It’s a sad ending to the startup that emerged in 2017 armed with $1 billion led by Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker Ford. That same year saw a burst of autonomous vehicle startups, and venture funding in the space jumped from $1.1 billion to $5.2 billion between 2016 and 2017, according to Crunchbase data. The number of funding deals also increased by 39%.

But it looks like that love is starting to fade. Ford said in a third-quarter earnings call Wednesday that Argo AI wasn’t able to attract new investors. (Argo AI raised an unknown amount of corporate financing led by back in 2021, per Crunchbase.) So Ford was shifting gears and allocating fewer resources to autonomous vehicles. 

A rocky road for AV

So far in 2022, we’ve seen around $4.7 billion in venture investment for autonomous vehicles — the lowest since 2017. In fact, funding in 2022 is still more than 10% lower than 2017. 

It’s too early to tell, however, if investors are pumping the brakes on self-driving technology. Funding decreased between 2019 and 2020, but saw a massive uptick in 2021 (which I’m going to call an outlier, given how much money was pumped into every sector that year). And 2022’s less-than-favorable numbers could be attributed to the economic situation that followed. 

Ford says it will likely buy autonomous-vehicle technology down the road. , Argo AI’s other backer, pulled out of the company and will continue working with its in-house autonomous-vehicle developer and expand its partnership with , ’s autonomous-driving software that went public earlier this year. 

Mobileye was valued at a little more than a quarter , and . Perhaps predictable: Earlier in October, Crunchbase News found that self-driving vehicle companies have lost a combined $41 billion in stock market valuation since 2020.

We don’t know what the future holds for autonomous vehicles. For now, Argo AI will be dismantled for parts and shared between Ford and Volkswagen. 

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Ride-hailing companies don’t make money. It’s nearly a law of business. I think that we can add another, related writ to the first, namely that autonomous driving startups always need another billion dollars.

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Or more, as we learned today on the news that has picked up $2.6 billion in what “capital and assets” including a $1 billion primacy investment, a $500 million secondary buy of shares from Ford, among other transactions in the VW-led deal.

You have heard of Argo AI (we’ve covered it here, and here), but I doubt that you knew the scale of capital that the group has needed to power its operations. For example, Argo raised $1 billion in commitments from before the current capital event.

Argo is worth around $7 billion after the transaction.

The new funds mean that Argo, one player in the realm of autonomous driving, is closer to $4 billion in capital raised than it is to $3 billion if I’m adding correctly (there’s some nuance to the deal structure). And what strikes my memory is how that sum isn’t shocking when we consider other huge deals in the niche.

Here’s a quick rundown of some recent deals in the autonomous sector:

• $100 million for LiDar technology in  . The San Francisco-based company has now raised $250 million to date.
• $1.15 billion for , part of the General Motors world. The recent transaction follows a , and several smaller investments. The firm’s total capital raised is, if we’re adding correctly this early on a Friday, around $5.5 billion.
• $1 billion for , which had previously found financing from Uber’s own coffers. That became ruinous, so Uber found friends to share the load.
• $940 million for , a company building a “self-driving vehicle made for local goods transportation” picked up nearly $1 billion in February, 2019. This time it was SoftBank money of all things. But what’s clear is that there are folks in the autonomous driving world willing to remove humans entirely from cars. That’s actually cool.
• $530 million for , a San Francisco-based autonomous driving startup that has now raised $690 million after counting its huge . The firm later into its coffers.

Toss in and the picture becomes even more crowded. Bear in mind that all the above rounds are merely the $100 million or greater rounds invested into autonomous driving companies since the start of 2019. Loosen the rules, say, adding rounds between $50 million and $100 million, and you can find even more deals.

All this to say that the venture-backed and corporate-sponsored bet on self-driving technology is getting longer and longer each day. And so far as I can tell from where I sit, only has managed to begin anything approaching .

How long these bets can continue before any player in the space can show even a partial return on investment in other than mark-up terns isn’t clear. But the answer as far as today goes is one word: longer.

Update: Luminar’s total funds raised was updated after publication, per the company’s own information.

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The round caught our eye not merely because we don’t see many Croatian companies on our radar, but also because it made us wonder how strong the aggregate EV venture capital scene has been. So, we dug into , and graphed the results.

