What are the funding trends in autonomous vehicles?

All funding deals in the autonomous vehicle market over the last years

Below is the table listing all the deals. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our report covering the Autonomous Vehicle Market.

Is autonomous vehicle funding really booming right now?

Autonomous vehicle funding is clearly stronger in 2026, although the $18.68 billion headline makes the improvement look far bigger than it really is.

We tracked 16 qualifying financings through the current cutoff, compared with 13 over the same period in 2025 and 15 in 2024. More importantly, 15 different companies raised money this year, up from 11 last year. So the recovery goes beyond a few familiar names coming back for another round.

The jump in dollars needs much more care. Calculable funding rose from $595 million in the 2025 comparable period to $18.68 billion today, but Waymo's $16 billion financing accounts for most of that increase by itself.

The cleaner numbers still look good. Funding from rounds below $50 million reached $221.9 million, more than twice the $101.6 million recorded a year earlier. The median round also moved from $30.8 million to $44.5 million.

The comparison with 2024 keeps the enthusiasm in check. We found the same 15 funded companies in both periods, and the 2026 median remains well below the $82.6 million recorded two years ago. Funding has recovered from a soft 2025; the market has not suddenly become thirty times healthier.

Market measure	2026 YTD	2025 YTD	2024 YTD	2026 vs 2025
Deals	16	13	15	+23.1%
Unique companies	15	11	15	+36.4%
Calculable capital	$18.68B	$595.1M	$2.25B	+3,039%
Capital excluding >$50M	$221.9M	$101.6M	$95.0M	+118.4%
Capital excluding >$100M	$281.9M	$254.3M	$414.6M	+10.8%
Median round	$44.5M	$30.8M	$82.6M	+44.7%
Average round	$1.44B	$59.5M	$172.8M	+2,315%
Largest round	$16.0B	$203M	$1.05B	-
First-financing share	18.8%	15.4%	6.7%	+3.4 pp

Does the autonomous vehicle funding boom survive without Waymo?

Yes, autonomous vehicle funding still looks healthier without Waymo, but the spectacular boom disappears.

Waymo alone contributes $16 billion, or 85.6% of the calculable capital we tracked this year. Take that financing away and 2026 becomes a much more normal funding market.

Looking below $100 million rounds is especially useful. We calculate $281.9 million of capital there, only 10.8% above the same period in 2025 and 32% below 2024. The market below $50 million looks stronger: $221.9 million this year versus $101.6 million in 2025 and $95 million in 2024.

That is where the recovery is actually happening. Smaller institutional rounds have strengthened quite a lot, while the broader sub-$100 million market is only modestly ahead of last year.

Concentration has also become extreme. The three biggest financings account for 96.1% of calculable dollars, versus 74.1% a year earlier. The top five capture 98.5%.

As seen above, 2026 combines a real improvement in ordinary fundraising with a very unusual pile-up of capital at the top.

Outlier test	2026 YTD	2025 YTD	2024 YTD
Total calculable capital	$18.68B	$595M	$2.25B
Capital excluding >$50M	$221.9M	$101.6M	$95.0M
Capital excluding >$100M	$281.9M	$254.3M	$414.6M
Median round	$44.5M	$30.8M	$82.6M
Top-1 capital share	85.6%	34.1%	46.7%
Top-3 capital share	96.1%	74.1%	76.8%
Top-5 capital share	98.5%	88.6%	86.0%
Rounds above $50M	8	5	8
Rounds above $100M	7	3	4

Are more autonomous vehicle companies actually getting funded?

Yes, more autonomous vehicle companies are raising money now than they were a year ago, and that is one of the cleaner signs of recovery.

We counted 15 funded companies in the current period, compared with 11 in 2025. Deals increased from 13 to 16, so unique companies are growing faster than the number of transactions.

Only one company appears with multiple qualifying financings this year, compared with two in the 2025 period. The increase is therefore coming mainly from a wider set of businesses getting checks.

There are also slightly more newcomers. We identify three first financings this year, or 18.8% of deals, against two in 2025 and one in 2024. CargoX is the unusual case: its first observed financing was already $250 million, so first-financing capital looks much larger than the number of new entrants would normally suggest.

We would not call this a startup creation wave. Fifteen funded companies merely brings the market back to its 2024 breadth. Still, after last year's contraction, investors are clearly backing a wider group again.

Are normal autonomous vehicle rounds getting bigger?

Yes, the typical autonomous vehicle round has become meaningfully larger than it was in 2025, although it remains far below the level we saw two years ago.

The median financing increased from $30.8 million to $44.5 million. That 45% jump is much more useful than the $1.44 billion average, which has been rendered almost meaningless by Waymo.

The biggest change sits around $20 million to $50 million. Seven of this year's 16 financings fall into that range, representing 43.8% of deals. The same bucket accounted for 23.1% in 2025 and 20% in 2024.

Beep's latest financing sits at the bottom of that band with a $20 million Series B. Autonomous A2Z raised roughly $27.4 million, while several other companies cluster around the tens-of-millions range.

We also found no exactly measurable financing below $20 million in the 2026 comparable period. That helps explain why the median has risen.

The contrast with 2024 is still large. Back then, the median reached $82.6 million. These days, autonomous vehicle investors seem comfortable funding a broader middle layer again, but the ordinary deal has not returned to the scale of the 2024 market.

Is autonomous trucking now the busiest part of autonomous vehicle funding?

Yes, autonomous trucking is currently the busiest part of the autonomous vehicle funding market by a wide margin.

Eight of the 16 financings we tracked this year involve autonomous trucking or goods movement, giving the category a 50% deal share. That is up from 38.5% during the same period in 2025 and 40% in 2024.

The category also contains a remarkable spread of round sizes. Waabi closed a $750 million Series C. Gatik raised $200 million. Zelostech announced more than $300 million. KargoBot raised more than $100 million. CargoX entered our dataset with a $250 million financing.

The operating evidence is becoming harder to dismiss as well. Gatik said alongside its latest financing that it had more than $600 million in contracted revenue and had completed 85,000 fully driverless orders. T2 has been running paid Level 2 freight operations between Japan's Kanto and Kansai regions since 2025, raised another ¥5 billion in 2026 and is building toward Level 4 operations.

Waabi is taking a different route. Its $750 million round primarily supports autonomous trucking, while an additional milestone-based Uber commitment is tied to a future robotaxi deployment.

There is still plenty of technical risk in all of these businesses, but trucking funding now has something the sector struggled to show consistently a few years ago: multiple companies pairing big rounds with real logistics operations, customers or deployment plans.

Is the robotaxi funding boom basically just Waymo?

Yes, today's robotaxi funding boom is overwhelmingly a Waymo story.

Robotaxi fleets account for one of the 16 financings in our comparable period, yet that one transaction represents 85.6% of all calculable capital.

Waymo raised $16 billion at a $126 billion post-money valuation after reporting 15 million rides during 2025 and more than 400,000 weekly rides when the round was announced. The company has kept expanding since then. It now describes commercial fully autonomous operations across 15 major U.S. cities, has begun bringing public riders into newer markets, and recently confirmed plans for a Tokyo commercial launch in 2027 and a Singapore launch in 2028.

That operating scale helps explain why Waymo can raise an amount that would look absurd for an earlier-stage robotaxi company. The financing is backing a network that is already carrying paying passengers at substantial volume.

It would still be a mistake to extrapolate Waymo's access to capital across the robotaxi market. One company is currently doing almost all the work in the funding statistics.

Which autonomous vehicle deals are driving all the money?

A handful of autonomous vehicle companies are absorbing almost every dollar raised in 2026.

Waymo is in its own category at $16 billion. Wayve follows with a $1.2 billion closed Series D, while Waabi raised $750 million. Together, those three transactions account for 96.1% of calculable capital.

The next group is much smaller but still large by normal venture standards. Zelostech announced more than $300 million, CargoX raised $250 million, Gatik closed $200 million and KargoBot raised more than $100 million.

Once we get below those financings, the market falls quickly back toward the $20 million to $50 million range discussed above.

This concentration is why the average round of $1.44 billion should basically be ignored. Almost no company in the market is raising anything close to that amount.

Company	2026 financing	Category	What the money is tied to
Waymo	$16.0B	Robotaxi Fleets	Fleet and geographic expansion
Wayve	$1.20B closed Series D	Vehicle Platforms	OEM and robotaxi deployment
Waabi	$750M Series C	Autonomous Trucking	Truck commercialization and platform expansion
Zelostech	>$300M	Autonomous Trucking	RoboVan expansion and autonomous logistics
CargoX	$250M	Autonomous Trucking	Autonomous delivery network expansion
Gatik	$200M Series D	Autonomous Trucking	Commercial driverless freight growth
KargoBot	>$100M	Autonomous Trucking	Continued autonomous freight development

Is autonomous vehicle funding moving toward late-stage winners?

