Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. Google's development of self-driving technology began in January 2009, at the company's Google X lab run by co-founder Sergey Brin. The project was launched by Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and Anthony Levandowski, founder of 510 Systems and Anthony's Robots. The project was renamed Waymo in December 2016 following a corporate restructuring of Google. Waymo operates commercial self-driving taxi services in Phoenix, Arizona and San Francisco, CA. In October 2020, the company expanded the service to the public, and it was the only self-driving commercial service that operates without safety backup drivers in the vehicle at that time. Waymo also develops driving technology for use in other vehicles, including delivery vans and Class 8 tractor-trailers for delivery and logistics. Waymo is run by co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov. The company has raised $5.5 billion in multiple outside funding rounds. Waymo has partnerships with multiple vehicle manufacturers to integrate Waymo's technology, including with Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Nissan-Renault, Stellantis, Jaguar Land Rover, Volvo, and Geely. History Ground work Google's development of self-driving technology began on January 17, 2009, at the company's secretive Google X lab run by co-founder Sergey Brin. The project was launched by Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and Anthony Levandowski, founder of 510 Systems and Anthony's Robots. Before working at Google, Thrun and 15 engineers, including Dmitri Dolgov, Anthony Levandowski, and Mike Montemerlo worked together on a digital mapping technology project for SAIL called VueTool. Many of the team members had met at the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge where both Thrun and Levandowski had teams competing in the robotic, self-driving car challenge. In 2007, Google acqui-hired the entire VueTool team to help advance Google's Street View technology. As part of Street View's development, 100 Toyota Priuses were purchased and outfitted with the Topcon box, digital mapping hardware developed by Levandowski's company 510 Systems. In 2008, the Street View team launched project Ground Truth, to create accurate road maps by extracting data from satellites and street views. This laid the groundwork for the Google's self-driving car program. Pribot In February 2008, a Discovery Channel producer for the documentary series Prototype This! called Levandowski.