Urban areas face growing challenges with increasing congestion, a shortage of human drivers, and rising demand for efficient, safe, and scalable transportation and delivery services. Avride addresses these problems by developing autonomous robotaxis and delivery robots that operate reliably in complex urban environments.
Today, Avride has secured up to $375 million in strategic investments and commercial commitments from Uber and Nebius. This funding will enable rapid scaling of their autonomous fleet to as many as 500 vehicles and expand their AI-driven product development and geographic reach.
Avride was founded in 2020 as a corporate spin-off from the Yandex self-driving car group, which had been developing autonomous vehicle technology since 2017. The founding team consists principally of engineers formerly from Yandex’s autonomous driving group, with Dmitry Polishchuk serving as CEO.
Inspired by the vision of making autonomous transportation a routine part of daily life, the company’s mission is to create safer, more accessible, and sustainable urban mobility solutions.
Leveraging a unique technology approach that integrates both vehicle and delivery automation under one AI-driven platform, Avride fulfils orders and transports passengers with minimal human intervention. Avride’s technology integrates autonomous electric vehicles (based on retrofitted Hyundai Ioniq 5 EVs) with sidewalk delivery robots, powered by a shared AI platform that enables continuous learning and performance improvements across modalities.
Their vehicles feature lidar, radar, cameras, and proprietary computational hardware designed for high redundancy and safety. The delivery robots, navigating sidewalks and crosswalks, fulfil food orders in collaboration with platforms like Uber Eats and Grubhub.
This dual-technology strategy, combining passenger transport and delivery robots, differentiates Avride from competitors such as Nuro, Waymo, Cruise, and Udelv, who typically focus on one domain.
Looking forward, Avride is focused on scaling its autonomous fleet to hundreds of vehicles with an initial public robotaxi launch on Uber’s platform in Dallas scheduled before the end of 2025. The company plans to expand geographically into new markets and broaden autonomous rides and delivery services.
