Waabi's technology has attracted significant investment, closing a $200 million Series B round led by Uber and Khosla Ventures, bringing its total funding to $283.5 million. The company plans to launch fully driverless commercial trucks by 2025, but its long-term mission extends beyond trucking to potentially include robotaxis, humanoids, and warehouse robotics. Urtasun believes that Waabi's AI system, which can generalize and learn from a few examples, is more scalable and capital efficient than other systems, and can be applied to various autonomy use cases.
Key takeaways:
- Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of autonomous trucking startup Waabi, has developed AI systems that can reason like a human, which she believes will speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles.
- Waabi's technology has been trained, tested, and validated using a closed-loop simulator called Waabi World, which has helped the company launch commercial pilots in Texas and aims to reach a fully driverless launch in 2025.
- Waabi recently closed a $200 million Series B round, led by existing investors Uber and Khosla Ventures, bringing its total funding to $283.5 million.
- Urtasun believes that Waabi's technology, which is initially being used to scale autonomous trucking, can be expanded to other areas such as robotaxis, humanoids, or warehouse robotics.