$200 Million Boost: Tech Titans Back Waabi's Vision for Fully Autonomous Trucks

Several significant investors have contributed $200 million to Waabi, a Toronto-based AI business, in order to produce completely driverless trucks by 2025.

Waabi said on Tuesday that it raised $200 million in an oversubscribed Series B round headed by Uber and Khosla Ventures. Strategic investors such as Nvidia, Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, Scania Invest, Ingka Investments, and others have participated in the investment round.

The fresh capital extends Waabi's total investment to more than $280 million, which the business claims would enable the deployment of completely driverless, generative AI-powered autonomous vehicles by 2025.

"We are big believers in the potential for autonomous technology to revolutionise transportation, making a safer and more sustainable future possible," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement.

Khosrowshahi commended Raquel Urtasun, the founder and CEO of Waabi, as a visionary in the industry.

"Under her leadership, Waabi's AI-first approach provides a solution that is extremely exciting in both its scalability and capital efficiency," Khosrowshahi told reporters.

Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, expressed this sentiment.

"Waabi is developing autonomous trucking by applying cutting-edge generative AI to the physical world," Huang explained in the announcement. "I am thrilled to support Raquel's vision with our investment in Waabi, which is driven by NVIDIA technology. For over a decade, I have championed Raquel's pioneering work in AI.

Waabi, founded in 2021, claims to be on the verge of achieving Level 4 autonomy, the industry-standard level at which a self-driving vehicle can operate without a person most of the time.

"Waabi has pioneered a single end-to-end AI system that is capable of human-like reasoning, enabling it to generalise to any situation that might happen on the road, including those it has never seen before," a press release notes. "Because it is able to reason, the system requires significantly less training data and compute resources compared to other end-to-end approaches."

With the increased strategic resources, Waabi intends to introduce fully driverless trucks in Texas, expand driverless operations to additional regions, and disrupt the supply chain.

According to the news announcement, Urtasun stated, "I have devoted the majority of my professional life to developing new AI technologies that can realise the enormous potential of AI in the physical world in a provably safe and scalable way." "With the amazing Waabi team, I have had the opportunity over the last three years to transform these discoveries into a game-changing solution that has gone beyond my wildest dreams. We have everything we need to introduce completely autonomous vehicles by 2025, including ground-breaking technology, a fantastic staff, and trailblazing partners and investors.