Nuro lays off 30 p.c of employees, shifts focus to R&D

Autonomous supply startup Nuro announced this week that it’s shedding 30 p.c of its workforce, or round 340 workers, as reported by TechCrunch. It’ll now shift its focus away from business operations and towards R&D. It’s the corporate’s second spherical of layoffs within the final yr; it let go of about 300 folks in November.

As a part of the restructuring, Nuro says it’s delaying the beforehand deliberate manufacturing of its third-generation Nuro bot (R3) car. As well as, it would cut back the dimensions of its business pilots and “discover extra environment friendly deployment fashions with companions.” The corporate says the modifications will let it function twice as lengthy with out elevating extra money.

Nuro was based in 2016 by former Google Waymo engineers Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson. Since then, the startup has raised over $2 billion whereas gaining regulatory approval for testing on public roads in Arizona, California and Texas. Final yr, it introduced the kickoff of an Uber Eats delivery program as a part of a 10-year partnership.

“Whereas up to now we developed autonomy techniques, designed and constructed customized automobiles, and deployed business pilots with companions in parallel, we are going to now pursue a extra sequential improvement mannequin,” the corporate wrote in a weblog publish. “With our new strategy, Nuro is not going to solely get by means of this financial downturn, however we hope to emerge stronger on the opposite facet.”

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