Raquel Urtasun, Founder and CEO of Waabi
Courtesy of Waabi
Self-driving trucking startup Waabi has raised $750 million in a new venture funding round aimed at expanding into the robotaxis market, the company announced Wednesday.
Waabi’s Series C round will be led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, the startup announced on Wednesday. The deal is one of the largest single rounds ever raised by a Canadian technology startup.
In addition to Waabi’s Series C, Uber has committed to invest $250 million in the startup based on future milestones. With Uber’s additional funding, Waabi plans to exclusively deploy at least 25,000 self-driving cars through its ride-hailing platform. Mr. Urtasun previously served as a principal scientist working on AV technologies in Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group.
Waabi, which ranks No. 35 on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, is based in Toronto and has some operations in Texas.
Founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun told CNBC that the new funding will allow the company to adapt its “physical AI” to develop highly secure unmanned systems in new locations, conditions and form factors.
“For me, it’s been 16 years since I started driving autonomously,” she said. “But this is finally here, the scale is here, and in the next few years it’s going to be amazing.”
Waabi has not yet revealed which vehicle models will be equipped with its system.
The startup previously partnered with automakers to develop driverless trailer-hauling trucks. volvo And before that, Peterbilt. Warbi has been operating its own fleet of driverless trucks to transport customers’ packages, but is now moving to a “driver-as-a-service” business model, said Arterson, who is also a full professor of computer science at the University of Toronto.
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, backstage at Center Stage on Day 1 of Collision 2024 at the Enercare Center in Toronto, Canada.
Bourne Ridley | Sports File | Getty Images
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and co-founder of computer hardware company Sun Microsystems, told CNBC that the fund is backing Waabi because it takes a “capital efficient” approach to “physical AI” and has late-mover benefits.
Khosla said Wabi can do for a fraction of the cost what its predecessors in the self-driving car industry accomplished by spending thousands of engineers and billions of dollars in research, development and safety testing.
Urtasun agreed, pointing out that things like artificial intelligence and sensor technology have come a long way since the early days of the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004. The Grand Challenge was an influential competition that encouraged the development of autonomous ground vehicles.
Waabi doesn’t compromise on the technology it uses because it focuses on safety, time to market and cost, Urtasun said.
“We use multiple sensors, lidar, cameras and radar,” she said. “This is important because they each have very different characteristics and failure modes, and using them all would be much more robust.”
Many driverless trucking startups have come and gone, but Waabi’s truck technology still faces competition from the likes of Aurora, Kodiak AI, and Bot Auto. tesla. Elon Musk’s automaker Tesla is poised to produce more semi-electric trucks in 2026 and has pledged to develop self-driving systems for them.
Competition is even more intense in the nascent robotaxi market.
Competitors that already operate or develop self-driving small cars include other Uber partners, including: alphabetIn addition to automakers owned by Waymo, Nuro, and WeRide, others are developing their own unmanned systems, including Tesla, Nuro, and WeRide. Rivian In the US, Xiaomoi and BYD are in China.
Additional investors in Waabi’s Series C round include NVIDIA venture capital arm NVentures, Volvo Group Venture Capital, and Porsche Automobile Holding SE.
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