Self-driving car startup Waabi has raised $1 billion and partnered with Uber to introduce self-driving cars on its ride-hailing platform. This is the company’s first expansion beyond self-driving trucks.
The funding consists of an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners and approximately $250 million in milestone-based capital from Uber to support the deployment of more than 25,000 Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis on its platform alone. The companies have not disclosed a timeline for such a large-scale implementation.
The partnership represents a bet that the startup’s AI technology can succeed where other companies have struggled, and can scale across multiple self-driving industries with a single technology stack. While competitors like Waabi experimented with both robotaxis and trucking before halting their freight programs, Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun said the company’s capital-efficient approach and generalizable AI architecture give it a unique advantage in tackling both markets simultaneously.
“Our incredible core technology allows for the first time a single solution that can run multiple verticals, and do them at scale,” Urtasun told TechCrunch. “This is not about two programs, two stacks.”
This partnership brings Urtasun’s work full circle. She previously served as a principal scientist at Uber’s self-driving vehicle division, Uber ATG, which Uber sold to self-driving truck company Aurora Innovation in 2020. It also builds on Mr. Warby’s existing partnership with Uber Freight.
Waabi is one of several AV companies Uber has brought in to deploy self-driving cars around the world on its platform. Other companies include Waymo, Nuro, Avride, Wayve, WeRide, Momenta, and more.
The partnership and funding round come as Uber launches a new division called Uber AV Labs that will use its vehicles to collect data for AV partners.
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If Urtasun is to be believed, Warbi isn’t as reliant on data as some people are. Waabi Driver is trained, tested, and validated using a closed-loop simulator called Waabi World, which automatically builds a digital twin of the world from your data. Perform real-time sensor simulation. Create a scenario to stress test Waabi Driver. And it teaches drivers to learn from their mistakes without human intervention. result? Warbi’s drivers can assess their surroundings and choose the best maneuver just like a human, Urtasun said. This allows the system to generalize and learn from fewer examples than traditional self-driving systems.
While Waabi has spent the past four-and-a-half years bringing its technology to highway and road capabilities for trucks, Urtasun said the Waabi Brain has already been generalized to a variety of vehicle form factors, and even hinted that the company’s next area is robotics. From the beginning, the company collected and simulated passenger vehicle data in parallel with its trucking operations. This shows that robotaxis are always part of long-term plans.
This approach has allowed Waabi to build faster and cheaper than its competitors, Urtasun claims.
“Developing the technology needed for AV 1.0 does not require billions of people or large fleets,” Urtasun said. “We don’t need massive data centers, energy consumption, or billions of advanced chips.”
The deal brings Warbi’s total funding to approximately $1.28 billion since completing its $200 million Series B in June 2024. Competitors Aurora Innovation and Kodiak Robotics have raised $3.46 billion and $448 million, respectively, in venture capital and public market proceeds.
In just five years, Wabi has launched several commercial pilots (with a human driver in the front seat) in Texas. The company had planned to launch a fully driverless truck on public roads by the end of last year, but that rollout has been postponed to the next few quarters, according to Urtasun.
Waabi is working with Volvo to develop a purpose-built self-driving truck, which the company revealed at TechCrunch Disrupt last October. Urtasun said Wabi’s drivers are ready, but the truck needs to be fully validated before launch.
But Urutasan isn’t worried. She said there is a lot of demand for Waabi’s trucks thanks to the company’s direct-to-consumer model, where shippers can buy equipped trucks directly, and is confident that the partnership with Uber will allow Waabi to “penetrate the market quickly and scale with a highly reliable product.”
“We are still in the early stages of robotaxis implementation,” she said. “We are looking forward to even bigger scale in the future.”
Urtasun declined to discuss specifics about Uber’s development, including what kind of partnership automaker Wabi would be with. She said Waabi will take a similar path to deploying self-driving trucks by integrating sensors and technology from the factory floor into vehicles.
“We believe in vertical integration with fully redundant platforms from the OEM,” she said. “That way we can build technology that is secure and truly scalable.”
Other investors in Waabi’s Series C include Uber, NVentures (NVIDIA’s VC arm), Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobile Holding SE, BlackRock, and BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund.
