Technology

How Google’s Waze has changed from its early days as car travel is remade

Published

3 years ago

December 1, 2022

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Waze app with icon showing police

Source: Waze

In this weekly series, CNBC takes a look at companies that made the inaugural Disruptor 50 list, 10 years later.

Nobody enjoys sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic jams, getting an arrival time delayed due to street construction and gaining more road rage by the minute as a result. Waze, the crowdsourcing navigation app, is continuing to find ways to make frustrating road bumps a little more bearable.

Waze users – also known as “Wazers” – provide information on things like stopped cars, road work, gas prices and police activity during their commutes. The app then collects this real-time data and updates its maps accordingly, giving users the most up-to-date information on travel times and other potential traffic burdens. What was once a small Israeli startup now has more than 140 million monthly users worldwide.

In 2013 – shortly after the app made the inaugural CNBC Disruptor 50 list – Alphabet‘s Google acquired Waze, reportedly for more than $1 billion. The addition of Waze to the Google portfolio was expected to help Google improve features on its own navigation app, Google Maps. Google Maps is still the most popular navigation app today and relies more heavily on historical data to map out the best path to one’s destination. On the other hand, Waze’s unique crowdsourcing technique allows it to determine the fastest route with the most recent information, and it’s only available for car and motorbike use.

The app’s innovation has had led to backlash in the past, for potentially distracting drivers, who must use their phones behind the wheel to make reports on Waze. In 2018, it faced threats of legal action by Los Angeles lawmakers for suggesting shortcuts that ended up causing more congestion on side roads not prepared to handle high amounts of traffic. Uri Levine, co-founder and former Waze president, said at the time that he disagreed with the complaints.

“All roads are the public domain and therefore the right of everyone to use,” Levine said. “In that sense, Waze redistributes traffic to create a better traffic situation for everyone.”

The company also struggled at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. With a decrease in individuals traveling, Waze reported in April 2020 that its users across the globe were driving 60% fewer miles compared to two months prior, with driving in Italy – one of the first countries to see the impacts of Covid-19 – dropping more than 90%. As a result, Waze laid off 5% of its global workforce in September 2020 and permanently closed offices in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America regions.

The company also shutdown Waze Carpool in September, a service connecting Wazers with similar commutes to carpool. The six-year-old service was intended to help Wazers cut down on gas costs while creating less traffic congestion during busiest travel times each day, but the pandemic caused too many changes in work driving patterns to be a priority, with errand trips and travel now the dominant uses for Waze.

Despite these challenges, innovations within the app have kept Waze users consistently coming back to the platform. It’s one of the top navigation choices among Uber and Lyft drivers. Drivers using Waze can be entertained as they’re directed to their desired location through voices from celebrities like DJ Khaled, Arnold Schwarzenegger and T-Pain. Partnerships with popular music streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora and iHeartRadio allow Waze users to stream music directly through the Waze app as they navigate to their destination.

Waze also flaunts its ability to do more for the greater good. The app was used by FEMA during Hurricane Sandy to provide information on available fuel locations in the midst of gas shortages; it helped provide accurate information on Covid-19 testing centers at the beginning of the pandemic.

Local governments are also able to partner with Waze through a program called Waze for Cities, which establishes two-way data sharing through the app and government partners that helps communities with city planning and Waze with more accurate traffic monitoring.

New top officials have joined the company relatively recently, with Neha Parikh taking on the role of CEO in June 2021 and CMO Harris Beber joining in April 2022. Beber previously served as CEO at Vimeo, while Parikh was the president of Expedia-owned Hotwire and currently sits on the board of Carvana.

“Why should anybody feel emotional about a navigation app? Yet people do, including me,” Parikh said at the Skift Global Forum in October. “It’s not just a one-way app that uses technology. It is a two-way ecosystem where people actually contribute to help each other.”

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Technology

Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup’s robots could ‘fracture a human skull’

Published

10 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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$Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull'$

Startup Figure AI is developing general-purpose humanoid robots.

Figure AI

Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup’s former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company’s robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.”

Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer, is the plaintiff in the suit filed Friday in a federal court in the Northern District of California. Gruendel’s attorneys describe their client as a whistleblower who was fired in September, days after lodging his “most direct and documented safety complaints.”

The suit lands two months after Figure was valued at $39 billion in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital. That’s a 15-fold increase in valuation from early 2024, when the company raised a round from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

In the complaint, Gruendel’s lawyers say the plaintiff warned Figure CEO Brett Adcock and Kyle Edelberg, chief engineer, about the robot’s lethal capabilities, and said one “had already carved a ¼-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction.”

The complaint also says Gruendel warned company leaders not to “downgrade” a “safety road map” that he had been asked to present to two prospective investors who ended up funding the company.

Gruendel worried that a “product safety plan which contributed to their decision to invest” had been “gutted” the same month Figure closed the investment round, a move that “could be interpreted as fraudulent,” the suit says.

The plaintiff’s concerns were “treated as obstacles, not obligations,” and the company cited a “vague ‘change in business direction’ as the pretext” for his termination, according to the suit.

Gruendel is seeking economic, compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial.

Figure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did attorneys for Gruendel.

The humanoid robot market remains nascent today, with companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics pursuing futuristic offerings, alongside Figure, while China’s Unitree Robotics is preparing for an IPO. Morgan Stanley said in a report in May that adoption is “likely to accelerate in the 2030s” and could top $5 trillion by 2050.

Read the filing here: