Sequoia is co-leading a $16 billion investment round in Waymo alongside Dragoneer and DST Global. Waymo has logged 127 million fully autonomous miles and cut serious injury crashes by 90 percent. Road traffic kills 1.19 million people annually. That number is the entire premise of this deal.
The operational case is already built. Waymo delivered 15 million paid rides in 2025 and now runs more than 400,000 rides per week across six U.S. cities: Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, and Las Vegas. These are not pilots. Co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, who has led the technical work since the Google Self-Driving Car Project launched in 2009, are targeting 20 additional cities in 2026. The full piece details exactly how Waymo's data flywheel compounds safety and unit economics with each new city launched.
Transportation is a $7 trillion global market. Sequoia frames autonomous mobility as a transition on par with smartphones and the internet, and the original post lays out the specific operational logic, not just the vision, behind that claim. Read it for the detail on what it actually takes to deploy safely across rain, night, and regulatory scrutiny simultaneously.
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