Waymo LLC has hired a new chief financial officer as the self-driving vehicle company strives to build self-driving capabilities and expand into multiple regions.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc.,
announced on Friday that it had appointed Elisa de Martel as chief financial officer. Ms. de Martel, who will take office on Monday, succeeds Gérard Dwyer, who left in May 2021 after nearly five years as chief financial officer.
The company’s interim chief financial officer and its controller covered the company’s finances while Waymo sought a permanent chief financial officer, according to a spokeswoman. “It was a competitive market,” she said. “We wanted to take our time and find the right person.
Elisa de Martel
Photo:
Waymo
Ms. de Martel joins Waymo from Carbon Inc., a 3D printing technology company based in Redwood City, Calif., where she served as chief financial officer since 2018. She previously held various financial roles at tech giant Apple Inc. for 11 years, eventually serving as Director of Manufacturing Finance.
As CFO, Ms. de Martel will focus on helping the company expand as it seeks to continue to develop its self-driving technology across various regions and vehicle platforms, the company said. spokesperson. “Elisa is truly here to help us scale our business through our next phase of growth,” she said.
Waymo has raised over $5.7 billion from investors and Alphabet to date, including $2.5 billion in June 2021.
Since 2017, the company has been operating self-driving cars in the Phoenix-area East Valley. In 2020, he opened rides to the public in Chandler, Arizona, and made them fully self-driving. It began operating self-driving vehicles in downtown Phoenix in August.
Waymo announced in March that it would offer fully self-driving rides in San Francisco only to its employees, its first attempt to send fully self-driving vehicles to a major city. Two months earlier, Waymo’s biggest competitor, General Motors Co.
subsidiary Cruise – began offering driverless rides to the public in San Francisco.
Waymo is not licensed to offer rides to the general public in California, the spokeswoman said. She declined to comment on the current status of permit applications.
The company also runs a robotaxi service for some members of the public in San Francisco with human drivers behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle if needed. Since 2017, Waymo has also been testing its driverless technology in tractor-trailers.
No matter how many miles self-driving cars travel in the real world, they are unlikely to encounter all the rare and dangerous incidents they might encounter. So now driverless car makers have turned to hyper-realistic virtual worlds to safely test their cars against some of the most extreme scenarios. Illustration: George Downs
Write to Jennifer Williams-Alvarez at [email protected]
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