Tech
Waymo relies on firefighters and police to bail out stuck robotaxis
Last August, a fire ripped through 10 acres of grass on either side of California’s I-280 near Redwood City. Traffic backed up as firefighters extinguished the blaze, and California Highway Patrol officers directed drivers to turn around and travel the wrong way to exit the freeway.
Some of those drivers encountered a new obstacle: a Waymo Robotaxi.
Footage of the incident shows the Waymo AV tried to pass stopped traffic by traveling on the shoulder, only to wind up reversing away from the oncoming wrong-way cars, before stopping altogether.
The robotaxi wouldn’t budge, despite efforts from the company’s remote assistance team. So, Waymo turned to a resource that has become a reliable problem solver and called 911.
“Highway patrol turned everyone around, but unfortunately our car is not able to turn around,” one of Waymo’s remote assistance workers told an area 911 dispatcher, according to a recording obtained by TechCrunch in a public records request. The employee wanted officers on the scene to drive the robotaxi away, and to arrange transportation for the passenger inside.
Roughly 30 minutes after Waymo called 911, a California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer got behind the wheel and drove the robotaxi to a park-and-ride lot near the highway, a CHP incident report obtained by TechCrunch shows. From there, it was driven away by one of Waymo’s “roadside assistance” workers, the company told TechCrunch.
The Redwood City incident could be viewed as an edge case, an inevitable, yet mildly embarrassing blip in Waymo’s rapidly expanding robotaxi service network.
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But this was not an isolated incident. Waymo has relied on taxpayer-funded first responders to navigate its vehicles when they encounter issues, despite the existence of the company’s own roadside assistance team. In at least six instances identified by TechCrunch, first responders have had to take control of Waymo vehicles and move them out of traffic during emergency situations, including one in which an officer was in the middle of responding to a mass shooting.
Waymo has recently come under criticism by lawmakers for its use of remote assistance employees, including a few dozen who work from the Philippines, to help its robotaxis decide the best path through complex situations. Its roadside assistance team has received far less attention.
The company’s representatives never mentioned the roadside assistance workers at a testy March 2 hearing in San Francisco about the behavior of Waymo’s robotaxis that became stalled during a major power outage in December. At the meeting, city officials aired concerns that the stuck autonomous vehicles impeded or pulled first responders away from their primary jobs.
“What has started to happen is that our public safety officers and responders are having to be the ones to physically move [Waymos],” Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said at the hearing. “In a sense, they’re becoming a default roadside assistance for these vehicles, which we do not think is tenable.”
Waymo told TechCrunch that its roadside assistance workers cleared dozens of stuck robotaxis during the blackout, with a handful still needing to be moved by first responders.
“Waymo Roadside Assistance is a dedicated team of specialists who lend extra on-the-ground support to our fleet,” the company said in an email to TechCrunch. “Waymo’s standards for roadside response and service quality prioritize minimizing potential community impacts.”
The company declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions about how many roadside assistance workers it uses, or which third-party companies might employ them. Waymo also didn’t say how it plans to scale the team as it races to launch in about 20 more cities this year, expanding beyond its current markets of Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, San Antonio, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Waymo’s helpers
Waymo’s robotaxis provide more than 400,000 paid rides per week, a testament to the company’s many years developing self-driving technology. The robotaxis do rely on humans for help on occasion, though, and it does this in a few ways.
The robotaxis need occasional guidance in complex situations, especially because — as Waymo claims — the company is trying to be as cautious as possible as it scales its service.
Waymo’s robotaxis receive this guidance from the “remote assistance” workers. At any given time, there are around 70 of these people monitoring Waymo’s fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles, the company has said. Half of these workers are based in the U.S., and half are based in the Philippines.
Those details, which were shared in a letter to Congress in February, generated blowback for Waymo over concerns about safety and security. Waymo has defended its use of remote assistants, claiming the workers are well-qualified and that there is no meaningful lag introduced due to how far away they’re located, whether in Arizona, Michigan, or the Philippines.
“Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S.-based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad,” the company recently wrote.
Remote assistance workers perform a few tasks. If a Waymo vehicle encounters a real-world situation that is tricky to navigate, it might send a request to these workers to help decide the best way through. Waymo is clear that these workers “provide advice and support to the [robotaxis] but do not directly control, steer, or drive the vehicle.” They also respond to lower-priority requests from Waymo robotaxis, like answering questions about whether the interior of a car is clean.
But this loop is not perfect.
