Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun, left, Zoox CEO Aicha Evans, center, and Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana.The self-driving vehicle industry may be young, just a bit over a decade old, but already a meaningful trend is taking shape: it’s proving to be more open to women CEOs and founders–including women of color–than the broader tech industry and for U.S. companies generally.
Among U.S. startups, approximately 40% have at least one woman in a senior management role, though only 14% have a woman CEO, according to Silicon Valley Bank’sSpanish-born Urtasun, an AI expert and professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, was previously chief scientist for Uber’s self-driving car program until it was acquired by Aurora Innovation in December 2020. Uber, Aurora and Silicon Valley VC Khosla Ventures are all investors in her new company.
Evans, a veteran Intel executive and engineer who was born in Senegal, was hired as Zoox’s CEO in January 2019 after it fired founder Tim Kentley-Klay in 2018. The company, which is developing a custom-designed robotic taxi, was bought by Amazon in 2020 for $1.2 billion.
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