Big techDrivingUnited StatesFounded 2016
Alphabet-backed autonomous driving company that develops the Waymo Foundation Model, the Waymo World Model and the EMMA research model for driving.
Waymo began as the Google self-driving car project in 2009 and was established under Alphabet as an independent self-driving technology company in 2016. It operates the Waymo Driver, which is built on the Waymo Foundation Model, and uses the Genie 3-based Waymo World Model for driving simulation. In February 2026 it raised a $16 billion investment round at a $126 billion post-money valuation, with Alphabet as majority investor.
Sources: waymo.com (19 Oct 2026) · waymo.com (9 Dec 2025) · waymo.com (6 Feb 2026) · waymo.com (2 Feb 2026)
Private company · Alphabet subsidiary with Alphabet as majority investor; also raises outside equity and debt. · $21B disclosed in USD across 2 of 2 listed rounds
#77 of 104 model companies · score 10.0 / 100 · updated 19 Oct 2026
Each bar shows an input from 0 to 100% before weighting. 0 of 3 listed models have open weights.
The score (0–100) measures public, checkable evidence about a company's robot models. It does not measure private capability. A company that publishes no benchmark results and no weights can still have strong models. Every input is computed from the data on each company page, and every number there links to its source.
| Input | Weight | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| Published benchmarks | 35% | For each scored benchmark, the company's best result divided by the best result any company has published, averaged over the benchmarks it reports. No published results scores 0. Results come only from the model's own paper, model card or the official benchmark leaderboard. Scored: LIBERO (4-suite average success, %); SimplerEnv Google Robot, visual matching (%); SimplerEnv Google Robot, variant aggregation (%); SimplerEnv WidowX / Bridge (%); CALVIN ABC→D (average length, 0–5); RoboArena (pairwise rating). |
| Open weights | 20% | Share of the company's listed models whose weights the public can download. |
| Adoption | 20% | GitHub stars on the company's most-starred official model repository, on a log scale relative to the most-starred repository in the list. Hugging Face downloads are shown on company pages but not scored, because gated repositories report zero. |
| Released models | 15% | Number of publicly announced, named models, capped at 5. |
| Disclosed funding | 10% | The sum of the funding rounds listed on the company's profile that were disclosed in USD, on a log scale from $10M to the largest sum in the list. Rounds reported only in other currencies are listed but not converted or counted. This input applies only to private startups and robot makers. For big-tech divisions, research labs and listed companies it is n/a, and its weight is shared across the other inputs in proportion. |
Sources. arXiv papers and official model cards for benchmarks and parameters; official leaderboards (RoboArena); the GitHub and Hugging Face APIs for stars and downloads; company announcements and established press for funding. Missing values are shown as n/a, never estimated.
Updated 19 Oct 2026. Benchmark protocols differ between papers, for example in fine-tuning and number of trials, so small gaps between close scores are not meaningful.
Closed weightsWorld model
Generative driving-simulation model built on Google DeepMind's Genie 3 that produces camera and lidar data for testing the Waymo Driver, including rare and counterfactual scenarios.
No benchmark results on a shared public benchmark have been published for this model.
Closed weightsVLA
Driving model that combines a sensor-fusion encoder (camera, lidar, radar) with a Gemini-trained driving VLM and a shared world decoder, and powers Waymo's Driver, Simulator and Critic.
No benchmark results on a shared public benchmark have been published for this model.
Closed weightsPolicy
End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving: a Gemini-based research model that maps camera input and text to planned trajectories, detected objects and road-graph elements.
No benchmark results on a shared public benchmark have been published for this model.
