Driverless-car tech startup Nauto raises $159M Series B led by Greylock Partners and SoftBank
Greylock's Reid Hoffman and SoftBank's Shu Nyatta will join Nauto's board as part of the investment. — Greylock Partners and SoftBank are leading a $159 series B round into auto-tech startup Nauto.
Context & Ripple Effects
This round is the second act of Nauto's unusual funding structure: nine months after BMW, Toyota, and Allianz took an undisclosed stake and agreed to pool safety data with the startup, the company has converted that strategic validation into a conventional $159M Series B led by Greylock Partners and SoftBank, with Reid Hoffman and Shu Nyatta taking board seats.
For SoftBank, this is an early marker in what becomes a sustained autonomous-vehicle capital campaign — the same firm that backed Nauto here later put $940M into delivery-robot maker Nuro via its Vision Fund at a $2.7B valuation, and Nuro's most recent round closed at a $6B valuation.
First-order effects
- Nauto gains $159M and two heavyweight directors — Hoffman and Nyatta — giving it institutional capital on top of its automaker-and-insurer strategic base to scale its driverless-car technology.
- Greylock and SoftBank each secure board-level influence over a startup whose data relationships with BMW, Toyota, and Allianz are already in place.
Second-order effects
- SoftBank's check signals to other autonomy startups that a single backer can fund successive rounds at escalating valuations — a template it applied directly when it led Nuro's $940M Vision Fund round two years later.
- Competing driverless-tech startups now face a rival with both OEM/insurer data partnerships and deep-pocketed financial sponsorship, raising the capital bar for anyone selling into the same fleet-safety market.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, autonomy funding consolidates around a small set of mega-backers who can bridge companies from strategic pilots to billion-dollar rounds, shifting power over which driving-tech approaches survive from automakers to the funds financing them.
The trend: SoftBank is building a concentrated position across the autonomous-driving stack, moving from early bets like Nauto toward dominant funding of the sector's survivors.