The Canadian self-driving truck startup Waabi has raised $200 million in venture backing from Uber and other investors for its plan to deploy fully driverless, generative AI-powered autonomous trucks in Texas in 2025.
Founded in 2021, Toronto-based Waabi is led by artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Raquel Urtasun. The firm says it is “on the verge of” reaching Level 4 autonomy, thanks to its approach of applying generative AI to the physical world.
Waabi says it has created 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. Because it is able to reason, the system requires significantly less training data and compute resources compared to other end-to-end approaches, Waabi says.
The “series B” round was led by Uber and Khosla Ventures, with participation from NVIDIA, Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, Scania Invest and Ingka Investments. Additional financial investors include HarbourVest Partners, G2 Venture Partners, BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund, Export Development Canada, Radical Ventures, Incharge Capital, and others. The new funding brings total investment in Waabi to more than $280 million.
The new capital will be used to grow Waabi’s commercial operations and expand the company’s team in both Canada and the United States. It follows the firm’s recent opening of its new Texas AV trucking terminal, its integration with NVIDIA DRIVE Thor—the chip maker’s in-vehicle computing platform architected for generative AI applications in automotive applications—and its ongoing partnership with Uber Freight, running autonomous shipments for Fortune 500 companies and top tier shippers in Texas.
In a statement, investor Nils Jaeger, the president of Volvo Autonomous Solutions, said the technology could make a serious impact on logistics transportation operations. “With autonomy, we are at the forefront of a new and complementary transport mode that will alleviate freight capacity constraints and by that enhance trade and economic growth,” Jaeger said. “As Volvo Group we feel confident that continued investment into a competitive autonomous driving landscape will not only stimulate additional technological capabilities- but enable the evolution and maturity of the autonomous vehicle industry.”