The National Transportation Safety Board recently revealed that, in January, a Waymo in Austin asked a remote assistance worker to confirm whether a nearby school bus was loading or unloading kids. The stop sign and flashing lights were deployed, but the remote assistance worker wrongly told the robotaxi it could proceed. The Waymo then drove past the school bus as it was loading children, though the bus’s “stop arms” were still extended, the NTSB said.
Waymo told TechCrunch that it “regularly audit[s] RA responses, including correctness. If an incident is captured it will be immediately flagged for next steps, ranging from additional coaching to full decertification.”
When a Waymo gets in a crash, or stuck in an emergency, the company leans on its “Event Response Team.” Waymo says this team is “exclusively based in the U.S.” — though they are still remote — and that they are “certified for more complex tasks like coordinating with emergency responders and managing post-collision protocols.”
By that definition, the remote assistance worker who helped CHP move the Waymo robotaxi away from the Redwood City incident was likely part of that event response team, though Waymo did not confirm.
There are growing pains here, too. Audio recordings from CHP dispatch, along with the incident report obtained by TechCrunch, show that officers were under the impression for about 10 minutes that Waymo wanted the passenger to drive the robotaxi away from the fire.
It wasn’t until the remote worker called 911 a second time that CHP realized an officer needed to drive it away from the scene. (Waymo declined to answer specific questions about this miscommunication. The company said it never asks riders to take control of its vehicles.)
Then there is the roadside assistance team. These workers handle “on-scene, direct interaction” work and are often tasked with moving a vehicle. Waymo declined to answer questions about how many times these workers have moved a robotaxi, how many are on call at a given time, or how many are in each city.
Some appear to work for Transdev, a third-party contractor that Waymo has used in the past, and a few even used to be safety drivers or monitors for Waymo, according to profile information on LinkedIn.
The company also told TechCrunch that it “require[s] local tow partners to maintain rapid response capability for urgent tow requests and strategically position support across our service areas.”
“In the event that a Waymo vehicle needs support, we dispatch Waymo Roadside Assistance and/or local tow partners to assist on-scene,” the company said in a statement. “While we do not expect first responders to move our vehicles as a matter of course, we recognize that moments count in emergency situations. Therefore, we designed a straightforward process that allows first responders to take control of the vehicle within seconds.”
Relying on first responders
While Waymo says it doesn’t expect first responders to interact with its vehicles, it keeps happening — and it’s not clear whether it will become totally avoidable.
In at least six cases over the past few months, first responders have had to manually navigate Waymo vehicles, including two active crime scenes.
Earlier this month, an Austin police officer had to move a Waymo out of the way of an ambulance that was responding to a mass shooting event. In February, a first responder in Atlanta had to disengage a Waymo after it drove into an active crime scene, before one of the company’s roadside assistance workers “retrieved it,” according to the company. And this week, a police officer in Nashville had to manually drive a Waymo robotaxi away after it got stuck in an intersection.
During the March 2 hearing in San Francisco, city officials repeatedly asked Waymo what it would do to lessen dependence on first responders. Waymo never mentioned it has workers who are dedicated to moving vehicles during the three-hour meeting.
District supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who oversaw the hearing, told TechCrunch in an interview that he felt Waymo didn’t provide many satisfactory answers.
“I was asking: how are you going to take more accountability to ensure that our first responders are not doing that?” he said. “And we did not get that answer in the hearing that we were looking for, which is: what are they going to do to ensure that they are going to take more ownership of that roadside assistance component?”
A manager on Waymo’s incident response team, Sam Cooper, said at the hearing that the company has trained “more than 30,000 first responders globally on how to interact” with its robotaxis. He also touted Waymo’s collaboration with first responders in designing the system that allows them to take control.
“We simply want to give them the capability, in that event, to adequately move that vehicle from the scene and make that scene safe so that they’re able to do their jobs,” he said.
Cooper said Waymo has made “improvements to our surge-staffing capabilities” so that Waymo would be better prepared for larger emergency situations. But he did not detail those improvements, and Mahmood told TechCrunch his office has not received a promised follow-up.
Cooper also said Waymo would consider leveraging partnerships like the one it has with DoorDash, which involves gig workers closing robotaxi doors that were left open, to move vehicles.
How that would differ from the existing roadside assistance staff Waymo uses is not clear. But city officials kept repeating the same message. “Our first responders should not be AAA,” district supervisor Alan Wong said.
Tech
Lucid Bots raises $20M to keep up with demand for its window-washing drones
Andrew Ashur, the founder and CEO of window cleaning robot startup Lucid Bots, likes to joke that his company is the antithesis of the robotics industry right now.
While many companies are trying to build humanoids or tout demos of their robots dancing and doing flips, Lucid Bots’ drones are out in the field making traditionally unsexy and dangerous work, like cleaning windows, safer and more efficient.
