#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business  - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Top Story 1: Week of Trucks - Wabbi + Gatik

Waabi - autonomous trucking - raises $1 billion - in the process extending its Uber partnership to develop robotaxis for Uber. Of that $1 billion, the majority is from Venture funds and $250M is from Uber. Waabi has a partnership with Volvo and commercial pilots (with safety drivers) in the US, but not fully driverless operations as of yet. 

Re Uber partnership, “the company is exclusively partnering with Uber to deploy robotaxis powered by the Waabi Driver on the Uber platform”. Is that really exclusive? In addition, the companies “aim to deploy at least 25,000 vehicles equipped with Waabi’s sensor kit on Uber’s ride-hailing network”. 

Meanwhile

Gatik announce autonomy at scale ("others are still in simulation, we’re in the supply chain"), sharing a mix of commercial and autonomy numbers and achievements: 

Expect an IPO or major investment round soon. 

Top Store 2 - Waymo Hits a Child

Waymo hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California. The NHTSA opened an investigation in coordination with the local police. 

According to Waymo, “the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV… the Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph (27 km/h) to under 6 mph (9 km/h) before contact was made”. It further says that “a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph (22 km/h). This significant reduction in impact speed and severity is a demonstration of the material safety benefit of the Waymo Driver”. 

While Waymo does probably have better reaction times - a human driver might have reasoned that he(/she) is driving near a school at drop-off time, and not driven at that speed in the first place. As a driver, schools always made me extra cautious - children are extremely unpredictive. For perspective - I strongly  suggest reading this LinkedIn post - about the Waymo city driving culture and how it didn’t fit with what was needed in Santa Monica. 

And indeed the NHTSA is investigating "whether the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution… proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users". 

An important reminder - Waymo has a school problem. The company is under investigation for not yielding to school buses, in over 20 incidents. While not directly linked to this accident, it highlights the missing awe robots have near schools.

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Waymo to raise $16 billion on a $110 billion valuation. Of that, Alphabet (Google parent company) will provide $13 billion. The latest round, in November 2024, was a $5.6 billion round on a $45 billion valuation. This is X2.5 in one year. 

Freenow to bring robotaxis to Hamburg - signs MOU with the city. The plan is to have robotaxi complement public transport in urban and peri-urban settings outside of Hamburg’s city centre. No known timeline, no known OEM (Baidu?).

Uber launches “AV Labs” - the new team will collect real world driving data from Uber vehicles’ sensors and provide it to AV tech companies the likes of Waymo and Waabi. For now, Uber is at the prototype phase, with one car on the road, but it definitely has the scale to provide global coverage of driving scenarios. 

42dot - Hyundai's AV unit - recruited a new CEO (X-NVIDIA) and is recruiting engineers. The unit has circa 800 employees, 70% of those R&D. Also reports that Hyundai is considering relying more on NVIDIA’s new autonomous Alpamayo platforms. 

Taxi drivers who work for Uber cannot be deemed automatically as employees, the Court in the Netherlands determines. The Court concluded that the default employment status is self employment, with any deviation to be examined on a per-case (personal) basis, thus reversing a lower Court’s decision. 

Pony AI partners with ATBB, fleet operations, targeting airport and rail autonomous deployments.  Waymo to be fully operational in London by September. In Japan, Waymo is still performing test runs. Video of a Waymo on the freeway at 65 mph (105 km/h). The ComfortDelGro + Pony vehicle is back on the road after an accident with a road divider. As one can expect, CDG blames the human safety operator for intervening. DiDi and GAC (OEM) receive approval to test the new Aion model robotaxi fleet in Guangzhou. Autonomous taxis set for test runs in Kazakhstan, working with both InDrive and Yandex. Tesla approved to begin FSD tests in Israel. 

CaoCao to raise HK$389M (±$50M USD) via sale of company shares. Yango implements PIN codes to increase safety - riders and drivers both receive the same PIN code, to ease identification. Ecab, dispatch software, signs with Frankfurt’s Taxi Now, its first German client. In 2025, Uber Poland launched in 34 new cities.  InDrive is once again the #2 most downloaded ride-hailing app.  

DRT, Bus-Based Mobility & AV shuttles 🚍🚌

WeRide launches commercial operations in Leuven, Belgium. The service is integrated into the public transport network. 

BusUp acquires Iomob (MaaS) and partners with TRIBBU (car sharing) to provide a larger set of mobility solutions. The article has some figures on BusUp: 

Enakl, Moroccan-based corporate commute, raises $2.3M. Funds will be used to grow tech stack and client base. Congrats!

SWVL expands to Kuwait with a new $2.2M contract and wins a 5-year $5.5M contract in the UAE. Routematic partners with the Zyoin Group, workforce solutions, to commute its employees. K2 and WeRide sign an MOU to operate autonomous buses in Abu Dhabi. Holon adds to its management team. 

The UK DfT’s Bus franchising manual is published. Written by Arup, this 138-page document “helps LTA officers and leaders to engage stakeholders, to develop and assess the franchise option(s) that suit local needs and local risk appetite, and to implement bus franchise operations”.

January is now behind us - but still at least 86 mobility events are ahead of us. From autonomy to shared mobility to electrification - check out my (free no signup required) 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar: 

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

Vay in Las Vegas: 

INVERS 2026 car sharing trends: 

GreenMobility partners with Viking Assistance to supply replacement electric cars.  

VNV published its 2025 financial report and although it doesn't have Gett anymore, it still holds to BlaBlaCar and to Voi. 

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Still VNV:

Berlin orders Nextbike to leave the city; the company operates 6,500 bikes across the city. The order is following a licensing dispute between the City and Nextbike, in which Nextbike lost in court. The company will now need to apply for the license requested by the city. It will be sorted eventually. 

Bird challenges Florence e-scooter ban in court. Not sure this one will sort itself. 

Rad Power Bikes reaches deal to sell itself for $13.2M to Life Electric Vehicles Holdings. The company, which raised a total of $330M and at peak (October 2021) was valued at $1.65 billion(!), entered bankruptcy in late 2025.

Delivery - from bikes & cars to bots & drones 🍽🧺

Zipline explains (2-min video) how it manages operations in tough weather. Manna passes 250,000 deliveries since beginning commercial operations. Keeta marks 1 year of commercial operational drone delivery in Dubai. 

Swiggy integrates with AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini - enabling users to book directly from their preferred LLM. 

Grubhub to remove delivery and service fees on all restaurant orders above $50, in an attempt to win market share.

AV Freight & Logistics 🚛🚜

Chinese trucking tech startup Deepway raises $172M before Hong Kong IPO. 

Swaayatt Robots removes safety driver for the 1st time in an off road operation. See video. 

TRATON commits $25M in dedicated R&D funding to PlusAI and will get a seat on the board. 

In other news 📰

Electreon completes the acquisition of InductEV, creating the largest global wireless vehicle charging company. As it happens, Astara Intelligence wrote about wireless charging this week - key takeaways: 

I’ll add to the list of advantages the savings in available space; eliminating the copper theft challenge and vandalism; reducing accidents and misuse; taking away the “I forgot to charge” and potentially solving union challenges. 

Why Red Tape, Not Technology, is Grounding Drone Delivery. A read by James Gleave on the UK and EU regulatory framework and how they stifle innovation and maintain an ever-continuous pilot-stage operation. For more. 

Routing24 launched a new subscription-free route planner tool for transportation and logistics.

I love meeting new people and learning about mobility & delivery innovation. Let’s get-to-know.

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Chris Neil is the new Head of Revenue Operations @ VivaCity. 

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