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Zoox Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

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The profile

In the first week of April 2020 Zoox, a self-driving startup said to be worth more than $3 billion, laid off almost all of its contract workers, including the backup drivers who rode in its test cars. The Verge put the number at around 120. The termination email told them it should not be "considered a standard layoff."

  • Category: autonomous vehicles
  • Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
  • Last updated: 2026-09-26
  • Related article: The Pandemic Layoff Stress Test

Founders, executives and investors

Zoox was founded in 2014 by Tim Kentley-Klay, an Australian entrepreneur with a marketing background, and Jesse Levinson, who had worked on self-driving technology at Stanford University. In 2018 it raised $500 million in venture capital at a $3.2 billion post-money valuation. A few months later the board ousted Kentley-Klay as chief executive and replaced him with Aicha Evans, Intel's former chief of strategy. In October 2019 Zoox took a $200 million convertible note as a first step toward a Series C round that had not closed by April 2020. Less than three months after the layoff, on June 26, 2020, Amazon announced an agreement to buy Zoox, with Evans as chief executive and Levinson as chief technology officer staying on to run it. CNBC later put the price at $1.3 billion.

Business before the pandemic

Zoox set out to build a self-driving car from the ground up instead of retrofitting an existing model. The vehicle drives forward or backward without turning around; Zoox planned to unveil it by the end of 2020 and to begin testing its own robotaxi service the year after. Based in Foster City, California, it had 50 test vehicles registered in California and a smaller fleet in Las Vegas. Its software engineers were employees. Safety drivers, mechanics and vehicle cleaners came through two staffing agencies, Aerotek and Experis, on multiyear contracts.

What the pandemic changed

In early March 2020 Zoox stopped testing on public roads in San Francisco and Las Vegas. It promised the contract workers pay until April 7. The shelter-in-place order ran on, and on a Friday the workers received an email ending their jobs effective immediately, locking them out of company email, Zoom and Slack and asking for their laptops and badges back. The email said Zoox would hire everyone back "once the shelter in place is lifted, unless stated otherwise." The company told The Verge that contractors who could work remotely kept their jobs and that the decision "was not made lightly."

The Verge noted that the agency arrangement kept Zoox's costs down and put "some legal space" between the company and many of its workers. One safety driver who asked an Experis representative about the shutdown received, in reply, a link to information about unemployment insurance. SBA's PPP loan data list no borrower named Zoox.

After the first shock

The vehicle that reached the public has no steering wheel or pedals, seats four facing each other, and runs 16 hours on a charge. "It's not a retrofitted car," Evans told CNBC in 2025. "It's built from the ground up around the rider."

Since 2025

On September 10, 2025 Zoox opened free rides to the public on the Las Vegas Strip, from pickup points including Area15, Resorts World and the Luxor, out of a 190,000-square-foot depot. It said charging fares was waiting on regulatory approval, and that Austin and Miami would follow. Alphabet's Waymo had been selling driverless rides since 2020 and had passed 10 million paid rides.

In December 2025 Levinson, now chief technology officer, said Zoox expected to start charging in Las Vegas in early 2026 and in the San Francisco Bay Area later that year, subject to federal and state approvals. The fleet had just passed 1 million autonomous miles. He also said the robotaxi business would not produce revenue meaningful to Amazon for at least several more years. "This is pretty expensive," he said.

In a notice published on July 31, 2026, NHTSA granted Zoox an exemption from parts of eight federal motor vehicle safety standards so that it could make and deploy its robotaxi commercially. The exemption runs to July 31, 2028; no more than 2,500 exempted vehicles may be introduced in any 12 months, and the number on the road at once is capped by operating authorizations that NHTSA issues.

Zoox, which called it the first such commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi, said it now had federal approval to charge for rides and was still working with regulators in Nevada and California to complete the requirements for commercial operations. On September 26, 2026, the California Public Utilities Commission's list of issued permits showed Zoox with drivered and driverless pilot permits and no deployment permit; the commission's pilot programs do not allow fares.

Sources

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