September 3, 2025 • 12 mins
One of New Zealand’s brightest is looking to be a leading figure in the robotics and self-driving car game.
Kiwi Dave Ferguson is one of the minds behind Nuro, a US maker of self-driving car technology – a company that just raised US$203 million in a funding round supported by Uber and Nvidia.
He began his career in self-driving vehicles with Google, working as a principal engineer on the Waymo program before splitting off to begin Nuro.
Self-driving cars have existed in fiction for decades, but real-life examples are a fairly new example, and although many people are sceptical about using them, Ferguson believes that will change.
“I think that the safety benefits that we’re going to get, the improvement in access, the sustainability, the economic benefits, the time back, like, it’s going to be an incredible project,” he told Hosking.
“A pretty incredible part of society long term.”
“Almost everyone I’ve ever known who has been in a Waymo, which is the only fully self-driving vehicle ... everyone that has been in a Waymo in San Francisco absolutely loves it.”
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right, Let's meet a keew we at the cutting edge
of the robotics and self driving car game. Dave Ferguson.
He left Google, where he was working for Weimo to
set up his own company in Neuro. Their capital rais
involved in video No Less and Uber, as well as
New Zealand's ice House ventures. Now Neuro's value these days
at over ten billion New Zealand dollars a day. Ferguson's
with US out of San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Good morning, Thanks Mike, good to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
At what stage is Neuro at in terms of delivery,
the capital raise, the money out there, access to it,
et cetera.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Well, we've raised just over two billion dollars, so in
terms of capital raised, I think we've done pretty well overall.
We're nine years into our journey and we very recently
signed a pretty big commercial deal with Uber where we're
going to be building a robotaxi. That Robotaxi will launch
at the end of twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
As far as the capital raise is concerned, in names
like Uber and in Vidia, how much of that name
association is important to what you do.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Well? I think for us at it's more the strategic
partnership that is part of the investment that they're making
that is important. So it's not so much the name,
but rather what we're doing together.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
When you were working with Google and Waimo, I mean,
was it always your intention to go out and do
your own thing or no?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
No, absolutely not. Actually I loved working at Google, and
my co founder and I worked together there. We met
at Google and we worked together for about five years
before deciding to branch out on our own and starting neuro.
I think I was probably a reluctant entrepreneur. It wasn't
something that I'd ever planned, but we were very excited
(01:41):
about the potential role we could have really working on
robotics generally, not so much self driving in particular, but
this has become the first application that we're working on.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
What do you make of self driving as a concept.
I read obsurvey the other day that I can't even
remember who did it. But as far as Tesla specifically
was concern, only fourteen percent of people thought that the
ability to be driven would attract you to a brand.
Is that something you need to battle or change?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I think personally, I think it's a terrible idea. That's
why I've devoted much of my career towards it. Look
I think that the safety benefits that we're going to get,
the improvement and access, the sustainability, the economic benefits, the
time back, it's going to be an incredible product, and
(02:31):
I think in a pretty incredible part of society long term.
I do think that there is a journey that we
need to go on together with the public around acceptance.
But I can say that almost everyone that I've ever
known who has been in a Weimo, which is the
only fully self driving vehicle, you know, Tesla's just a
driver assistant system right now. Everyone that's been in a
(02:54):
Weimo in San Francisco absolutely loves it, and if they
were skeptics beforehand, their converts almost immediately after the.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Journey of Weimo. Just in terms of robotaxis, where they
do it, in what cities and jurisdictions in America, the
trials the rules of regulations, has that been slower than
you would have liked?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I think from a regulatory perspective, it's been about as expected.
There is. The challenge with the states is that the
federal government regulates vehicles and each state regulates drivers. So
when you have a self driving vehicle. You have both
the vehicle and the driver in one and so you
have to deal with regulations on both the federal and
(03:36):
state level, and so that becomes a little bit more complicated.
But there are a number of states, including California, where
you can do full driverless operation, and those are obviously
the first states that companies are expanding it.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
What's the issue the biggest issue you face is it
the tech or is it government?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I think for now it's still the tech. I think
Weymover has proven that it's possible to build incredibly safe technology,
and I think we have two through the driverless deployments
that we've made as a company. But there's still a
pretty significant challenge in scaling that tech, particularly in a
very economically feasible way, basically doing it fast enough and
(04:16):
cheap enough.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
It strikes me that if you're in certain areas of life,
chips is one, your area is another. There's a lot
of money out there to be grabbed if you want it.
Is that fair or not?
Speaker 2 (04:29):
I think the autonomous vehicle industry has had a tough
couple of years, to be honest, Mike, We've seen almost
every company shut down that was working in their space
about three years ago, including some of the biggest companies
in the world, like Uber had their own effort that
shut down. Apple had their own internal effort that shut down.
So I do think we've gone through a period where
(04:51):
it was much much sort of a trough of disillusionment
around av in general. I think now we're coming out
of that, and WEIMO is big part of that because
they've shown that the tech is there and so now
it is just a scale and economics question, and so
I think the capital is coming back to the space,
particularly for the players that look like they're going to
(05:13):
be strong enough to actually deliver on this.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
How did you survive?
Speaker 2 (05:18):
We were fortunate to raise quite a lot of money
through twenty twenty one. Our last fundraise before this current one,
which is our series, was at the end of twenty
twenty one. At that point we had I think roughly
a billion dollars on the balance sheet, and so we
had a pretty good coffer wather to weather the storm,
and we cut our expenses, we reduced our team unfortunately,
(05:41):
and we really focused on just delivering on the autonomy
on the tech side, and fortunately we had enough runway
to really make it through the lean periods, and now
with many of the other competitors gone, I think we're
in a really good position with the maturity of the
tech to actually forge partnerships like the one and to
make this a reality.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
All right, right, let's move it forward. So I go
into the future to buy a car with your robotics in,
do I say versus somebody else's? Right? So, would that
be from my point of view, the punter's point of view,
a commercial choice, a sales choice or whatever, or is
it going to be different from that?
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yes, I believe so. I think we're going to have
fleets of vehicles much like the Robotaxi that we're building
now with Uber, that will be owned by mobility companies.
So Uber will have a bunch of their own av
fleets that they operate, but you'll also have the opportunity
as a consumer to buy a personally owned vehicle that
will have autonomy on it. And for Neuro, we are
(06:39):
working very hard to play in both spaces, so we're
forming partnerships on the mobility side. We're also forming partnerships
with the car manufacturers so that we can be part
of a future vehicle that you or someone else might
choose to buy for your own use.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
But would I see I've got a million questions about
the car makers, But would I buy Neuro Would I go,
I'm buying that because it's got neural on board as
to somebody else's products, like a good set of abs
breaks or some Elkintara interior or a good color scheme
or something.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, I think so. I think it's going to be
a differentiator. Now, it may not be the case that
you would pick the same car and you have a
trim that is a NEUROAV system versus some other AV provider.
There may only be one per vehicle, but I think
it will make a differences whether you choose to buy
a Corolla that has neuro or you choose to buy
a Forward that has some other.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
AV What about the car makers, do you perceive a
problem of one then getting in the market and purchasing
them stuff as opposed to say, doing it themselves or
and or what they're prepared to pay for it versus
what you're prepared to sell it for.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
It's an incredibly tough technical challenge, Mike and I think
we've seen through the last few years how difficult it
is for OEMs to build it themselves. Now, there's a
lot of variety in the OEM, the automotive sort of
automaker is field, where some of them are very technically
savvy and some of them are much less so, And
(08:05):
so I think we will see some of them continue
to try to go it alone. That's a very small subset.
These days, most of them are going to partner with
av providers like neuro so that they can have the
absolute bend class technology to provide to their customers.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
And how will it roll out for me as a punter?
Do I buy or will it be in my car
as an early version? So in other words, once you
crack it, once you get the regulatory tick off, and
it's in the car, what's the advance from that first
day to three years, seven years, tenures down the track
where it does something that maybe we can't even imagine.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
So that's a great question. I think the way that
we will see it roll out and to personally owned
vehicles is that it will actually be a product that
improves over time. So the simplest way to think about
it is your vehicle will have the hardware, it'll have
the eyes and ears, the cameras and light ears, and
radars that will enable it to drive itself, but on
day one it may own do that in certain areas,
(09:01):
so maybe it'll only drive itself on highway so you
can have breakfast or run a radio show from the
front set of your car on the way to work
while it's on the highway. And then over time the
software will improve with the same hardware, so you won't
have to upgrade your car, and it will expand the
areas over which it can do fully driverless or fully
autonomous behavior. So it will be what you hint to that,
(09:24):
which is a product that should continue to get better
and better over the years.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Is it subscription potentially over rear downloads, all that sort
of stuff. Yeah, So you get the base in the car,
and then you want the upgrade, like you want the
heated seats, you pay seven dollars a month and you're in. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
I think that particularly for the higher levels of autonomy,
so we in the industry we sort of differentiate between
a system that is sort of helping you personally drive
versus a system that is taking full control over the car.
I think as we get to those higher levels where
you can have an app or you can not even
be in the car those levels. I'm pretty confident they're
(10:04):
going to be subscription based because they just provide so
much value and that will be the easiest way to
recoup the investment and frankly, to reduce the upfront costs
of a vehicle to the end consumer as well.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Do you have an age issue of you counched any
of that data? Older people going I love my car,
this is mental, I'm never doing this, versus the eighteen
year old ago is bring it on, I can't wait.
Will that be a hurdle or not? Do you think not?
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Really? I think what we've seen through a lot of
the surveys is, again, once people experience it, they're pretty
excited about it, Mike, And you can imagine the elderly
at some point they're no longer super comfortable or confident
in driving, either it's too much of a hassle, or
as the age they become less excited about taking that
(10:49):
on themselves. And so you do have a lot of
variety within the different age groups. But at the end
of the day, if you can have a product that
is safer, so basically better than you driving in terms
of safety, and it can be incredibly low cost. Then
the result is just a product that makes a lot
of sense to every age group. Frankly.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
And then when you've done it, Dave, then what for you?
What's next when.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
We've solved such Oh I don't know's that's still a
we was way Mike. You know, the startup experience has
been an absolute right of a lifetime. It's been incredibly difficult,
by far, the hardest thing I've ever done, but it's
also been an incredibly fulfilling journey. So my wife says,
I'm going to start another company. I don't know if
(11:35):
I've got that in me. But there's still a long
way to go with getting this to scale worldwide. You know,
we lose one point two million people every year in
road accidents. Like there's a long way for us to
go to realize these benefits and actually put a massive
dent in that.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
All right, Dave, go well, appreciate it. We'll stay in touch.
Dave ferguson Kiwee in San Francisco, as company is Neurope.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen to news
talks it'd be from six am weekdays, or follow the
podcast on iHeartRadio.
Right, Let's meet a keew we at the cutting edge
of the robotics and self driving car game. Dave Ferguson.
He left Google, where he was working for Weimo to
set up his own company in Neuro. Their capital rais
involved in video No Less and Uber, as well as
New Zealand's ice House ventures. Now Neuro's value these days
at over ten billion New Zealand dollars a day. Ferguson's
with US out of San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Good morning, Thanks Mike, good to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
At what stage is Neuro at in terms of delivery,
the capital raise, the money out there, access to it,
et cetera.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Well, we've raised just over two billion dollars, so in
terms of capital raised, I think we've done pretty well overall.
We're nine years into our journey and we very recently
signed a pretty big commercial deal with Uber where we're
going to be building a robotaxi. That Robotaxi will launch
at the end of twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
As far as the capital raise is concerned, in names
like Uber and in Vidia, how much of that name
association is important to what you do.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Well? I think for us at it's more the strategic
partnership that is part of the investment that they're making
that is important. So it's not so much the name,
but rather what we're doing together.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
When you were working with Google and Waimo, I mean,
was it always your intention to go out and do
your own thing or no?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
No, absolutely not. Actually I loved working at Google, and
my co founder and I worked together there. We met
at Google and we worked together for about five years
before deciding to branch out on our own and starting neuro.
I think I was probably a reluctant entrepreneur. It wasn't
something that I'd ever planned, but we were very excited
(01:41):
about the potential role we could have really working on
robotics generally, not so much self driving in particular, but
this has become the first application that we're working on.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
What do you make of self driving as a concept.
