We assess the current state of the autonomous ground delivery market following news from Nuro and prior scale-backs from Amazon and FedEx.
As concerns around self-driving technology mount, last-mile delivery companies are taking a hit.
Autonomous delivery unicorn Nuro recently announced that it plans to lay off 30% of its staff — about 340 employees — in addition to delaying production of its newest vehicle prototype, the R3.
This follows the news that both Amazon and FedEx are scaling back their autonomous delivery programs as they prioritize more lucrative projects.
Momentum in the space is clearly slowing, with funding to autonomous delivery companies falling 88% to $81M in 2022.
Valuations in the space are also running stale as the majority of solutions in the US have yet to reach commercial scale, mainly due to regulatory hurdles that prohibit autonomous delivery vehicles from public roads and sidewalks.
In this brief, we use CB Insights data to assess the current state of the autonomous ground delivery market. We look at the following data points:
- Total funding
- Top-funded companies
- Valuations
- Headcount growth
- Execution, Strength, and Positioning (ESP) matrix
Total funding
Funding to autonomous delivery companies has cooled substantially since peaking at $1B in 2019. Companies have raised just over $12M in 2023 YTD, down from $81M in 2022, which was an 88% decline from the year prior.
The number of deals has also dropped significantly since 2021, during which 13 different companies raised funding rounds.
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