“The sad truth is most are still selling a lot of hype and headlines, and we sell performance on the job site that shows up in our customers, profits, and losses,” Ashur told TechCrunch. “We’re not just in the lab and simulators. We’ve got dirt under our fingernails, and we’re out on job sites getting work done.”
Charlotte, North Carolina-based Lucid Bots is a full-stack robotics company that sells its Sherpa drones and Lavo robot to cleaning companies to help them on their job sites. The company designed and manufactures its own robots in the U.S. and just raised a $20 million Series B round co-led by Cubit Capital and Idea Fund Partners. This brings its total funding to $34 million.
The company plans to use the money for hiring to keep up with demand, although Ashur joked that they’ve run out of parking spots at their manufacturing facility.
“We have more requests for demos, then we have hours in the day, so we need to scale up capacity and head count,” Ashur said. “As a founder, when we don’t have enough hours in the day to do all the demos, it gives me a little bit of heartburn.”
Demand from customers and investors wasn’t there in the beginning, Ashur said. It took the company half a decade to ship its first 100 robots, and it took a fair amount of convincing to get VCs to back a robotics founder with a liberal arts background and no robotics experience.
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Ashur got the original idea for the company while he was a junior at Davidson College studying economics and Spanish. He happened to walk by a building that was being cleaned by window washers. It was a windy day, and the workers’ swing stage started to knock around and slam into the building.
Watching the harrowing scene made Ashur think about how technology could make this safer.
“Built infrastructure is literally the largest asset class in the world, but right now, we’ve got these three compounding issues,” Ashur said. “We’ve got aging infrastructure, the new infrastructure we’re building is getting bigger and harder to maintain, and, last but not least, we have less and less people willing and able to do the work. We needed to start building drones and robots to bridge that gap.”
Lucid Bots was launched in 2018 and started out as a cleaning company that took contract jobs to learn more about the industry. After two years, and a few cleaning chemical burns, Ashur said they knew what their drone needed to be successful.
Lucid Bots’ sales has gained momentum recently. It took the startup five years to sell 100 units and now it is approaching 1,000.
The company continues to improve its bots and drones in an effort to keep sales ticking along. Data collected by the robots is fed back to the underlying software, which is used to improve both of Lucid Bots’ products. The company is also building a tool that will allow its bots to be used for adjacent categories like painting waterproofing and sealing, among others.
“We recently waterproofed a massive university stadium that was starting to age, still using the same brain and frame as a Sherpa,” Ashur said. “Part of why we went there is because our existing customers were pulling us there and we were getting, gosh, probably about 50 or so inbound leads a month related to painting and coating and that was before we even began marketing that option.”
Tech
After pivoting, Y Combinator grad Glimpse raises $35M led by a16z
Dispute-tracking fintech Glimpse announced Wednesday that it raised a $35 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from 8VC and Y Combinator.
Founders Akash Raju, Anuj Mehta, and Kushal Negi, attended Purdue together and were initially building a startup that did Airbnb product placements. That company launched in 2020, but by 2024, the founders pivoted to a wholly new idea: Glimpse, a platform that helps retailers automate financial deduction processes.
It raised a $10 million round last year, led by 8VC, after the business pivot, which it called a Series A round at the time. It is now calling this fresh $35 million a Series A round, and rebranding its previous Series A as a seed round. The company has raised $52 million to date, including funding they raised before they pivoted.
“We ultimately felt we lacked product-market fit and decided to hard pivot,” Raju said of the first, unsuccessful idea. “In this process, we had exposure to brands’ back offices and the chaos that was selling in retail, ultimately leading us to start Glimpse as it is today.”
They met their lead a16z investor through a mutual founder friend. “We built a strong relationship as we scaled the business. Really excited we can partner with them for this next stage of growth,” he continued.
Deductions are the amounts a retailer subtracts from what they owe a brand when settling an invoice. It’s commonplace and typically works like this: A brand bills the retailer, the retailer pays the brand. If it pays less than what was billed, it provides a reason, such as if the goods were damaged.
Some of the deductions are for valid reasons, but some aren’t — those are called invalid deductions, and they are tedious to track and manage on the back end. “These errors are surprisingly common,” Raju, the company’s CEO, said, adding that “a brand might ship inventory correctly but still be charged for a short shipment.”
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“Teams log into multiple retailer systems, pull scattered documents, review line items, reconcile against internal records, and manage disputes end-to-end. The challenge is driven by fragmented, unstructured data and siloed workflows across systems and teams,” he said of how the process usually goes.
If the brand doesn’t reconcile every invalid deduction, that could lead “to consistent revenue leakage,” he said.
