Uber settles lawsuit filed by Waymo for $245 million

Uber and Google sister Waymo have reached a settlement shortly before the fifth day of hearing of the lawsuit filed by Waymo. Uber pays an amount of 245 million dollars in shares, approximately 200 million euros.

According to Waymo, that amount equates to 0.34 percent of Uber’s shares, which will come into its own hands, Bloomberg reports. According to the company, the settlement also includes an agreement that classified information from Waymo will not end up in Uber’s hardware and software, Reuters adds. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said: “While we don’t believe that Waymo trade secrets got to Uber and that Uber used Waymo engineering for its self-driving technology, we are taking steps to ensure that our lidar and software only work our own contains.”

According to the news agency, Waymo had initially estimated the damage at $1.9 billion. The company filed a lawsuit about a year ago after Uber allegedly stole self-driving car technology. At the center of the case was former Uber CEO Anthony Levandowski, who was not one of the accused. Levandowski worked for Waymo and left that company in 2016, shortly after setting up a company called Otto with other former Google employees.

Uber bought Otto for $680 million within six months of its inception. In March of last year, Waymo argued that an investigation by a Google security officer revealed that Levandowski had used his laptop to download 14,000 files from a Waymo repository before joining Uber in its self-driving car research division.

The files would be a total of 9.7GB of data, including 2GB of files about Waymo’s lidar technology. The similarities between Otto and Waymo’s lidar designs came to light when Waymo accidentally received an email from a supplier containing a drawing of a lidar circuit board.