Verne's first robotaxi won't roll out of San Francisco or Shenzhen. It will roll out of Zagreb — and that is the whole point.
Verne, the Croatian autonomous vehicle startup, announced Thursday a partnership with Pony.ai and Uber to launch what they call Europe's first commercial robotaxi service, with Zagreb as the launch city. Uber also said it intends to invest an undisclosed amount into Verne. The companies did not give a specific launch date beyond "soon."
The choice of Zagreb is deliberate. Verne was founded in 2019 as Project 3 Mobility inside Rimac Group — Mate Rimac's electric hypercar company — and Rimac holds a 23 percent stake in Verne. For Rimac, who believes autonomous vehicle technology will make human-driven ride-hailing economically obsolete, Zagreb represents a cleaner proving ground than the regulatory and reputational minefields of American cities. No prop 21 referendum. No workers' compensation litigation. Just a capital city with a documented regulatory framework and a government that has already signaled openness.
The capital structure tells its own story. Verne raised roughly 100 million euros in a Series A in July 2024, per TechCrunch. It has also received 179.5 million euros in EU grant funding since 2023 — a figure that reflects how seriously Brussels is treating autonomous vehicle infrastructure as a strategic investment. Investors include TASARU Mobility Investments, a company fully owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund; Kia; Rimac Group; SiteGround; and Infinum. That's a blend of Gulf state sovereign wealth, European automotive incumbency, and Balkan tech money — an unusual coalition that speaks to Verne's geopolitical positioning.
Pony.ai brings the hardware. The company had 961 robotaxi fleet vehicles as of November 2025, including 667 units of its Gen-7 vehicle, per an investor relations filing. Mass production of the ARCFOX Alpha T5 Robotaxi, built in partnership with Arcfox, began in July 2025, and Pony.ai produced its 300th unit by October 2025, with a target of 1,000 combined vehicles by year-end. The company reported $25.4 million in revenue for Q3 2025, up 72 percent year-over-year, though robotaxi revenues still operate against losses of $274 million for full-year 2024 — losses that grew 119.6 percent from 2023. Pony.ai said it achieved city-wide unit economics breakeven in Guangzhou as of November 23, 2025, a milestone the company has been pointing to as proof that the model can work at scale.
That claim is worth scrutinizing. Guangzhou is a controlled environment with specific regulatory support. Translating unit economics breakeven in one Chinese city to a European capital with different liability frameworks, insurance requirements, and public expectations about machine error is a significant leap. The Waymo parallel is instructive: Waymo has been targeting a Q4 2026 London launch, per Reuters, and has been running limited driverless pilots in the UK since spring 2026. If Waymo enters Europe through London and Verne enters through Zagreb, the continent's autonomous vehicle story splits into two very different bets — one on a dense, high-profile Anglo-American market with all the reputational risk that entails,, and one on a smaller capital where the bar for acceptable performance is calibrated differently.
For Uber, the investment in Verne is the latest move in a long effort to position itself as a platform rather than a fleet operator. Uber has been burned by automation anxiety before — its own S-1 famously worried about driverless technology making its business model obsolete — and partnering with Pony.ai while taking an equity stake in Verne suggests it is trying to own parts of the supply chain rather than be displaced by it. Whether that strategy works depends entirely on whether either partner can operate outside the China and U.S. markets where both have accumulated the most real-world data.
The human story here is Mate Rimac. He was never interested in building a high-volume electric car that humans would drive — precisely because he believes autonomy makes that business extinct. He built Rimac into a hypercar company and a technology supplier to other OEMs. He is now using Verne to place a bet on the world he expects to arrive. Zagreb is where that bet becomes real, on streets that are not Silicon Valley's, with regulators who are not California's, for passengers who are not early adopters at a tech conference.
What to watch next: whether Verne can secure Croatian regulatory approval on a timeline that matches its ambitions, and whether the partnership with Pony.ai gives it access to real operational data from non-Chinese markets. The EU grant money buys runway. The Uber relationship buys distribution. Whether the robotaxi itself is ready for a European city that is not a controlled demo is the question nobody in the press release is answering.
