Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasan
Waabi
There’s a new competitor in the war for robotaxi supremacy, and it’s an unlikely one: Waabi, a Canadian self-driving truck startup created by AI scientist Raquel Urtasan. The company says it has raised up to $1 billion from venture capital firms and Uber to help commercialize its large robotic platform business and fund a surprise foray into the robotaxi market led by Alphabet’s Waymo.
The Toronto-based company, which supplies self-driving software to Volvo to develop a large number of semi-robots in the US, will also work exclusively with Uber to put tens of thousands of robotaxis on its ridehail platform, powered by its technology, Urtasan said. Forbes. He declined to say when the vehicles operated by the “Waabi Driver” will hit the road and which automaker will produce them.
“Uber is the largest ride-sharing network in the world, so we can tap into an incredible market,” said CEO Urtasan, formerly chief scientist for Uber’s in-house self-driving car unit, Uber ATG. “But this [helps] that we are deploying at least 25,000 bots on the Uber network.”
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Deploying at least 25,000 robotaxis would be a huge boost for that market, given that Waymo, which operates in six U.S. cities and urban areas, currently takes about half a million paid rides per week with a total fleet of fewer than 3,000 electric vehicles. Although Urtasan has said in the past that Waabi was looking to expand its driverless technology beyond commercial trucks, this is the first time it has confirmed a specific plan to do so.
Swedish truck maker Volvo, which has been an investor in Waabi since 2023 and participated in the latest funding round, is testing the company’s technology and will soon deploy it. “What they’ve said publicly is that it’s a few blocks away,” he said. “And this will be an industry first. Truly a scalable platform and commercial operations.”
The new funding includes about $750 million from backers including Khosla Ventures, G2 Venture Partners, Volvo Group and Porsche, as well as Uber’s future “milestone-based” $250 million investment in robotaxi technology, the company said. Excluding the Uber funds, Waabi – named after one Ojibwe word for “has a vision” – has raised more than $1 billion since Urtasan founded it in 2021. The new round is the largest for a tech startup in Canadian history, she and the company said, declining to provide a current valuation for the closely held startup.
Robitic Volvo trucks using Waabi’s AI-enabled software are destined for US roads.
Waabi, Volvo
Urtasan has described Waabi as an autonomous developer of second-wave, pure AI technology focused on creating driving software modeled after the human brain. And unlike Tesla’s Elon Musk, who uses cheap digital cameras as the primary sensor for the company’s “Full Self-Driving” subscription system, Waabi’s driverless trucks use laser lidar and radar, in addition to multiple cameras.
“We invest in the companies that are leading the way in the AI era,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “Waabi has developed a truly ground-breaking natural AI platform that represents a fundamental leap forward in the way next-generation driverless technology is being developed.”
