Autonomous vehicle startup Waabi has raised $1 billion and partnered with Uber to develop self-driving cars on its ride-hailing platform — the company’s first expansion beyond autonomous trucking.
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 capital from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver robotaxies exclusively on its platform. The companies did not provide a timetable for such a large-scale rollout.
The partnership represents a bet that the startup’s AI technology can succeed where others have struggled – scaling multiple self-driving disciplines with a single technology stack. While competitors like Waymo previously attempted both robotaxi and trucking before shuttering its freight program, Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun says her company’s capital-efficient approach and generalizable AI architecture give it a unique advantage to address both markets simultaneously.
“Our incredible core technology really allows, for the first time, a single solution that can do multiple verticals, and they can do them at scale,” Urtasun told TechCrunch. “It’s not about two programs, two stacks.”
The tie-up brings Urtasun’s work full circle: He previously served as chief scientist at Uber’s autonomous vehicle division, Uber ATG, which Uber sold to self-driving truck company Aurora Innovation in 2020. It also builds on Waabi’s existing partnership with Uber Freight.
Waabi is one of several AV companies Uber has brought on board to develop self-driving vehicles on its platform globally. Other companies include Waymo, Nuro, Avride, Wayve, WeRide, Momenta and others.
The commitment and funding round comes as Uber is launching a new division called Uber AV Labs that will use its vehicles to collect data for AV partners.
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Waabi isn’t as data-driven as some, if Urtasun is to be believed. The Waabi Driver is trained, tested and validated using a closed-loop simulator called Waabi World that automatically creates digital twins of the world from data. performs real-time sensor simulation. builds scripts to stress test the Waabi Driver. and teaches the Guide to learn from its mistakes without human intervention. The result? Waabi’s Driver can reason about its environment like a human would and choose the best maneuver, Urtasun says. This allows the system to generalize and learn from fewer examples than traditional self-driving systems.
Waabi has spent the last four and a half years bringing this technology to life for highway and surface truck capabilities, but Urtasun says the Waabi brain is already generalizing to different vehicle form factors – even hinting that the company’s next vertical is robotics. From the beginning, the company collected and simulated passenger car data alongside trucking operations, a sign that robotaxis was always part of the long-term plan.
The approach has allowed Waabi to build faster and cheaper than competitors, Urtasun claims.
“We don’t need the gazillion people to develop the technology and the large fleets that AV 1.0 needs,” Urtasun said. “We don’t need the huge data centers, the power consumption or a huge gazillion chips.”
The deal brings Waabi’s total funding to about $1.28 billion after closing a $200 million Series B in June 2024. Competitors Aurora Innovation and Kodiak Robotics have raised $3.46 billion and $448 million to date, respectively, through a mix of venture capital and public markets.
In just five years, Waabi 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 highways by the end of last year, but rollout has been delayed until sometime in the next few quarters, according to Urtasun.
Waabi is working with Volvo to build custom-built autonomous trucks, which the company revealed last October at TechCrunch Disrupt. Urtasun says Waabi’s Driver is ready to go, but the trucks still need to be fully validated before launch.
However, Urtasun is not worried. She says there’s a strong demand for Waabi’s trucks because of the company’s direct-to-consumer model that allows shippers to buy the equipped trucks directly, and she’s confident that with Uber’s partnership, Waabi will be able to “penetrate the market quickly and scale with a product that’s going to be very reliable.”
“We are still in the early stages of developing robotics,” he said. “There’s a lot more scale to come.”
Urtasun would not share more details about Uber’s launch, such as what automaker Waabi would be working with. He said Waabi would take a similar route to autonomous trucking, integrating its sensors and technology into the vehicle from the factory floor.
“We believe in vertical integration with a fully redundant platform from the OEM,” he said. “That’s how you build truly secure and truly scalable technology.”
Other investors in Waabi’s Series C include Uber, NVentures (Nvidia’s VC arm), Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, BlackRock, BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund and others.
