Uber, Waymo Hit The Brakes On Courtroom Battle With Settlement
Uber and Waymo settled a lawsuit Friday over the theft of self-driving-technology trade secrets. Waymo will receive a 0.34% stake in Uber as part of the settlement, which would be worth about $245M, according to the San Francisco Business Times.
Waymo originally sought over $1B and indicated that if it won the lawsuit in court, it would keep suing the company in the future, according to the Business Times. Part of the settlement includes Uber’s agreement to make sure no Waymo components are used in its self-driving cars.
“While we do not believe that any trade secrets made their way from Waymo to Uber, nor do we believe that Uber has used any of Waymo’s proprietary information in its self-driving technology, we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a blog post.
The settlement closes a case that started February 2017 when Waymo accused then-Uber employee Anthony Levandowski of stealing information when he was an engineer at Google. Levandowski left Google to form his own self-driving company, Otto, which Uber purchased for $680M in 2016. Uber fired Levandowski in May. The accusations also were under investigation from federal prosecutors.
