San Francisco-based autonomous vehicle startup Cruise is teaming up with General Motors and Microsoft in order to commercialize its fleet of self-driving cars. In addition to this partnership, Cruise also announced that it received a $2 billion investment from Microsoft, Honda, GM and others. This brings the company’s valuation to $30 billion.
Cruise was founded in 2013 and then acquired by GM in 2016. The company has been one of the leaders in the push to make self-driving cars widely available. It’s spent years developing AV hardware and software and now has a fleet of all-electric, shared, self-driving cars across the country.
Although Cruise is headquartered in SF, the company also has an office in Bellevue, which is home to its engineering and technical teams. Cruise employs about 2,000 people across all of its offices, according to LinkedIn, and it’s currently hiring for a few Bellevue-based roles.
As part of this new investment, Cruise will also partner with Microsoft to leverage its Azure cloud and edge computing platform. Since self-driving cars rely on hordes of data and AI, Microsoft’s platform will help Cruise vehicles get quick access to this information from wherever the cars are deployed.
“Our mission to bring safer, better and more affordable transportation to everyone isn’t just a tech race — it’s also a trust race,” Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said in a statement. “Microsoft, as the gold standard in the trustworthy democratization of technology, will be a force multiplier for us as we commercialize our fleet of self-driving, all-electric, shared vehicles.”
“Advances in digital technology are redefining every aspect of our work and life, including how we move people and goods,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella added. “As Cruise and GM’s preferred cloud, we will apply the power of Azure to help them scale and make autonomous transportation mainstream.”
Cruise parent company GM will also partner with Microsoft for its own cloud computing needs.
This partnership and investment will help accelerate Cruise’s expansion push by giving it the technology and capital to further deploy its fleet. It will also help Cruise find more ways to profit off of its fleet — whether that’s by making deliveries, providing shared access to vehicles or something else.
