What was the idea behind the launch of Nuro?

If you look back at the past 30 years, we've seen an incredible revolution and transformation in how we interact in the digital world… But if you look at our relationship with the physical world, it looks much the same as it has for the last 50 years. When we founded Nuro, we were convinced that over the next 30 years, we're going to see a pretty massive transformation in the physical world and wanted to be a part of that. We created Nuro as a general robotics company, a physical AI company before physical AI was cool. The idea was to try to better everyday life through robotics and to create some of the key technology that was going to power the positive transformation of the physical environment.

You describe this broader vision of working in physical AI. But at some point, fairly early on, you decided to focus on autonomous vehicles, right?

Yes. We felt strongly that we had to have an initial application that was very concrete and achievable in, say, the first five years. Success would earn us the right to then go and pursue other applications. The first application that we got excited about was goods delivery. We saw it as an opportunity to transform how society conducts commerce, and more specifically local and curbside commerce. If we could create stores on wheels, giving local merchants the ability to deliver things very quickly and inexpensively, we felt that we could not only provide an incredible service that reduced a lot of personal vehicle shopping trips, but also strengthen local communities and local merchants.

Delivery takes passengers out of the equation. Was that also part of the appeal?

Absolutely. What makes self-driving cars such a hard technical feat is that you have to have a system that is incredibly safe. If you're transporting passengers, it also has to be very comfortable and efficient. That means that it needs to act like a fairly confident, sometimes even aggressive, driver. Our expectations as passengers include both, that it's never going to crash or slam on the brakes, but also that it's going to get us where we want to go very quickly. And those two competing requirements — safety and comfort — are directly competitive with each other from a technical standpoint. Our thesis was that if we remove passengers, then we could focus almost all of our efforts towards making the safest possible vehicle. If the driver was exceedingly cautious, the burrito being delivered wasn’t going to get upset.

So market conditions changed and you were forced to change. What did you learn in the process?

As an entrepreneur, you have to be incredibly resilient. You have to have a vision that is so intrinsically compelling that it is worth sacrificing almost everything to go after it. At the same time, you have to pay attention to what may have changed since you came up with that vision and always be ready to reevaluate. That can be tricky, because some things are absolutely fundamental to who you are as a company. But then there are other elements that are perhaps more malleable. Finding the right balance is hard but absolutely critical to staying relevant. You have to be really honest with yourself and your team.

Was it hard to pivot?

The decision itself was relatively straightforward. We did the work and we evaluated honestly how circumstances had changed. It was very clear that we needed to change our path. The execution of that decision was incredibly difficult. We had to get investors on board. We had to get the team on board. We had to cut the team significantly. We had to let some partners down. Going through it required an enormous amount of work from the whole team.

What were some of the specific challenges?

We had spent about six years building a strong brand for ourselves as the AV goods delivery company. We were known for our cute delivery vehicles, for our incredible partnerships with FedEx, Domino's, Kroger, UberEats. Investors and talent knew us as a strong company operating in that space. So it was very tricky to then kill that brand and say we're not doing this anymore. The pivot also happened as we were getting ready to manufacture and commercialize our product. People who joined our team were excited about that. Instead, we would be going back to the R&D lab for at least another couple of years. We had to significantly reduce the team and refocus our resources entirely on autonomy. We had to get our existing investors on board. We had to make sure that we heard them out and that we successfully communicated with them why we felt that this was absolutely the right path for the company.

What’s happened since the pivot?

We’ve had a big team focused on continuing to improve the technology. We really accelerated those efforts. And in the meantime, a few of us were working very hard to land new partnerships that would enable us to execute on this new strategy. We've had really strong success on that front. We signed a partnership with Uber and Lucid, where Lucid is integrating our driver software and compute into their vehicles, selling those vehicles to Uber, who will operate a robotaxi service. It is exactly what we envisioned and a validation that this path is working. There’s a real appetite within the ecosystem for what we offer. But this “mobility as a service” is just one of three opportunities in front of us. The second is in logistics. That’s close to our former life, except we are not going to be building or operating vehicles. The third is working with automotive manufacturers to integrate our tech into vehicles that they sell to consumers. We think that that's a really important vertical long term.

There’s been pushback against AVs, even in places like San Francisco, where robotaxis have become commonplace and successful. Safety remains a concern. How do you solve that problem?

Safety is the biggest promise of self-driving vehicles. At the same time, we’ve always known that any company in this space is one accident away from some real soul searching. Any vehicle that we put on public roads goes through a rigorous validation process, with dozens of different domains of testing, to make sure that it can handle complex traffic, edge cases, and safety-critical scenarios. We believe the IP behind that work is almost as valuable as the IP behind our core AI that's driving the car. And it's critically important from a trust perspective. We have to earn the trust of communities, regulators, and the general public.

Guaranteeing 100% safety seems impossible.

Every year, over 40,000 people die in road accidents in the U.S. alone. It's a pandemic. As an industry, we have a responsibility to improve that. There's one school of thought that says it'd be really nice if AVs were 10 times safer than humans before we put any on the road. But if getting to that point takes years after AVs are already safer than human drivers, you’d be losing lives that could have been saved. We’re definitely not trying to be flippant. We absolutely recognize there should be no ceiling when it comes to safety. Collectively, as a society, we have to figure out what is the right path to deploying AVs at scale. There are different standards that are leveled at self-driving cars versus human drivers. The goal is to save lives on the road, and if we can keep that as our North Star in our approach to launching and scaling, I think we should be in good shape.

Q&A

Dave Ferguson: How agility and tenacity shaped an autonomy platform

The co-founder & co-CEO of Nuro talks about safety and the long journey to physical AI

As an entrepreneur, you have to be incredibly resilient. You have to have a vision that is so compelling to yourself that it is worth sacrificing almost everything to go after it.Dave Ferguson, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Nuro

You did very well with that approach. And then you pivoted. Why?

Two reasons. First, AI advanced so much that we were able to actually tackle the more general problem of self-driving. We had collected all this data based on human driving behavior. So as our system got more capable, we basically ended up learning how to drive like an expert human driver. That means we solved the safety and comfort problems at the same time.

The second reason was that our plan to build out autonomous delivery involved being vertically integrated. We designed the vehicles, we manufactured them with a partner, and we would own and operate them, and provide delivery as a service. The amount of capital that we would need to scale operations was in the billions of dollars. In 2022, the cost of capital skyrocketed and it became less clear how we could do that.

So, we began a process to evaluate different ways to go to market. And through that process, we decided the best path forward for Nuro and in terms of positive impact on the world was to shift to a licensing model. We would focus on the AV tech exclusively and partner with manufacturers and operators to do the rest.

Today, we have over 40,000 people that die in road accidents in the U.S. alone every year. It’s a pandemic. As an industry, we have a responsibility to improve that.Dave Ferguson, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Nuro

This kind of radical realignment can undermine trust. Was that an issue?

There are two aspects to trust. The first is, ‘Is this a person who is honest and genuine and that I can trust?’ Over the previous six years, we had established a pretty strong degree of trust with all of our stakeholders. They had seen us through good times and tough times and had faith that when we were communicating stuff, it was actually what we truly believed. In terms of integrity, we were on a pretty good footing.

The second aspect is perhaps harder. Our strategy turned out to be wrong. Why should anyone have faith that this time it’s going to work out? We had to be as transparent as we could, laying out our plan so that people could poke holes in it, and could get to a point where they understood why we felt strongly about it. Then people could form their own opinion and decide whether this was a path that aligned with their interests and talents.

FeatureReimagining the road to self-driving cars

Wayve challenges Silicon Valley with a contrarian bet on autonomy

VideoCEO Survey highlights

A pivotal year for AI fuels confidence in 2026