By Akash Sriram
(Reuters) – Uber (Uber) talks with private equity firms and banks to ensure funds build their robotics business.
The company has been offering Alphabet-owned Waymo’s robots on ride-hailing apps in Austin and Atlanta. It also reached a $300 million partnership in July, which will allow it to deploy more than 20,000 cars made by electric vehicle company Lucid, powered by Nuro’s autonomous driving technology for more than six years.
Khosrowshahi will form a collaboration on Wednesday as part of a larger plan involving three Robotaxi business models: paying fixed interest rates to partners with such vehicles, sharing revenue with fleet operators and owning vehicles, while licensing autonomous driving technology.
“We are talking to private equity participants, and we have talked to banks,” the CEO said. “Once we demonstrated the revenue model, how many vans these cars can generate per day, there will be a lot of financing to go.”
Currently, Uber says it is planning to use a “moderate” portion of its annual cash flow to fund deployments. It may also sell minority stakes in the company to help expand, it said.
Analysts say large-scale Robotaxi deployments can reduce operating costs and increase profitability by relying on drivers.
Despite strong regulatory scrutiny and doubts about wider adoption, several companies, including Tesla and U.S. market leader Waymo, have been rushing to launch robots, but Elon Musk said it could be worth trillions of dollars.
Waymo appears in five cities, including San Francisco, while Tesla launched a robotics service in Austin in June and started using ride-hailing operations in the Bay Area last month.
Uber said that since Tesla’s Robotaxi service was launched in cities, demand trends in Austin or San Francisco have not changed yet.
“For many companies, this is really worth mentioning… because there are lofty predictions about the overall addressable market for the Robotaxi industry,” said Ken Mahoney, CEO of Mahoney Asset Management.
(Reported by Akash Sriram in Bangalore; Editors by Aditya Soni and Shinjini Ganguli)