Yes, the biggest autonomous vehicle checks are increasingly going to mature companies, while early-stage fundraising remains alive underneath them.

Series D+ financings represent five of the 16 deals we tracked, up sharply from the comparable 2025 period. Those transactions account for 93.5% of calculable capital.

Waymo and Wayve explain much of the dollar concentration, but the pattern extends further. Gatik is already at Series D, while Waabi's $750 million round is a Series C large enough to resemble late-stage growth financing in practice.

Younger companies have not disappeared. Seed and Series A together still account for 25% of deals. Among financings where the stage is known, the early-stage share is 28.6%, compared with 22.2% in 2025 and 30.8% in 2024.

The funded company population has actually become younger on the median, moving from about seven years old in 2025 to five years old now. Series D+ businesses, by contrast, have a median age around nine years.

The market increasingly has two distinct lanes: young companies can still get financed, while most of the dollars go to businesses that have spent years proving the technology and are now trying to deploy it at scale.

Is standalone autonomous driving software losing ground?

Yes, standalone autonomous driving systems have lost noticeable funding share this year as money moves toward companies with clearer deployment models.

Autonomous Driving Systems represented 30.8% of comparable deals in 2025 and only 18.8% today. Their calculable capital share also fell sharply.

Meanwhile, trucking companies, robotaxi operators and broader vehicle platforms have taken more attention. Those businesses give investors a clearer answer to the obvious commercial question: where does the autonomous technology actually get deployed?

Wayve is a good example. Its technology is fundamentally autonomous-driving software, but the investment story now revolves around putting that software into production vehicles and robotaxi fleets. Its latest Series D brought in Microsoft, NVIDIA, Uber, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis, and the company says commercial robotaxi trials are beginning in 2026 with supervised consumer-vehicle deployment planned from 2027.

The category boundaries are imperfect, so a few percentage points should not be overread. The broader shift is clearer: investors currently seem more interested in autonomy attached to an actual fleet, vehicle program or distribution channel.

Why are strategic investors so involved in autonomous vehicle funding?

Strategic investors remain heavily involved because autonomous vehicle companies increasingly need commercial partners as much as they need money.

We found a verifiable strategic investor in 11 of the 16 financings this year, or 68.8% of deals. That is slightly higher than the 61.5% recorded in 2025, although still below the 73.3% seen in 2024.

What has changed more clearly is where those strategic investors show up. Five of the 11 strategic-backed deals in 2026 are Series D+, versus only one of eight in last year's comparable period.

Wayve captures the pattern well. Its investor group spans cloud infrastructure, semiconductors, ride-hailing and automakers. AMD, Arm and Qualcomm later added another $60 million to the round, broadening the chip-industry support behind the company's deployment plans.

Beep's latest Series B was led by Mobileye, which already works with Beep on autonomous mobility projects. Waabi's financing sits alongside an Uber agreement for future robotaxi deployment.

These companies need vehicles, chips, cloud infrastructure, customers and routes to market. Once fundraising moves closer to commercial rollout, industrial relationships naturally become more valuable.

Are new investors entering autonomous vehicle funding?

The visible autonomous vehicle investor pool is broader this year, although better disclosure explains part of the jump.

We identified a lead or co-lead on 11 of 16 financings, compared with six of 13 in 2025 and six of 15 in 2024. Those 2026 deals contain 18 different disclosed leads or co-leads, up from 10 last year and seven two years ago.

Eclipse is the only lead that appears more than once in the current sample. That is useful because it means we are not simply looking at the same three venture firms repeatedly recycling capital around the sector.

The names now span venture capital, sovereign wealth, growth funds, industrial companies and major technology investors. Gatik's Series D, for example, was co-led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies. Waymo's financing brought together Dragoneer, DST Global, Sequoia and a long list of large institutional investors.

We should be careful with the comparison because lead-investor disclosure itself improved from 46.2% of deals last year to 68.8% now. Even so, the market currently looks capable of attracting capital from a wider range of institutions than the 2025 sample suggested.

Is North America taking over autonomous vehicle funding?

North America is taking an enormous share of autonomous vehicle dollars, but the actual deal market is much more geographically balanced.

