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.”
Steven R Manson
My automatic braking slammed on the brakes cause california directed us onto the left shoulder so the yellow line was in the middle in my hood making the system think I was leaving the road. This is a 2024 peterbilt and just happened 2 days ago. It’s NOT about safety….it’s ALL about profit
John Doe
Those dumb trucks with dumb technology will be in a accident in no time doesn’t have a brain and think reacts like a human with experience
Robert Bell
Good evening Tech Team , I believe that our world is moving forward with technology, but we need to invest in safety first and foremost in to educating our people regarding safety, respect, An understanding the rules on the road an highways, everything in this day is all about speed, which I have no problem about getting down the road on time, but I believe if we go to sleep early enough we can Make it on time, plus getting up early, inaddition to paying more money to our workers, bottom line rich folks, stop trying to pocket all of the money 💰 for your self, your not going to take it with you when you die, take some of your money and help the homeless people, help the elderly people, re-educate our children, reform our jail system, by implementing the Word Of Our Lord Jesus Christ 🙏
State Name Here
AI is going to remove the long haul driver they will NEVER be able to replace the driver in downtown areas making deliveries
Look at the larger truckload carriers. If they can remove a driver from 75% of the route they will reduce operating cost that will be transferred to legal departments
Bernardia Bernard Mickens
Well I say that we truckers are in trouble now and I feel that these computers can be hacked,I truly believe that.
Tim
Costing thousands their jobs. So ya that’s a big hell nom
Don Davis
So the truck shows up at my warehouse…and AI gets out of the cab and unties the load, removes the tarps, and makes the truck ready to be unloaded?
Or is the trucking company going to have to send workers to destinations to prepare the load so the truck can go out on the road?
Seems to me that trucking is about more than driving, and I wonder if the people who think trucks don’t need drivers have considered that fact.
Mark Thomson
Big shoutout to all the drivers who have been forced to share their location data for making this happen. Without the men and women doing the real work generating quality data to feed our data set this wouldn’t be possible.