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Nuro teams up with Domino's for driverless deliveries

Dave Ferguson, Nuro Co-Founder and President joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss the company's partnership with Domino's and investments from Chipotle and Softbank.

Video transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. In this week's start-up spotlight, starting this week, Domino's customers in Houston might open their door to a pizza delivery not from a human, but from a self-driving robot. That's because the Domino's out there in Houston teaming up with autonomous delivery company Nuro, the first to get an exemption from the US Department of Transportation to test out its delivery bot on public roads. The company has also raised over $1 billion from the likes of SoftBank and even Chipotle in its latest $500 million round back in November.

And joining us now to chat more on that is Nuro's co-founder and president Dave Ferguson joins us once again here. And Dave, good to be chatting again. Congrats on finally getting this up and running. We talked a couple of years ago about the progress you guys are making here. But how exciting is it to finally see pizzas getting delivered on real streets?

DAVE FERGUSON: Thanks, Zack. Good to be back. And yeah, it's very exciting. I mean, we've been working on this, obviously, for almost five years now. And this week, getting to deliver real pizzas with a partner as amazing as Domino's to real consumers is a real thrill for us.

AKIKO FUJITA: Dave, so many restaurants have talked about the need to create this touchless delivery point, especially during the pandemic when there are so many concerns about any kind of transmission. I wonder to what extent that has accelerated the growth for you and to what extent you've generated more interest as a result.

DAVE FERGUSON: Yeah, it's a great point. You know, obviously, with self-driving vehicles doing deliveries, one of the elements of that experience is that it is totally contactless, from the point where someone loads the vehicle all the way through to when the consumer gets their goods out of it. And when we started out on this journey, that was seen as sort of a nice to have by our consumers and partners. And I think the pandemic has completely changed that. And exactly to your point, Akiko, now having a contactless experience has enormous value. And so we're seeing that becoming an additional benefit that our partners and consumers are asking for and really appreciating with the service.

ZACK GUZMAN: Dave, you're talking to a guy who used to be a pizza deliveryman, dare I say a pizza delivery boy, back in high school. And I don't know. I mean, I know that this job's difficult. So in the first week, how have deliveries gone? And what have you seen so far?

DAVE FERGUSON: Yes, so far, so good. We're ramping up. We mentioned we're doing it from one store in Houston to part of the local community. And we're really excited over the coming weeks and months to see how consumers take to it and what they love and what they don't love as much, so that we can improve upon it. You know, we've only been doing it for a few days so far. And so, there's still a lot to learn. But so far, so good, for sure.

AKIKO FUJITA: From a regulatory standpoint, does this provide an easier entry point to any kind of autonomous delivery? And it feels like we've been talking about drone delivery for so many years. And yet, the regulation just hasn't caught up to that. Does that open up a bigger window for you?

DAVE FERGUSON: One of the reasons why we were so excited to work on road delivery specifically is that we have an incredible infrastructure already built around roads in this country, right? So roads are for transporting things. Now usually, that's people, but it's also goods. And so we felt that that was a clear, strong path towards building a full delivery infrastructure and service, right? If we can go on roads, we can go quickly. We can leverage existing infrastructure. We don't need to clear entire new regulatory fields, such as drones in the air. And we also don't need to use spaces that are primarily for humans, such as sidewalks, right?

And so we felt that that was the clearest path. And I think we felt somewhat validated in that decision over the last year or so because we've gotten this exemption from the federal government for the first ever exemption to have a fully autonomous vehicle on roads. And we also got approval from the California DMV for the first ever fully driverless commercial operation. So we feel pretty good about that. We think it makes a lot of sense to use roads for what they were intended. And so far, we're seeing a lot of traction there with partners and our regulatory friends as well.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, the progress has kind of been like a frog in a boiling pot of water. It's kind of slow. Next thing you know, you've got a pizza delivery. But when we were talking two years ago, we were talking about grocery delivery in Scottsdale. But what does the timeline look to maybe when this isn't just in Houston, but everywhere? And now with Chipotle on board in the last round of investing, when it might be more restaurants turning to you guys to maybe replace what DoorDash or Uber offers?

DAVE FERGUSON: So we see a tremendous opportunity across a number of verticals. As you mentioned, Zack, we started out with grocery. And we still-- we're still operating with grocery partners, both Kroger and Walmart. But there's so much more to this than just grocery or even just prepared food, right? Today, 43% of all personal vehicle trips in the US are for shopping or running errands. That's almost 100 billion trips every year that we feel that we could replace if there was a service that could go do those things for you. If there was a service that could run those errands or pick up those goods for you, then you wouldn't need to do it.

And to us, that's the opportunity. And that obviously spans across not just pizza with incredible partners like Domino's or groceries with Kroger, but all verticals and all local businesses. We really want to empower local commerce and strengthen the ability for communities to service the folks that live in those communities itself.

AKIKO FUJITA: Well, we're certainly looking forward to continue to follow the progress of Nuro. Nuro co-founder and president Dave Ferguson, it's good to talk to you today.