Waabi Secures $200 Million to Deploy Driverless Trucks Next Year
Autonomous vehicle startup Waabi raises $200 million in a Series B round to launch fully driverless trucks in 2025. The company credits its rapid progress to a groundbreaking generative AI system that requires less data and testing than traditional approaches.
Waabi raises $200 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round led by Uber and Khosla Ventures to launch fully driverless trucks in 2025. The investment round sees participation from major strategic and financial backers, including NVIDIA, Volvo Group Venture Capital, and Porsche Automobil Holding SE. This new capital brings the total investment in the company to over $280 million as it prepares to commercialize its technology.
Just three years after its founding, Waabi approaches Level 4 autonomy thanks to a revolutionary generative AI system built for the physical world. Unlike other end-to-end approaches, this single AI system demonstrates human-like reasoning that allows it to handle completely unprecedented driving scenarios. Consequently, the technology requires significantly less training data and computing power while remaining fully interpretable and verifiable for safety.
The company pairs this advanced AI with Waabi World, a highly sophisticated simulator that minimizes the need for real-world on-road testing. This unique combination allows Waabi to develop and validate its autonomous driving software in a safer, faster, and more capital-efficient manner. Founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun states that this approach finally delivers on the enormous potential of physical world AI in a provably safe and scalable way.