Waymo is stepping on the accelerator.
Backed by a fresh $16 billion funding round, the self-driving car company says it is preparing for its biggest expansion yet, with plans to roll out ride-hailing services in more than 20 new cities worldwide in 2026.
In a blog post published Monday, Waymo announced the new investment, which values the Alphabet-owned company at $126 billion post-money. The round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital, with Alphabet continuing as Waymo’s majority investor.
According to Waymo, the funding signals that autonomous driving is no longer an experiment but a business ready to scale globally.
“We are no longer proving a concept; we are scaling a commercial reality, laying the groundwork for ride-hailing operations in over 20 additional cities in 2026, including Tokyo and London,” the company wrote in its blog.
Expansion plans take shape
The company recently launched in Miami and has expanded service across major US metro areas, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta. Waymo says it provides more than 400,000 rides every week across six major US metropolitan areas.
That growth has been rapid. Waymo reported that in 2025 alone, it more than tripled its annual ride volume to 15 million trips, bringing its lifetime total to over 20 million rides.
Waymo is leaning heavily on its safety data to justify this explosive growth. The company reports that across 127 million miles of fully autonomous driving, it has seen a 90% reduction in serious injury crashes compared to human drivers.
“This milestone is built on a foundation of safety that is now statistically superior to human driving,” the company noted.
However, the rapid rollout hasn’t been without bumps. Federal regulators are currently looking into Waymo’s behavior in sensitive areas. The NHTSA and NTSB recently opened investigations into incidents where robotaxis reportedly failed to stop for school buses in Austin and Atlanta.
Most recently, an investigation was launched after a Waymo vehicle struck a child near a school in California, resulting in minor injuries.
The road ahead
While rivals like Tesla and Uber are nipping at their heels, Waymo’s new war chest allows it to move with what co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov call “unprecedented velocity.”
With the $16 billion in the bank, the company is focusing on “maintaining… industry-leading safety standards” while meeting an “exploding global demand.”
Also read: Tesla’s robotaxi push is accelerating as it converts its Fremont factory to build more Optimus robots.