Several large investors have contributed $200 million to launch fully driverless trucks in 2025 with Toronto-based AI company Waabi.
In an announcement on Tuesday, Waabi stated that it had raised $200 million in an oversubscribed Series B round, led by Uber and Khosla Ventures. The funding round includes participation from strategic investors Nvidia, Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, Scania Invest, Ingka Investments and more.
The new funding brings total investment in Waabi to over $280 million, which the company says will support deployment of fully driverless, generative AI-powered autonomous trucks in 2025.
“We are big believers in the potential for autonomous technology to revolutionize transportation, making a safer and more sustainable future possible,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in the release.
Khosrowshahi praised Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun as a visionary in the field.
“… Under her leadership, Waabi’s AI-first approach provides a solution that is extremely exciting in both its scalability and capital efficiency,” Khosrowshahi said.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, echoed that sentiment.
“Waabi is developing autonomous trucking by applying cutting-edge generative AI to the physical world,” Huang said in the release. “I’m excited to support Raquel’s vision through our investment in Waabi, which is powered by NVIDIA technology. I have championed Raquel’s pioneering work in AI for more than a decade. ”
Founded in 2021, Waabi states it is on the verge of reaching Level 4 autonomy – the industry-assessed level at which a self-driving vehicle can drive without a human most of the time.
“Waabi has pioneered a single end-to-end AI system that is capable of human-like reasoning, enabling it to generalize to any situation that might happen on the road, including those it has never seen before,” the release states. “Because it is able to reason, the system requires significantly less training data and compute resources compared to other end-to-end approaches.”
The increase in strategic capital has Waabi planning to launch fully driverless trucks in Texas, expand driverless operations to new regions and transform the supply chain.
“I have spent most of my professional life dedicated to inventing new AI technologies that can deliver on the enormous potential of AI in the physical world in a provably safe and scalable way,” Urtasun said in the news release. “Over the past three years, alongside the incredible team at Waabi, I have had the chance to turn these breakthroughs into a revolutionary product that has far surpassed my expectations. We have everything we need — breakthrough technology, an incredible team, and pioneering partners and investors — to launch fully driverless autonomous trucks in 2025.”