Autonomous driving startup Nuro Inc. today announced that it has raised $97 million in funding to support its commercialization efforts.

The investment included the participation of Nvidia Corp., Uber Technologies Inc., Baillie Gifford and other institutional investors. It came as an extension to a $106 million Series E round that Nuro first announced in April. The Mountain View, California-based company is now worth $6 billion.

Nuro’s flagship product is a hardware module that can be installed in vehicles to equip them with autonomous driving capabilities. The system, which is known as the Nuro Driver, is based on Nvidia’s AGX Thor automobile chip. The processor combines a Blackwell graphics card with a central processing unit and modules optimized to process footage from vehicle cameras.

The Nuro Driver combines the AGX Thor with lidar devices, radars and cameras. There’s also an inertial measurement unit that an autonomous vehicle can use to track its own rate of acceleration. According to Nuro, there are a total of 30 sensors in certain configurations of its system.

Before deploying self-driving vehicles in a new location, the company provides them with maps of that location to ease navigation. The Nuro Driver keeps the maps up-to-date with data that its sensors collect during trips. The system can, for example, add in information about changes to traffic control conditions.

Nuro also uses road data collected during trips to power its cloud-based simulation platform. The software helps train the company’s autonomous driving models. According to Nuro, it creates virtual environments that simulate road traffic and technical issues. 

Today’s Uber-backed funding round comes a few weeks after Nuro inked a partnership with the ride-hailing provider. As part of the collaboration, Uber plans to deploy up to 20,000 autonomous taxis available through its app. The vehicles will be equipped with the Nuro Driver during assembly.

Uber invested $300 million in Lucid Group Inc., the automaker that will make the taxis, as part of the initiative. It was reported at the time that the company also made a second, larger investment in Nuro. 

“With this new capital, we’re well-positioned to continue our next phase of growth, which will see us focus on delivering new commercial partnerships to realize autonomy at global scale,” said Nuro co-founder and President Dave Ferguson.

Uber will deploy its first Nuro-powered autonomous vehicles in a major U.S. city next  year. The vehicles will be based on Lucid Group’s Gravity SUV design, which can cover up to 450 miles per charge. Uber plans to bring its autonomous taxi service to dozens of additional markets in the coming years. 

Photo: Nuro