Anthony Levandowski in the context of Yoky Matsuoka

Waymo LLC (/ˈweɪmoʊ/ WAY-moh), 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., Google's parent company. Waymo operates commercial robotaxi services available to the public in Phoenix (Arizona), San Francisco Bay Area (California), Los Angeles (California), Atlanta (Georgia), and Austin (Texas). Waymo services are available to select passengers on a waitlist in Silicon Valley (California). As of April 2025, it offers over 250,000 paid rides per week, totalling over 1 million miles monthly.

The company traces its origins to the Stanford Racing Team, which competed in the 2005 and 2007 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenges. Google's development of self-driving technology began in January 2009, led by Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), and Anthony Levandowski, founder of 510 Systems and Anthony's Robots. After almost two years of road testing, the project was revealed in October 2010. In fall 2015, Google provided "the world's first fully driverless ride on public roads". In December 2016, the project was renamed Waymo and spun out of Google as part of Alphabet. In October 2020, Waymo became the first company to offer service to the public without safety drivers in the vehicle.

Sebastian Thrun (born May 14, 1967) is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He was chief executive officer of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and is chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google vice president and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he co-founded Google X along with Yoky Matsuoka and Anthony Levandowski and Google's self-driving car team with Anthony Levandowski. He is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.

Thrun led development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and which has since been placed on exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. His team also developed a vehicle called Junior, which placed second at the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. Thrun led the development of the Google self-driving car.