Blog
6 min read

How We Work With Partners

Jul 1, 2025
·
Nuro Team

Autonomy has the potential to create a safer, richer, and more connected world. This vision is what drives us on our mission to make autonomy accessible to all. In partnership with automakers, mobility companies, and logistics providers, we are working to responsibly deploy autonomous vehicles on all roads and all rides.

What does that work look like?

We’ve built a self-driving system that enables our partners to bring safe, scalable autonomous solutions to life. To empower their fleets, our partners license the Nuro Driver™, our AI-first software and modular hardware that can make any vehicle autonomous, and the Nuro AI Platform™, which includes developer tools and a connectivity suite to support the Nuro Driver.

With a streamlined integration roadmap, flexible manufacturing options, and a proven deployment framework, we work side-by-side with our partners to design, build, and deploy scalable self-driving vehicles.

Our partnerships progress through five stages:

  1. Defining and co-designing the product

  2. Building the prototype

  3. Designing for manufacturing

  4. Validating the system

  5. Launching and scaling

1. Defining and Co-Designing the Product

At Nuro, everything we build is shaped by one principle: Serve the people we build for. That means centering our partners’ needs, challenges, and goals in every technical decision we make.

We begin the partner journey by asking, What are we building together? A driver assistance system, a fully autonomous vehicle, a custom hardware platform designed to support autonomy?

Together, we align on the vision and scope before co-designing how it takes shape. This includes not just the level of desired autonomy, but also what autonomy-enabling hardware elements will be involved, accounting for performance, reliability, and operational costs.

With over five years of driverless autonomous vehicle deployments on public roads, we have deep experience developing every layer of this stack, and we bring that expertise to every partnership.

2. Building the Prototype

With the vision in place, the next step is bringing it to life through a prototype.

We work with our partners to integrate the Nuro Driver with their vehicles to create a testable version of the system. These prototypes help us explore the experience, validate early assumptions, and conduct early product testing.

We’ve built and tested a wide range of prototype systems and have already integrated the Nuro Driver with nine different vehicle platforms. Our track record of quickly, reliably, and safely bringing complex configurations to life speaks for itself.

3. Designing for Manufacturing

Next, we prepare our successful prototype for the production line by refining the design to ensure the hardware is ready for scalable manufacturing. This can include updating components for durability, simplifying assemblies for repeatable builds, and aligning with partner-led production processes.

While our partners fine-tune the details of the autonomy-enabled vehicle, we ensure integration continuity throughout.

4. Validating the System

Before a system is deployed—especially in a driverless capacity—it must be validated to the highest standards.

We implement a comprehensive validation pipeline to ensure the product performs exactly as intended. This includes:

  • Extensive software-level validation, stress-testing autonomy performance across a wide range of conditions in simulation;

  • Closed-course testing at our dedicated facility in Las Vegas, where we test challenging edge cases and failure recovery with real sensors, full-stack autonomy, and physical consequences;

  • Public road testing with trained safety drivers to evaluate system performance in dynamic, live environments before autonomous operation begins.

We do this not just to meet performance goals, but to establish full conviction in the integrated system’s safety and performance.

Nuro’s deployments undergo extensive additional testing in dozens of validation categories before L4 driverless operations.

We also work closely with local, state, and federal authorities throughout our development and testing process to ensure that vehicles powered by the Nuro Driver meet or exceed safety and compliance standards. Our commitment to transparency and collaboration with our community partners enables a smooth and rapid roll-out once Nuro Driver-powered vehicles are ready to be deployed.

In fact, Nuro received California’s first Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Permit, and we were also granted the first and only equipment exemption by NHTSA to operate a vehicle without traditional controls.

5. Launching and Scaling

With validation complete, the product is ready to be deployed at scale.

The Nuro Driver-powered vehicle platform can now move into mass production, and our partners can manufacture tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles for public roads.

As the vehicles navigate new environments, the Nuro Driver will continue to learn and improve. To ensure all Nuro Driver-powered vehicles benefit from that continued evolution and operate on the latest validated software, we will provide our partners with ongoing Over-the-Air updates.

Built in Partnership

When it comes to autonomy, our partners aren’t just looking for innovation, they’re looking for confidence: in the process we follow, the systems we deliver, and the long-term success of what we build together. That’s why our approach is grounded in deep technical collaboration and shared ownership. From early concept to validation and beyond, we work side-by-side with our partners to construct an autonomous vehicle that is capable, adaptable, and built for long-term value at scale.

Ready to bring your vehicles up to speed? Contact us today.