A secretive self-driving startup worth $2.5 billion just raised $600 million with help from Tesla’s biggest outside investor

Aurora Innovation

• Aurora Innovation has raised $600 milion as part of a Series B funding round from Kia and Hyundai.
• Baillie Gifford, Tesla’s top shareholder after CEO Elon Musk, also participated, Bloomberg News reported.
• Aurora cofounder Sterling Anderson previously worked on Tesla’s Autopilot program.
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Aurora Innovation, a self-driving startup worth $2.5 billion, has raised another $600 million round of venture capital with backers including Hyundai and Kia.

Baillie Gifford, a $221 billion Scottish investment manager that is also Tesla’s second-largest shareholder after CEO Elon Musk, also participated in the round, Bloomberg News reported, but the firm wasn’t included in Aurora’s announcement. A spokesperson for Baillie Gifford did not respond to a request for comment.

Read more: The inside story of how an old-school Scottish firm became an early investor in many of Silicon Valley’s most prized unicorns, and made a killing in the process

The Series B addition brings the round to about $1.13 billion in total, which makes up a bulk of the roughly $1.2 billion in total funding that Aurora has raised to-date.

"Together with all of our ecosystem partners, we are seeing the convergence of a powerful platform that will deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly," Aurora cofounder Sterling Anderson, who previously oversaw integral parts of Tesla’s Model X and Autopilot programs, said in a press-release.

Kia and Hyundai will join Amazon, Sequoia Capital, Geodesic, Shell Ventures and other previous investors as backers of Aurora, which has penned numerous partnerships with automakers like Fiat Chrysler.

In May, Aurora announced plans to purchase Montana-based Blackmore, a company which develops lidar radar systems used in self-driving cars (with Tesla being a major notable exception).

More self-driving car news:

• Uber just revealed a new self-driving car that it will use to take on Tesla and Waymo in the robotaxi wars
• Uber and Lyft are betting on self-driving cars to become profitable. But that may not happen, new research from MIT suggests.
• Your Uber ride could get 80% cheaper over the next decade

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SEE ALSO: Uber just revealed a new self-driving car that it will use to take on Tesla and Waymo in the robotaxi wars

Source: Business Insider – grapier@businessinsider.com (Graham Rapier)