Below is known deal and dollar volume for venture capital, private equity, and corporate venture capital (CVC) rounds raised by companies in Crunchbase’s EV category. Note that the category includes EV manufacturers, as well as companies developing battery technology and vehicle charging infrastructure.

So far in 2019, there have been 27 rounds raised by EV companies, accounting for approximately $2.1 billion in known funding.

Over the past year, we’ve covered a number of rounds that related to electric vehicles in some form or another. For example, In April, we covered how , a developer of battery technology for use in electric vehicles, raised $170 million in a funding round led by German auto giant .

The California-based Sila Nano is working to improve lithium-ion batteries. Its chemistry allows for “lighter, safer, higher energy density batteries for mass adoption of electric vehicles, smarter, longer-lasting portable electronics, and broader use of renewable power sources,” according to the company.

Big car companies are also at work. Earlier this year, tied up with to the tune of $500 million. The pair are working on new batteries for Ford’s own electric car work. If that sounds similar to the Rimac round, it should.

And last September, Daimler also put money in San Francisco-based , a maker of battery-electric buses. It co-led in the company, which previously made “buses for municipal, federal and commercial transit agencies,” according to our friends at . In partnership with Daimler, TechCrunch that Proterra would “work with Daimler to possibly electrify the company’s Thomas Built Buses division, which manufactures a line of school buses.”

Around the world it seems that the tide has crested on gas-powered cars; at least in terms of where research, and the future are looking. It will be years and years until the world sells more electric cars than those powered by old-school methods. But the deals needed to reach that tipping point are being sorted as we speak.

Indeed, we’ve been on this topic essentially since Crunchbase News came into publication, noting in 2017 that the venture classes are into the space. Even back in 2009, a period in which the global economy was dark, there was a good sum invested into the space. Since then China has for their development, for example.

There’s More To Autos Than Electricity

We’d be remiss to leave today without pointing out that the dollar amounts we discussed above are small compared to another category of automotive investment. Namely, self-driving tech.

There has been a staggering amount of money invested into autonomous car tech in recent years. Indeed, according to Crunchbase data, the figure is north of $16 billion globally since the start of 2018. With that in mind, the Rimac round is impressive but comparably modest.

Indeed, so far this year we’ve seen two billion dollar or larger rounds in the self-driving space. Uber’s picked up a billion, and , part of the empire raised $1.15 billion as well. That’s a lot of money.

But ironically, electric cars are a reality today. They exist, they are sold, they are driven. Self-driving tech remains, in contrast, partial and not yet as good as it needs to be. This makes for an interesting wager of sorts. But perhaps in the end we’ll get a self-driving Rimac.

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News that would buy , a small American scooter company made a splash. That scooter-war veterans and had managed to acquire another, larger rival mattered for the young unicorns. For Ford, the move was yet another acquisition, and move, into the broader mobility space.

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The incumbent transit company didn’t merely generate good headlines when it said it was going to work on non-car mobility projects. The Spin deal, of course, comes several years after , and, as Crunchbase News reported the other day, the automotive giant has never been more startup-hungry than it is today.

But on the Spin side of things, clarity was harder to find. Reports on the value of the deal were all over the map, from to , and .

Even more, that the company’s prior, hoped-for token offering hadn’t gone off. That coupled with the interval since the firm’s last round of external capital, and it looked like Spin had run low on cash and found itself a home and an exit for its shareholders.

Maybe not. According to , the company had another option:

“[W]e’ve learned from multiple sources that the deal came after Spin had a signed Series B term sheet in hand, for $20 million on a $65 million pre-money valuation, led by New York’s Rosecliff Ventures.”

That actually makes sense? If Bird and Lime are worth billions, surely Spin, with its access to the San Francisco market, had value. And, given the amount of money sloshing around Silicon Valley today, it could have found some to put into its own pockets.

Perhaps Ford promised backing and help to Spin that it couldn’t have hoped to match on its own? And $20 million would have only gone so far. This old chart (source) shows how much Bird and Lime have grown after raising hundreds of millions apiece:

Mentally stack that against Spin’s $20 million Series B. The Ford option makes sense.

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