Ed Ludlow

Welcome to a special edition of Bloomberg Tech.

I'm Ed Ludlow.

Waymo is widely seen as leading the robo-taxi race, but with competitors like Tesla on its heel, the Alphabet unit has no interest in hitting the brakes on growth.

In a wide-ranging interview, Waymo co-CEO Takedra Mawakana talked to us about expanding into foreign markets, ongoing safety investigations, and their recent mega-funding round.

Let's take a listen to that conversation now.

You've just raised $16 billion.

That's a lot of money.

What does it unlock for Waymo over the next 12, 24 months?

I should point out, you know, we reported Alphabet will account for the vast majority of that 16 billion.

But it is interesting.

Sequoia Capital, DST, Dragoneer, they are new investors.

What do we interpret from that, that they came in at this stage of the company's life?

You set the scene for expansion across 20 cities this year.

Right now, you're doing 400,000 paid rides a week across six cities.

It's a greater scale than when you and I talked more than a year ago, which seemed to be a time of pace then.

What's the biggest challenge of operating a robo taxi service at that new scale that you're developing?

There's something there, isn't there?

City versus state, state versus federal.

We will talk about it.

I got a lot of interest when I said that I was going to be speaking with you about