Pre-IPO pedia | GM's Cruise surpasses Alphabet's Waymo
There are three major self-driving car companies in the United States, Waymo, Cruise and Aurora. Following Google's Waymo, here comes GM's Cruise, also a unicorn that has the same business as Waymo.
The development of driverless vehicles has entered a white-hot stage. ResearchandMarket predicts that the global market size of driverless vehicles will reach 27.3 billion US dollars in 2021, and it is expected to reach 59.4 billion US dollars in 2026,with a compound annual growth rate of 16.84%.
In the last article, we mentioned that manyinstitutionsare activelyparticipatingthisopportunity. Such as Volkswagen and General Motors are catching up on the road to automatic driving.
As far as the domestic market is concerned, Baidu's Apollo open-source autopilot system is in the leading position, followed by BYD, Tencent and Didi, and Huawei, DJIand Meituan are also accelerating their layout.
So how did Cruise, one of the three self-driving giants, come to the center of the stage?
In 2013, with a passion for autonomous driving, Vogt and Daniel Kan founded Cruise LLC to test and develop autonomous vehicle technology.
Kyle Vogt, a native of Kansas City, Kansas, has been passionate about the concept of autonomous driving since he was a teenager. In 2004, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied computer science and electrical engineering. In the same year, he participated in the "DARPA Challenge" related to the field of automatic driving.
In his junior year, Vogt left MIT to start his own business. He co-foundedJustin.TV(later renamed Twitch) and Socialcam withJustin Kan. A few years later, two companies founded by Vogt were acquired by Amazon for $970 million and $60 million respectively.
Daniel KanisJustin Kan's younger brother. In 2011, he founded Appetizely and Exec. Exec's main business was running errands for idle people, and many people recruited cleaners through it, which was later acquired by Handybook.
In March 2016, GM bought Cruise for an undisclosed price, with media reports ranging from $500 million to $1 billion.
When the company was founded, Cruise focused on developing direct-to-consumer kits to enable ordinary vehicles to drive themselves, but after two years of development, the business has not improved.
In 2015, Vogt changed the company's strategyto focus on B2B businesses, starting to write software that could be used in fully autonomous vehicles. After being acquired by GM, Cruise is developing software to fully automate GM's Chevy Bolt electric vehicle.
With thehopes to build the most advanced self-driving car in the world,Cruise is taking full account of the concerns of consumers and constantly improving it. Cruise is piloting self-driving cars in unique and complex traffic scenarios that people often face.
Today, Cruise has developed two representative self-driving cars: Cruise First-Generation AV and Cruise Origin.
The Cruise First-Generation AV, custom built on the foundation of the Chevy Bolt, our first-gen vehicles have logged millions of city miles to make self-driving a reality.
The Cruise Origin has no driver, no pedals, no steering wheel. The purpose-built, all-electric Origin is the ultimate riding experience and nearly ready to roll off the assembly line.
According to foreign media reports, Cruise encountered a big technical bottleneck in 2018. When its unmanned vehicle was tested on the road, it could not accurately identify whether the objects on the road were moving or stationary.
For example, when it passed a row of motorcycles or bicycles parked on the roadside, Cruise's unmanned vehicle would hesitate to stop. In addition, its software sometimes fails to recognize pedestrians, and sometimes mistakenly believes that there is a bicycle in front of it and automatically stops.
However, according to its financing rhythm in 2019, Cruise may have solved these technical problems and is ready to officially land in the unmanned taxi business.
Since March 2014, Cruise has conducted a total of ten rounds of financing. The main investors are Softbank, Wal-Mart, Honda, Puxin Group and so on.
Several financing projects that are highly concerned by the market include:
On May 31, 2018, Cruise received a $3.4 billion capital injection from Softbank and GM.
On October 3, 2018, Cruise received a $750 million capital injection from Honda.
On May 7, 2019, Cruise received a $1.2 billion capital injection from Puxin Group, Softbank and Honda.
On January 9, 2021, Cruise received a $2 billion capital injection from Microsoft, Honda and GM.
On April 15, 2021, Cruise received an exclusive $750 million stake from Wal-Mart.
On June 15, 2021, Cruise received an exclusive $5 billion debt financing from General Finance.
Cruise's valuation has beensteadily risingsince its acquisition. After Walmart's investment in 2021, Cruise was valued at more than $30 billion, surpassing Waymo for the first time and becoming the most valuable unicorn car company.
After raising $2.25 billion in 2021, Waymo's valuation dropped to $30 billion. The valuation is nearly 75% lower than the $105 billion valuation Morgan Stanley placed on Waymo in 2019 and 85% lower than the $175 billion valuation in 2018.
As driverless technology is in the experimental development stage, it has not yet been put into commercial operation. Therefore, self-drivingcarcompanies have little external income at present, and can only solve the problem of R & D funds by paying and financing themselves, but once successful, the value it can create is incalculable.
According to media reports, Cruise's unmanned vehicle carries up to 21 ranging radars, 16 cameras and 5 lidars in order to achieve full driverless driving. Although Cruise did not disclose the cost of itsself-drivingcar,with so many sensors, it must be worth a lot.
Cruise, as a subsidiary of a super car manufacturer General Motors,and investors such as Softbank andWalmarthave strong financial resources, basically has no financial problems in a short time.
For a long time, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann and GM CEO Mary Barra, known as the Iron Lady, had a serious disagreement over the direction of Cruise.
Ammann hopes that Cruise will focus on the field of unmanned taxis and go public independently as soon as possible. But Mary wants to keep Cruise firmly in the GM system and use Cruise's technology to support the development of GM's mass-produced self-driving technology.
The two executives ultimately failed to agree on their views on the self-driving business, and on December 16, 2021, GM announced Ammann's departure, ending Cruise's long-standing IPO disagreement.
This change indicates to the outside world that Cruise will not split up and go public in the near future. As of January 21, 2021, GM's market value was $77.355 billion, while Cruise's valuation was $30 billion, accounting for 38.8% of GM's total market value. Some investors believe that investing in Cruise by investing in GM is also a feasible option.
Mooers, what do you think of the immature automatic driving technology?
Two self-driving carunicorn companies, Waymo and Cruise, which do you prefer？ Are you optimistic about their prospects? Follow me to join the latest discussion!
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Bolun97 : None, tesla is king
102568460 : A self driving vehicles requires lots of tech, processing and decision making algorithms. Only time will tell how effective thEse tech can manages these, at the same time, consistently. All the best in their r&d and deployment in real time
nice name Bolun97 : hard for Tesla. They could not solve it too