pay Sierra to run their customer service with AI agents instead of hiring rooms full of humans. The agent talks to your customers over chat.

It answers questions. It processes returns.

It updates subscriptions. Here is the clever part.

Sierra charges based on outcomes, not seats. Brands pay when the AI actually resolves a problem, not just for having the software installed.

That pricing is unusual. Most software charges a flat monthly fee no matter what.

Sierra only gets paid when the bot does the job.

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.

Sierra

Bret Taylor had already done the impossible twice. He co-created Google Maps.

He later became co-CEO of Salesforce, chaired Twitter's board during the messy Elon Musk takeover, and became chairman of OpenAI in late 2023. Clay Bavor spent 18 years at Google, most recently running its Labs group.

The two friends left their big jobs in 2023 to build something together. They picked customer service on purpose.

It is the least glamorous corner of software. Their logic was simple.

Companies hate their support costs. Customers hate waiting on hold.

AI that actually resolves problems could fix both sides at once. They launched Sierra in February 2024 with $110 million from Sequoia and Benchmark.

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.

That was the original plan. Houston and Mountain View were the early markets, mapped city by city, each one needing its own regulatory approval before a single vehicle moved.

It was slow and it was expensive, and in 2024 Nuro gave it up in favour of licensing its self-driving software to companies that already build and operate vehicles.

Sierra

Sierra went straight for big brands, not tiny startups. SoFi, Ramp, ADT, Sonos and Brex signed up early.

By 2026 it said more than 40% of the Fortune 50 were customers. The trick was trust.

Enterprises are terrified of an AI bot going rogue and insulting a customer. So Sierra built guardrails and let each company control exactly how the agent behaves.

Bret Taylor's contacts did the rest. When the chairman of OpenAI calls a Fortune 500 CEO, they pick up.

Sierra hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in November 2025, seven quarters after launch, and $150 million by February 2026. In April 2026 it launched Ghostwriter, which builds and deploys a new agent from a plain-English description.

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 could pivot to autonomous delivery, though Cruise is no longer a threat after GM shut it down at the end of 2024. 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.

Sierra

Everyone is building AI customer service agents right now. Decagon has raised at a multi-billion valuation.

Salesforce, ServiceNow and Intercom all shipped their own agents. Sierra is not the cheap option.

It sells premium AI to giant companies that move slowly. The bigger risk sits underneath the product.

Sierra does not make its own AI models. It rents them from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.

If those model makers decide to compete directly, Sierra's edge gets thin fast, and its co-founder chairing one of them only makes that question louder. A $15.8 billion valuation on roughly $150 million in revenue leaves almost no room for a stumble.

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.

Sierra

The core product is the Sierra AI agent. It is a branded customer service bot that companies deploy on their website, app, and phone lines.

It handles the boring stuff. Order tracking.

Refunds. Password resets.

Account changes. Sierra also built its own tools to test and monitor these agents so they do not make things up.

In 2024 the company added a voice version that talks to customers on the phone. In April 2026 it added Ghostwriter, a tool that builds and deploys a new agent from a plain-English description.

The whole pitch is one AI agent that carries your brand's name and never sleeps.

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.

Sierra

Sequoia Capital and Benchmark wrote the first checks at launch in February 2024, $110 million between them. Greenoaks Capital then led both the $175 million round in 2024 and the $350 million round in September 2025.

In May 2026 Tiger Global and Google's GV led a $950 million round at a $15.8 billion valuation, with Benchmark, Sequoia and Greenoaks back in. That takes total funding to about $1.6 billion.

That is partly the product and partly Bret Taylor. Investors bet on founders who have already built billion-dollar things.