CHICAGO, May 7 (Xinhua) -- GM Cruise LLC announced on Tuesday a 1.15 billion U.S. dollars equity infusion from institutional investors as the General Motors' autonomous vehicle development unit pushes to launch a robo-taxi service sometime this year.
The new investment in Cruise, which brings the driverless car operation's post-money valuation to 19 billion dollars, was led by funds advised by T. Rowe Price Group Inc., and existing Cruise partners SoftBank Vision Fund and Honda Motor Co.
Nearly a year ago, Cruise garnered a 2.25 billion dollars investment from Japan's SoftBank. It was seen as a key investment at the time, as SoftBank was already backing chip maker Nvidia Corp., Uber Technologies Inc., DoorDash delivery services and Chinese ride-sharing company DiDi.
Following the SoftBank investment, Cruise announced a partnership with Honda on future autonomous vehicle development. That tie-up came with a 2.75 billion dollars investment from the Japanese automaker.
"Developing and deploying self-driving vehicles at massive scale is the engineering challenge of our generation," Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said in a statement. "Having deep resources to draw on as we pursue our mission is a critical competitive advantage."
Cruise has grown from a startup with 40 employees when GM acquired it in 2016 to more than 1,000 by now. The company has said it plans to double the size of its work force in 2019.
