MAY 13, 2023 — 340 LAYOFFS IN OPERATIONAL RESTRUCTURING
The company has announced that it will lay off 30%, or about 340 employees, across the company as part of a restructuring meant to extend its capital runway.
“Today we’re sharing how we intend to chart a more capital-efficient path to realize Nuro’s mission.
At Nuro, our mission is to make everyday life better through robotics. Our first product — autonomous local goods delivery — aims to improve the lives of millions of people, strengthening communities and the environment in the process. This has been our goal from day one, and we remain firmly committed to it.
Over the past seven years, we’ve made significant progress towards this goal. We built a custom fleet of zero-occupant vehicles, developed state of the art AI to operate these vehicles driverlessly on public roads, and signed nationally recognized brands as commercial partners. Each of these accomplishments marks a key step in building a scaled, autonomous delivery service.
For most of Nuro’s existence, we have operated in a favorable fundraising environment and have been fortunate to attract significant funding from top investors. But over the past year and a half, capital markets in general, and deep tech funding in particular, have significantly retracted. Recent bank failures and talk about an impending US recession signal that this shift isn’t going to revert soon. We’ve entered a new capital environment that will shape the next few years or more. In this new reality, we need to be more efficient with our balance sheet.
There is a fundamental tension in the development of self-driving between capital efficiency and speed to building an initial service. We have historically invested heavily in deploying commercial services and have learned a great deal from our customers. But commercial deployments come at a significant cost, both in terms of resources and autonomy focus. And until the unit economics of these services make sense, we think it is prudent to focus on what we can do efficiently as a startup.
Going forward, we will change our approach to building the Nuro business. While in the past we developed autonomy systems, designed and built custom vehicles, and deployed commercial pilots with partners in parallel, we will now pursue a more sequential development model.
At the center of this new approach is our hyper-focus on autonomy. Recent advancements in AI have increased our confidence and ability to reach true generalized and scaled autonomy faster. We have invested in AI and ML from day one, and a large portion of our autonomy stack is already directly learnable from data. Our focus now will be on making our autonomy stack even more data-driven, enabling us to scale to larger operating areas even more rapidly.
In addition, we will delay the previously planned production line of our third-generation vehicle, reduce the scale of our commercial pilots in the near term, and explore more efficient deployment models with partners. This focus on accelerating autonomy progress and sequential development of our service will provide a leaner model for AV development, and will more than double our runway from about 1.5 years to nearly 3.5 years.
Unfortunately, implementing this new roadmap means making difficult choices around where we focus our efforts and where we cut or pause spending. Last month, we offered voluntary separation packages to some employees, and we will implement a planned reduction in force later this week. This change weighs on us most. We are deeply inspired by the dedication and passion of our colleagues and every step we take after this will be with gratitude for the hard work and contributions of the colleagues who will be leaving us.
We firmly believe a future where autonomous vehicles improve daily life is both exciting and inevitable. With our new approach, Nuro will not only get through this economic downturn, but we hope to emerge stronger on the other side. Our mission to better everyday life through robotics and our product vision to build a local autonomous delivery service remain intact, and our dedication and resolve to achieve them is stronger than ever.”
NOVEMBER 28, 2022 — Original blog entry…
Mountain View, California-based Nuro, a robotics specializing in driverless, purpose-built on-road delivery autonomous vehicles, has announced a 20% reduction in its workforce.
The personnel realignment will impact 300 employees.
According to co-founders Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson...
"Dear Nurons,
Today we’re announcing the most difficult decision we’ve had to make since we founded Nuro 6 years ago. We are reducing the size of our team by roughly 20%, which equates to around 300 Nurons. You will all receive an email shortly letting you know if you are impacted by this layoff and with information on next steps.
As co-founders, we’ve repeatedly said that building this team has been our proudest accomplishment to date — this remains as true today as ever. We owe all Nuro’s progress to our team. Each and every one of you have made important contributions to this company, and saying goodbye to talented Nurons is not a decision we have taken lightly. For those of you leaving Nuro, we are very sorry for this outcome — this is not the experience we wanted to create for you. We made this call and take full responsibility for today’s circumstances.
We want to share as much as we can about the context and the why behind our decision, what we are doing to support those who are leaving, and details of what will happen next.
First, we’d like to share what led to this and what mistakes we made. The world has changed significantly in the past twelve months. Late 2021 represented one of the strongest fundraising environments in history. We saw an abundant supply of capital for deep tech companies and almost all companies were aggressively hiring and expanding. In that environment, we determined it made sense to invest heavily across the board and grow our team rapidly.
But 2022 has brought a variety of macroeconomic challenges — geopolitical uncertainty, energy crises, persistent inflation, and an impending US recession, among others. The market has gotten ugly. This stark shift requires us to respond decisively and we made the decision to extend our runway well into 2025 to ensure Nuro will steadfastly weather this market downturn. We have dug into company spending and cut back across the board. Laying off team members is always the last resort, but unfortunately it was needed after other options were exhausted. This result is on us; we doubled the size of our team in less than two years and significantly increased our operating expenses, assuming the funding environment would remain strong. This was a mistake.
Today our focus is on those who are impacted. We want to be clear that these reductions are not a reflection of the work of impacted individuals. You have all made important contributions to Nuro, contributions that made the company what it is today and will continue to shape its future. We are so grateful for that."
Change is coming. There will always be a tomorrow, no matter how much you may try to ignore it. There are no guarantees in life or promises for a bright future. We see good people being laid off through no fault of their own. Just because something bad hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. It can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. No one is guaranteed to wake up tomorrow and still have a job by evening. Are you now wondering, Am I Next?