Waymo

Sebastian Thrun is the German-American roboticist who, more than anyone, launched the modern autonomous vehicle industry. As director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory he led the team whose robot 'Stanley' won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, followed by 'Junior' in the 2007 Urban Challenge. Google co-founder Larry Page recruited him to start the Google Self-Driving Car Project in January 2009 — the effort that became Waymo when it spun out as an Alphabet subsidiary in December 2016 — and Thrun also co-founded Google X, the moonshot lab that housed it, along with Google Street View. Thrun left day-to-day leadership of the project in 2012-2013 to build Udacity, the online education company he co-founded after his Stanford AI course drew 160,000 students, and later ran flying-car startup Kitty Hawk. Waymo has long since been led by professional management — co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov since 2021 — but its technical DNA traces directly to the Stanford DARPA team Thrun assembled and brought to Google.

Anthony Levandowski built the self-driving motorcycle 'Ghostrider' for the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge while at UC Berkeley, then founded 510 Systems and Anthony's Robots — pioneers of camera-and-lidar mapping tech that Google quietly acquired in 2011. He co-founded the Google Self-Driving Car Project with Sebastian Thrun in 2009 and was one of its central engineers for years before leaving in 2016 to found the trucking startup Otto, acquired by Uber months later. His departure triggered the industry's defining legal battle: Waymo sued Uber in 2017 alleging Levandowski had taken thousands of confidential files, the case settled with Uber paying Waymo about $245 million in equity, and Levandowski pleaded guilty in 2020 to one count of trade-secret theft before receiving a presidential pardon in January 2021. He went on to found Pronto, an autonomous haulage company for mining, and remains a polarizing figure in the field he helped create.