I read obsurvey the other day that I can't even
remember who did it. But as far as Tesla specifically
was concern, only fourteen percent of people thought that the
ability to be driven would attract you to a brand.
Is that something you need to battle or change?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I think personally, I think it's a terrible idea. That's
why I've devoted much of my career towards it. Look
I think that the safety benefits that we're going to get,
the improvement and access, the sustainability, the economic benefits, the
time back, it's going to be an incredible product, and
(02:31):
I think in a pretty incredible part of society long term.
I do think that there is a journey that we
need to go on together with the public around acceptance.
But I can say that almost everyone that I've ever
known who has been in a Weimo, which is the
only fully self driving vehicle, you know, Tesla's just a
driver assistant system right now. Everyone that's been in a
(02:54):
Weimo in San Francisco absolutely loves it, and if they
were skeptics beforehand, their converts almost immediately after the.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Journey of Weimo. Just in terms of robotaxis, where they
do it, in what cities and jurisdictions in America, the
trials the rules of regulations, has that been slower than
you would have liked?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I think from a regulatory perspective, it's been about as expected.
There is. The challenge with the states is that the
federal government regulates vehicles and each state regulates drivers. So
when you have a self driving vehicle. You have both
the vehicle and the driver in one and so you
have to deal with regulations on both the federal and
(03:36):
state level, and so that becomes a little bit more complicated.
But there are a number of states, including California, where
you can do full driverless operation, and those are obviously
the first states that companies are expanding it.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
What's the issue the biggest issue you face is it
the tech or is it government?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I think for now it's still the tech. I think
Weymover has proven that it's possible to build incredibly safe technology,
and I think we have two through the driverless deployments
that we've made as a company. But there's still a
pretty significant challenge in scaling that tech, particularly in a
very economically feasible way, basically doing it fast enough and
(04:16):
cheap enough.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
It strikes me that if you're in certain areas of life,
chips is one, your area is another. There's a lot
of money out there to be grabbed if you want it.
Is that fair or not?
Speaker 2 (04:29):
I think the autonomous vehicle industry has had a tough
couple of years, to be honest, Mike, We've seen almost
every company shut down that was working in their space
about three years ago, including some of the biggest companies
in the world, like Uber had their own effort that
shut down. Apple had their own internal effort that shut down.
So I do think we've gone through a period where
(04:51):
it was much much sort of a trough of disillusionment
around av in general. I think now we're coming out
of that, and WEIMO is big part of that because
they've shown that the tech is there and so now
it is just a scale and economics question, and so
I think the capital is coming back to the space,
particularly for the players that look like they're going to
(05:13):
be strong enough to actually deliver on this.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
How did you survive?
Speaker 2 (05:18):
We were fortunate to raise quite a lot of money
through twenty twenty one. Our last fundraise before this current one,
which is our series, was at the end of twenty
twenty one. At that point we had I think roughly
a billion dollars on the balance sheet, and so we
had a pretty good coffer wather to weather the storm,
and we cut our expenses, we reduced our team unfortunately,
(05:41):
and we really focused on just delivering on the autonomy
on the tech side, and fortunately we had enough runway
to really make it through the lean periods, and now
with many of the other competitors gone, I think we're
in a really good position with the maturity of the
tech to actually forge partnerships like the one and to
make this a reality.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
All right, right, let's move it forward. So I go
into the future to buy a car with your robotics in,
do I say versus somebody else's? Right? So, would that
be from my point of view, the punter's point of view,
a commercial choice, a sales choice or whatever, or is
it going to be different from that?
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yes, I believe so. I think we're going to have
fleets of vehicles much like the Robotaxi that we're building
now with Uber, that will be owned by mobility companies.
So Uber will have a bunch of their own av
fleets that they operate, but you'll also have the opportunity
as a consumer to buy a personally owned vehicle that
will have autonomy on it. And for Neuro, we are
(06:39):
working very hard to play in both spaces, so we're
forming partnerships on the mobility side. We're also forming partnerships
with the car manufacturers so that we can be part
of a future vehicle that you or someone else might
choose to buy for your own use.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
But would I see I've got a million questions about
the car makers, But would I buy Neuro Would I go,
I'm buying that because it's got neural on board as
to somebody else's products, like a good set of abs
breaks or some Elkintara interior or a good color scheme
or something.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, I think so. I think it's going to be
a differentiator. Now, it may not be the case that
you would pick the same car and you have a
trim that is a NEUROAV system versus some other AV provider.
