inDrive, Pony.ai and Nvidia plan 2027 robotaxi tests in Kazakhstan

Ride-hailing app inDrive — whose platform lets riders and drivers haggle over fares — has agreed to explore a robotaxi partnership with Pony.ai, the Chinese autonomous-driving company, and Nvidia. Under a memorandum of understanding announced Friday, the three would bring Pony.ai’s self-driving cars onto inDrive’s app in Kazakhstan, with trials planned for Astana, the capital, starting in the first half of 2027, inDrive chief technology officer Yuri Misnik told TechCrunch. A safety operator would ride along at first, with driverless service as the eventual target.

Under the plan, Pony.ai would supply its newest Gen-7 robotaxis for inDrive to list on its app and run locally, while Nvidia would contribute the underlying software stack — its Hyperion self-driving platform and Halos safety system. The announcement adds Kazakhstan to a fast-growing list of countries where ride-hailing operators are chasing driverless fleets: Uber said earlier this month it would trial Pony.ai cars in London, on top of the supervised autonomous rides it already runs there with UK-based Wayve, and the company is pursuing robotaxi deals with several partners elsewhere, including the Middle East.

inDrive, whose business model has always leaned on low-cost, negotiated fares, frames the robotaxi push the same way. “Our approach is capital-light by design,” said Misnik. “We work with a range of partners in different markets, combining their expertise with ours to deliver a better customer experience.” Nvidia argues that its Hyperion platform could hold down robotaxi development costs by giving partners a pre-built base of sensors and compute, rather than making them design that hardware from scratch — the kind of saving Kani says counts most in emerging markets, where fares are already relatively inexpensive and self-driving services have to stay price-competitive to catch on. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made his first visit to Kazakhstan on Friday, the same day the deal was announced.

Pony.ai, meanwhile, is racing to scale internationally. The company is targeting a robotaxi fleet above 3,500 vehicles, deployed in more than 20 cities worldwide, by year-end 2026 — up from the 1,975 vehicles it had running this past June. Kazakhstan announced its own push into autonomous taxis last month, with trials due in Astana and two other cities in 2027 and new rules already in place for testing self-driving vehicles on some public roads. Astana’s harsh winters — the city has around 1.7 million residents and months of snow and ice — could make it a demanding proving ground for the technology, Tomsky said.

Why it matters

The deal extends the global robotaxi race to a market neither Silicon Valley nor Beijing has prioritized, and tests whether Nvidia’s pitch — that off-the-shelf autonomy hardware can make driverless fleets viable in lower-cost markets — holds up outside the U.S. and China.