Dave Ferguson was not a computer kid. As a boy he preferred climbing trees, he has said in a profile for Kea New Zealand. His father was a diplomat, so the family lived in the United States for a time, then returned to New Zealand so he could finish high school there.
After school he applied to the University of Otago, and in a large first-year class one teacher made the difference. Willem Labuschagne pointed him toward computer science. Ferguson remembers that Labuschagne learned everyone's name in the first year, which he found remarkable. He credits the man with shaping both his research and his approach to life. When Labuschagne died, Ferguson set up a scholarship in his memory.
They started with a pared-down vehicle that carried groceries rather than people.
The next stop was Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, which he calls the Disney World of robotics. In his first year there he worked on a robot to map abandoned coal mines, inspired by a mining accident. He later wrote an algorithm that NASA uses for long-range autonomy on its Mars rovers. After Intel, in 2011 he joined Google's self-driving car project as a principal machine learning engineer, working beside Jiajun Zhu, a Fudan and University of Virginia graduate who led perception and simulation.
What almost nobody saw coming was how small the first idea was. In 2016 both men left Google, convinced robotics would reshape daily life within 10 to 15 years. They started with a pared-down vehicle that carried groceries rather than people.
Money followed fast. $92 million in January 2018, $940 million from SoftBank in 2019 at $2.7 billion, and $600 million at $8.6 billion in November 2021. Kroger, Domino's and CVS signed on, and in 2020 Nuro received the first federal autonomous exemption.
Then the cost arrived. In November 2022 Nuro cut about 20 percent of its staff, roughly 300 people. In May 2023 it paused commercial expansion and cut about 30 percent, around 340. In September 2024 it dropped its own vehicle business and began licensing its driving software. In August 2025 it raised $203 million at $6 billion with Uber and Nvidia, below its 2021 peak, and in October 2025 Ferguson became co-CEO alongside Zhu.
The company built to carry groceries now sells the driver. The boy who liked trees ended up writing code that runs on Mars, and paying forward to a teacher who learned a stranger's name. A first-time founder can see the debt in that: someone at the start said computer science, and he is still repaying them.