Glimpse says it helps with this process by reviewing deductions, flagging invalid ones, and filing disputes, helping companies recover money they may have missed or lost. The platform’s AI agents log into a retailer’s portal, find and centralize all necessary documents, then classify each deduction, Raju explained. From there, the AI agents validate each change against internal data (such as supply chain records and promotion calendars) to determine which deductions are legitimate and which are not.
The company said it works with more than 200 retail brands, including Suave and its lip balm brand Chapstick.
“When issues are identified, Glimpse automatically files disputes, follows through on the process, applies recovered cash, and syncs everything back to the brand’s ERP,” Raju said, adding that the product integrates across multiple systems. In addition to the main enterprise resource planning financial software, it integrates with promotion calendars, and retail portals. It can truncate a long process down to days, he said.
Despite Glimpse’s automation, Raju said his company does have humans in the loop, “primarily around ensuring outcomes,” he said, like “following up on disputes to drive resolution and cash recovery, as well as quality assurance on critical steps like classification and data extraction.”
The system gets smarter each time a deduction is processed and continuously refines its classification, validation, and resolution. “Over time, this creates a compounding data advantage, where each new integration and customer makes the system smarter and more effective across the entire network,” he said.
Others are tackling invalid deduction with software, too, such as Revya and Confido.
“Our vision is to be the AI infrastructure for CPG and retail brands, and this capital helps continue executing toward that vision,” he said.
Tech
Harbinger’s next product will be hybrid emergency vehicles
Trucking startup Harbinger is still a relatively new company, but the flexibility of its electric vehicle platform has helped it capture another customer in a different line of business. This time, Harbinger’s chassis will be used in emergency vehicles for 70-year-old company Frazer.
The two companies announced Wednesday that Frazer will build ambulances on the hybrid version of Harbinger’s platform, as well as larger mobile healthcare vehicles. Frazer will also become a customer of Harbinger’s new energy storage business, which the startup debuted earlier this year in a partnership with Airstream.
The deal shows that companies like Harbinger are finding success with electric and hybrid vehicles despite headwinds in the passenger vehicle space in the United States. Grounded, another startup based in Detroit, revealed this week that it worked with Colgate to develop a small fleet of mobile dental care vehicles.
The key to Harbinger’s success is its flexible platform, co-founder and CEO John Harris said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. The simple truck chassis can be shortened or lengthened depending on a customer’s needs, and Harbinger can drop in a range-extending combustion engine if desired. Harbinger is just a few years old, but this one platform already powers RVs (built with THOR Industries), FedEx delivery vans, a smaller box truck design, and now ambulances. This has helped the company raise more than $300 million to date.
“If you look across the step van and the RV use case, we’ve got three wheel bases, four different GVWR [gross vehicle weight ratings], and sort of four different powertrain options, with four, five, [or] six battery packs, plus the hybrid across all of that stuff. We have 99.5% part commonality,” Harris said. “That’s the game changer.”
Frazer CEO Laura Griffin told TechCrunch that switching to Harbinger’s hybrid powertrain — which is predominantly electric but leverages the gas engine to top up the battery — was a no-brainer because it helps lower her customers’ total cost of ownership and increases their uptime.
“We’re constantly looking for, what innovations can elevate the experience for our end users, which are going to typically be municipalities, 911 entities, hospitals,” she said. “They’re doing it where it’s comparative to other medium-duty chassis, so it checks all of the boxes for us.”
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Griffin said Frazer will buy the battery-based auxiliary power units from Harbinger and use them on both the newer hybrid emergency vehicles, as well as on older combustion versions. These will replace standard generators and can help first responders (or users of the mobile healthcare vehicles) power medical devices in the field without pulling energy from a vehicle’s battery pack or combustion engine.
“In the back of an emergency vehicle, for instance, an ambulance, you can imagine there’s a lot of equipment, and all of the latest, greatest equipment that’s added on tends to be power based,” Griffin said. “So we are looking for abundant clean power sources that don’t necessarily tie to the chassis.”
Harris sees this becoming a great business no matter how many hybrid vehicles Frazer buys, since the auxiliary power units are useful regardless of powertrain.
“It will be a faster growth curve, because there are thousands of ambulances,” he said. And he’s looking to other industries as well — especially in Harbinger’s home state of California where there are increased restrictions on the use of gas generators.
“We’re seeing a lot of interest from people saying, like, I don’t really want a generator six feet from an operator for 12 hours a day, I’d be happy to save money with batteries. I would be happy to have less emissions,” he said.
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Lucid Bots raises $20M to keep up with demand for its window-washing drones
