Pony.ai

Pony.ai is an autonomous-driving company founded in 2016 and headquartered in Guangzhou (with US roots in Fremont, California), and one of the scaled leaders in robotaxis. It trades publicly on the Nasdaq under the ticker PONY, with a secondary Hong Kong listing, and reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of about 34 million dollars, up sharply year over year, as it expanded toward thousands of robotaxis across more than twenty cities.

Pony.ai runs a full Level 4 stack across both robotaxis and autonomous trucks (robotrucks), operating driverless passenger service in Chinese cities and expanding internationally. Being publicly traded makes it one of the most financially transparent windows into the robotaxi business.

Pony.ai's deployment is no longer China-only. It launched Europe's first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia in March 2026 with the local operator Verne, and on August 14, 2026 it expanded its partnership with Uber to place more than 2,000 robotaxis across five European cities — Zagreb plus four the companies have not named. A Middle East deployment is also planned. The structure is the template most non-US operators now use: Pony.ai supplies the Level 4 autonomy, Uber supplies demand through booking and payments, and a local partner runs the fleet in each market.

The honest framing: the self-driving stack is genuine, load-bearing AI, and Pony.ai is among the few robotaxi operators at real commercial scale. But robotaxi economics remain challenging industry-wide, regulatory environments differ sharply by country, and most of Pony.ai's deployment is still concentrated in China and the European expansion is announced rather than complete, with four of its five cities unnamed — context worth holding when comparing it to Western operators.