(Bloomberg) -- Walmart Inc. is getting into the self-driving car business.
The world’s largest retailer is taking an undisclosed stake in Cruise LLC, the autonomous-vehicle technology company that’s majority-owned by General Motors Co. The Walmart investment brings the size of Cruise’s latest funding round to $2.75 billion, the two companies said in a statement Thursday, up from the $2 billion Cruise
The investment will help support Walmart’s push to create a home-delivery logistics network that’s “fast, low-cost and scalable,” Walmart’s U.S. chief executive officer, John Furner, said in a blog post. The two companies began
The additional funds will raise Cruise’s post-investment valuation to more than $30 billion, San Francisco-based Cruise said. That’s up from $19 billion when T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. invested in the company in 2019. Just as Microsoft gave Cruise a major software player in its corner, Walmart gives it a retail partner with thousands of stores and deep pockets.
Walmart’s deal won’t spell the end for the self-driving car tests it’s conducting with Waymo, the autonomous unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., and startup Nuro Inc., a spokeswoman said.
The retailer is preparing for a future when shoppers don’t have to drive to the store and is trying out a number of different technologies, including drones. The cost of getting deliveries to customers’ doorsteps across the nation is often prohibitive, and it’s a big reason why Walmart’s domestic e-commerce business is still losing money.
Walmart’s test to use Cruise’s all-electric self-driving vehicles to deliver groceries from a store in Scottsdale, Arizona, is still in the early phases and hasn’t been expanded to other cities, the spokeswoman said.
Efforts to develop self-driving vehicles have picked up pace in recent months. California has approved more robotaxi testing on public roads,
The investment is the latest sign of consolidation in the self-driving sector as big companies like Honda Motor Co., Walmart and Microsoft move in. Zoox Inc. sold to Amazon.com Inc. last year, and Cruise itself