Nuro

Jiajun Zhu earned his bachelor's degree in computer science from Fudan University and a master's in computer science from the University of Virginia before joining Google, where he became a principal software engineer and one of the founding members of the company's self-driving car project — the roughly dozen-person team that started in 2009 and later became Waymo. There he led the perception team and helped build and lead the project's simulation efforts, and he has been awarded more than 100 patents. In 2016 Zhu co-founded Nuro with fellow Google self-driving veteran Dave Ferguson, convinced that robotics would reshape local commerce; rather than chase passenger robotaxis, they designed a new category of smaller, specialized driverless delivery vehicles. Under his leadership Nuro became the first company to receive an autonomous-vehicle exemption from NHTSA. He served as CEO and, since October 2025, shares the co-CEO role with Ferguson as the company has expanded its autonomy platform toward robotaxis and licensing to commercial fleets.

A New Zealander by origin, Dave Ferguson earned his bachelor's in computer science and mathematics from the University of Otago and an MS and PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, where he led the planning team for CMU's entry in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. He then became a principal engineer on Google's self-driving car project (now Waymo), where he built and led the computer vision, machine learning, behavior prediction, and scene understanding teams. He holds over 100 patents and has published more than 60 academic papers. In 2016 Ferguson co-founded Nuro with Jiajun Zhu, whom he had worked alongside as a senior engineer on the Google project, to bring autonomy to goods delivery with purpose-built driverless vehicles. He served as Nuro's president for most of the company's life and was appointed co-CEO alongside Zhu in October 2025, focusing on capital raising and commercial partnerships as Nuro scales its autonomy platform globally.