Nuro has historically raised more than $ 1 billion in funding.
During the New Coronary Pneumonia epidemic, in order to reduce personnel contact, the public ’s acceptance of automation and unmannedness has been significantly enhanced More commercialization opportunities.
Nuro, an American self-driving startup, recently announced a partnership with CVS Pharmacy, a well-known drugstore chain, to deliver CVS medicines to residents of Houston, Texas. Nuro will use Toyota Prius models for delivery. Later, it will gradually use its customized R2 self-driving delivery van.
Source: Nuro
After purchasing medicines and daily necessities from the CVS official website or APP, consumers can choose the free delivery service of the Nuro self-driving car. When the autonomous vehicle arrives, customers can verify their identity and pick up the goods themselves. There is no driver, no passengers, only cargo in the car.
CVS Health ’s senior vice president of store operations, Ryan Rumbarger, said in a statement that during the epidemic, demand for drug distribution increased. When customers are inconvenient to go to the store to buy medicines, home delivery is a good choice.
This cooperation with CVS means that Nuro ’s delivery of unmanned vehicles will expand from supermarket groceries to medical care. Of course, Nuro’s exploration in the field of medical healthIt has been started since last month. During the New Coronary Pneumonia epidemic, Nuro has already delivered food and medicine and other epidemic prevention materials to some hospitals in San Mateo and Sacramento, California.
Nuro started to launch a self-driving car delivery service for the public with Kroger, a famous American grocery retailer, at the end of 2018. It operates in Scottsdale; at the end of 2019, Nuro began working with Wal-Mart to provide Wal-Mart customers with home delivery services in the Houston area.
Nuro and Wal-Mart’s unmanned delivery vehicle (Source: Wal-Mart)
Nuro was founded in 2016 by co-founder Zhu Jiajun and Dave Ferguson, the former chief engineer of Google ’s self-driving team, and announced in February 2019 that he obtained the Softbank Vision Fund 940 million US dollars of financing, and in early 2018 announced the completion of 92 million US dollars in Series A financing, investment institutions include Gao Rong Capital, NetEase founder Ding Lei, Zhen Fund, Greylock Partners.
February this year, Nuro received the US Department of Transportation (DOT) and US National Highway Safety (NHTSA) approved that its “no steering wheel, no rearview mirror, no side mirror” completely unmanned logistics distribution vehicle Nuro R2 can drive on public roads, The time limit is 2 years, and the number does not exceed 5000 units.
And in April, Nu