North America accounts for 37.5% of deals this year. Asia-Pacific also accounts for 37.5%, while Europe contributes 18.8% and the Middle East 6.3%.

North America's calculable capital share reaches roughly 91%, almost entirely because Waymo sits in the region. Calling that broad North American dominance would be misleading.

The more interesting change is Asia-Pacific's drop in deal share, from 61.5% in the 2025 comparable period to 37.5% now. North America rose more modestly, from 30.8% to 37.5%.

Asia-Pacific capital is also understated because several large financings do not have exact disclosed values. Zelostech's round is above $300 million and KargoBot's is above $100 million, so neither can be fully incorporated into an exact regional capital total.

The Middle East is appearing in the comparable dataset as well, most visibly through CargoX's $250 million financing led by Abu Dhabi-based BlueFive Capital. Geographic participation is spreading even while one American company makes the capital chart look overwhelmingly U.S.-centric.

Are the huge autonomous vehicle rounds paying for R&D or real deployment?

The biggest autonomous vehicle rounds today are increasingly paying for deployment, fleet growth and commercialization rather than another cycle of pure research.

Waymo's $16 billion financing arrived after the company had already reached millions of annual paid rides. Its latest updates show the expansion continuing: new U.S. cities are opening, Tokyo is being prepared for commercial service and Singapore has now been added to the international roadmap.

Wayve describes its current phase in similar terms. The company says its $1.2 billion Series D is supporting scaled commercial deployment, with robotaxi trials starting in 2026 and production-vehicle deployment following from 2027.

Gatik's $200 million Series D came with more than $600 million of contracted revenue, while T2 is already operating commercial Level 2 freight services as it builds the infrastructure and systems needed for Level 4 trucking.

Beep is also using its latest funding to expand autonomous mobility networks rather than starting from a blank sheet. Its new capital is meant to scale mobility-as-a-service operations and the AutonomOS fleet-management platform.

Across those examples, the financing conversation has moved much closer to operations: more vehicles, more routes, more cities, integrations with automakers, remote operations, maintenance infrastructure and paying customers. Technical development obviously continues, but the expensive question these days is increasingly how to turn autonomy into a repeatable transport business.

Is 2026 already a standout year for autonomous vehicle funding?

In dollars, 2026 is already an extraordinary autonomous vehicle funding year; in deal activity, it looks more like a strong recovery.

The 16 financings recorded by our cutoff already equal 88.9% of the 18 deals we found across all of 2025. They also represent 76.2% of the 21 transactions recorded during the full 2024 calendar year.

Capital has moved on a completely different scale. The $18.68 billion calculable total is already around 17.6 times the calculable capital recorded for all of 2025 and more than twice the 2024 full-year figure.

We are deliberately not annualizing any of this. Autonomous vehicle funding is too lumpy for a simple run-rate calculation to tell us much, particularly when one transaction represents most of the year's capital.

For now, the deal count tells a fairly conventional recovery story. The dollar total tells us that a few autonomous vehicle companies have entered a financing class that barely existed in this market before.

What is actually changing in autonomous vehicle funding?

Autonomous vehicle fundraising has genuinely improved from 2025. More companies are getting financed, deal count is higher, the median round has recovered and sub-$50 million capital has more than doubled.

The improvement looks much less dramatic against 2024. We found the same number of funded companies in both comparable periods, while today's median financing remains substantially lower. So 2026 looks more like a recovery from last year's weakness than a completely new funding boom.

The biggest structural change is the amount of capital available to mature companies approaching large-scale deployment. Series D+ transactions absorb almost all calculable dollars, and rounds from Waymo, Wayve, Waabi and Gatik are closely tied to fleet expansion, vehicle integration or commercial operations.

Autonomous trucking currently has the strongest breadth. Half of this year's financings sit in the category, spread across several companies and geographies. Robotaxi funding is much narrower because Waymo alone creates almost the entire dollar story.

Investors are still funding younger companies, but the richest part of the market increasingly belongs to businesses that can show more than a promising autonomy stack. Contracts, fleets, commercial routes, automaker integration and real-world operations are becoming much more visible around the largest rounds.

The trend we would treat most cautiously is headline capital growth. As pointed out above, 85.6% of calculable funding comes from one financing. The healthier signal is lower down the market: more funded companies, more $20 million to $50 million rounds and stronger capital formation below the megaround layer.