There may only be one per vehicle, but I think
it will make a differences whether you choose to buy
a Corolla that has neuro or you choose to buy
a Forward that has some other.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
AV What about the car makers, do you perceive a
problem of one then getting in the market and purchasing
them stuff as opposed to say, doing it themselves or
and or what they're prepared to pay for it versus
what you're prepared to sell it for.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
It's an incredibly tough technical challenge, Mike and I think
we've seen through the last few years how difficult it
is for OEMs to build it themselves. Now, there's a
lot of variety in the OEM, the automotive sort of
automaker is field, where some of them are very technically
savvy and some of them are much less so, And
(08:05):
so I think we will see some of them continue
to try to go it alone. That's a very small subset.
These days, most of them are going to partner with
av providers like neuro so that they can have the
absolute bend class technology to provide to their customers.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
And how will it roll out for me as a punter?
Do I buy or will it be in my car
as an early version? So in other words, once you
crack it, once you get the regulatory tick off, and
it's in the car, what's the advance from that first
day to three years, seven years, tenures down the track
where it does something that maybe we can't even imagine.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
So that's a great question. I think the way that
we will see it roll out and to personally owned
vehicles is that it will actually be a product that
improves over time. So the simplest way to think about
it is your vehicle will have the hardware, it'll have
the eyes and ears, the cameras and light ears, and
radars that will enable it to drive itself, but on
day one it may own do that in certain areas,
(09:01):
so maybe it'll only drive itself on highway so you
can have breakfast or run a radio show from the
front set of your car on the way to work
while it's on the highway. And then over time the
software will improve with the same hardware, so you won't
have to upgrade your car, and it will expand the
areas over which it can do fully driverless or fully
autonomous behavior. So it will be what you hint to that,
(09:24):
which is a product that should continue to get better
and better over the years.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Is it subscription potentially over rear downloads, all that sort
of stuff. Yeah, So you get the base in the car,
and then you want the upgrade, like you want the
heated seats, you pay seven dollars a month and you're in. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
I think that particularly for the higher levels of autonomy,
so we in the industry we sort of differentiate between
a system that is sort of helping you personally drive
versus a system that is taking full control over the car.
I think as we get to those higher levels where
you can have an app or you can not even
be in the car those levels. I'm pretty confident they're
(10:04):
going to be subscription based because they just provide so
much value and that will be the easiest way to
recoup the investment and frankly, to reduce the upfront costs
of a vehicle to the end consumer as well.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Do you have an age issue of you counched any
of that data? Older people going I love my car,
this is mental, I'm never doing this, versus the eighteen
year old ago is bring it on, I can't wait.
Will that be a hurdle or not? Do you think not?
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Really? I think what we've seen through a lot of
the surveys is, again, once people experience it, they're pretty
excited about it, Mike, And you can imagine the elderly
at some point they're no longer super comfortable or confident
in driving, either it's too much of a hassle, or
as the age they become less excited about taking that
(10:49):
on themselves. And so you do have a lot of
variety within the different age groups. But at the end
of the day, if you can have a product that
is safer, so basically better than you driving in terms
of safety, and it can be incredibly low cost. Then
the result is just a product that makes a lot
of sense to every age group. Frankly.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
And then when you've done it, Dave, then what for you?
What's next when.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
We've solved such Oh I don't know's that's still a
we was way Mike. You know, the startup experience has
been an absolute right of a lifetime. It's been incredibly difficult,
by far, the hardest thing I've ever done, but it's
also been an incredibly fulfilling journey. So my wife says,
I'm going to start another company. I don't know if
(11:35):
I've got that in me. But there's still a long
way to go with getting this to scale worldwide. You know,
we lose one point two million people every year in
road accidents. Like there's a long way for us to
go to realize these benefits and actually put a massive
dent in that.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
All right, Dave, go well, appreciate it. We'll stay in touch.
Dave ferguson Kiwee in San Francisco, as company is Neurope.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen to news
talks it'd be from six am weekdays, or follow the
podcast on iHeartRadio.
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