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Waabi Secures $1 Billion, Partners with Uber too Accelerate Robotaxi Deployment
Uber is expanding its autonomous vehicle ambitions with a important investment in Waabi, a self-driving technology startup, and a strategic partnership to deploy robotaxis on the ride-hailing platform. The deal, announced today, marks Waabi’s first foray beyond autonomous trucking and signals a renewed push for scalable self-driving technology.
The funding round consists of an oversubscribed $750 million Series C co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, alongside a roughly $250 million investment from Uber tied to the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on its network. While a specific timeline for this large-scale rollout remains undisclosed,the partnership underscores a major commitment to autonomous ride-hailing.
This collaboration is predicated on the belief that Waabi’s artificial intelligence technology can overcome the challenges that have plagued other companies attempting to scale self-driving systems across multiple applications.Unlike competitors such as Waymo, which discontinued its freight program after pursuing both robotaxis and trucking, Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun asserts her company’s “capital-efficient approach and generalizable AI architecture” provide a distinct advantage.
“Our incredible core technology, the Waabi Driver, is designed to refine the Driver’s performance. this allows the system to learn and adapt without extensive human intervention, enabling it to reason and make decisions more like a human driver. This approach, Urtasun believes, allows the system to generalize and learn from fewer examples than customary autonomous driving systems.”
Waabi has spent the last four and a half years developing this technology for both highway and city driving with trucks, but Urtasun indicates the underlying “Waabi Brain” is adaptable to various vehicle types, even hinting at potential applications in robotics.The company proactively collected and simulated passenger car data alongside its trucking efforts, signaling its long-term ambition to enter the robotaxi market.
This strategy has enabled Waabi to develop its technology more quickly and affordably than its competitors, Urtasun claims. “We don’t need the gazillion humans to develop the technology and the large fleets that AV 1.0 needs,” she said. “We don’t need the massive data centers, energy consumption, or a gazillion latest chips.”
The latest funding brings Waabi’s total raised to approximately $1.28 billion, following a $200 million Series B round closed in June 2024. For comparison, competitors aurora Innovation and Kodiak Robotics have raised $3.46 billion and $448 million, respectively, thru a combination of venture capital and public funding.
Over the past five years,Waabi has conducted several commercial pilots in Texas with human safety drivers.The company initially aimed to launch a fully driverless truck on public highways by the end of last year, but that rollout has been postponed to the coming quarters, according to Urtasun. Waabi is collaborating with Volvo to develop purpose-built autonomous trucks, unveiled last October at TechCrunch Disrupt. While the driver software is ready,full validation of the trucks is still underway.
Urtasun expressed confidence in the demand for Waabi’s trucks, citing its direct-to-consumer sales model, and believes the Uber partnership will accelerate market penetration and scalability. “We’re still in the first innings of deployment of robotaxis,” she stated. “There’s a lot more scale to come.”
Details regarding the Uber rollout, including the specific automaker Waabi will partner with, remain confidential. However, Urtasun indicated the company will employ a similar approach to its trucking rollout, integrating its sensors and technology directly into vehicles on the factory floor. “We believe in vertically integrating with a fully redundant platform from the OEM,” she said. “That is how you really build safe and truly scalable technology.”
Other investors in Waabi’s Series C round include Uber, NVentures (Nvidia’s venture capital arm), Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, BlackRock, and BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund.