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The self-driving vehicle industry may be young, just a bit over a decade old, but already a meaningful trend is taking shape: it’s proving to be more open to women CEOs and founders–including women of colour–than the broader tech industry and for U.S. companies generally.

With this week’s news that Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun raised $83.5 million in a Series A round for her Toronto-based startup, three out of 12 leading autonomous technology companies in North America are now led by women. What’s more, in a time when companies across all industries are working to improve diversity, two of the women leading self-driving tech companies, Zoox CEO Aicha Evans and Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana, are Black. 

“I’ve been excited to see the number of women interested in autonomous technology. There’s an appreciation for what it can do for people, what it’s going to unlock,” says Alisyn Malek, who left General Motors to cofound autonomous shuttle startup May Mobility in 2017 (and is currently executive director of the Washington-based Commission on the Future of Mobility). “The talent pool that AV can pull from is broader because we’ve never done it before.”

Malek, who’s had extensive experience working with venture capital firms during her time at May Mobility and as GM’s head of Innovation Pipeline, is particularly impressed with Urtasun’s large funding round for Waabi, among the biggest for any autonomous vehicle startup.

“Raquel’s story stands out uniquely because she was able to pitch a new company,” Malek says. “Getting that first round is the hardest. Seeing if she’s able to be successful going forward will be interesting to watch.”

Women holding approximately a quarter of the top management jobs at autonomous tech companies surpassed the estimated 8.2% of women CEOs at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies as of February 2021, according to a study by the Women’s Business Collaborative. The same report also found that less than 1% of CEOs at companies surveyed were women of colour.

Among U.S. startups, approximately 40% have at least one woman in a senior management role, though only 14% have a woman CEO, according to Silicon Valley Bank’s 2020 Women in US Technology Leadership survey.