Jane Lanhee Lee

(Reuters) – Nuro is an autonomous vehicle delivery company that raised $600 million during its recent round of funding. Silicon Valley-based startup Alphabet joined the board as an investor.

A source close to the matter said that Nuro’s value was $8.6Billion after it received funding from Tiger Global Management. It had previously been valued at $5 billion.

Toyota Motor (NYSE) Corp.’s Woven Capital and SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund 1 were just a few of the investors. Kroger (NYSE) Co. was also an investor.

The race to create war chests for technology development and commercialization is on the rise among self-driving startup companies. It can be expensive and tedious. Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving unit raised $2.5 million in June.

Nuro’s R2 unit, which has no steering wheels or pedals, and has only space for packages, announced that it had signed a 5-year strategic partnership agreement with Google Cloud in support of self-driving simulating and data management.

Google Cloud stated that it also wanted to assist Nuro in optimising how it delivers for other businesses. This is a step towards transforming local commerce.

Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson, the founders of Nuro, worked together on Google’s self driving car project. They were later spun off as Waymo before launching Nuro.

Nuro’s R2 was tested in many places, including Houston (Texas), Phoenix (Arizona), and Mountain View (California).

In February 2013, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved Nuro’s request to allow up to 5,000 R2 cars to be used on public roads for a period of two years. It hasn’t disclosed how many R2 vehicles are currently on the roads.