Waabi, another innovative player in the burgeoning autonomous vehicle sector, has announced a major funding round. They have thrown $1 billion into ramping up their push to create YOU GUESSED IT robotaxis. In all, the company is making a $1.8 billion investment. As it goes public today, after nearly four and a half years of developing robust autonomous capabilities on its own, it’s redirecting its focus toward the more lucrative robotaxi market in concert with its partner, Uber.
Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners jointly led a huge $750 million Series C round. On top of that, Uber provided an additional $250 million in milestone-based capital. This capital funding will help deploy more than 25,000 Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis. This is quite a change from their core work, a huge step into the world of urban mobility solutions.
Waabi’s technology is predicated on the company’s core success in autonomous trucking pursuits. The company has previously run commercial pilots in Texas, but with a human driver in the front seat. Ultimately, this decision highlights their dedication to safety above all, while continuing to introduce autonomous systems into practical, real-world situations. The Waabi Brain technology demonstrates strong generalization across different vehicle forms, paving the way to its use on robotaxis.
The company is thrilled about getting a chance to duplicate its successful autonomous trucking rollout strategy. They’ll do this by integrating sensors and other technology on-board during vehicle production. Raquel Urtasun, Waabi’s founder and CEO, explained, “We believe in vertical integration, with a fully redundant platform. That philosophy has to come straight from the OEM.
In developing its robotaxis, Waabi wants to keep it simple, stupid (KISS) – churning out as few models as possible. Unlike most competitors, Waabi’s approach requires less dependence on massive data gathering and processing. It lowers the burden on massive human effort and infrastructure. As Urtasun outlined, building the tech and big fleets that AV 1.0 will need doesn’t require a bazillion humans. Rather, we can do it with a much leaner crew. We don’t need the mega data farms, energy hogs or a quintillion new processors.
The company’s Waabi Driver has some powerful reasoning skills. It can only do what a fully competent human driver can do — drive well in complicated nonlinear environments. This technology is put through extensive training and validation in Waabi World. The closed-loop simulator generates digital twins of the real-world scenario for immersive act learning. The simulator is capable of performing real-time sensor simulations. It’s able to simulate difficult situations to stress-test the Waabi Driver, so it can learn from its mistakes on its own.
Waabi had intended to roll out an entirely driverless truck to public highways by the end of last year. Yet, the company has chosen to delay this rollout until deep into the next several quarters. Despite Autonomy’s growing pains, Urtasun has a rosy outlook for the grand promise of robotaxi deployment. As she put it, “We’re still in the first innings of deployment of robotaxis.”
Waabi’s strategic partnership with Volvo to develop purpose-built autonomous trucks further underscores its commitment to advancing technology across multiple verticals. Urtasun made this vision sound truly exciting. He continued, “Our amazing underlying core technology is now able to bring together one unified solution that works seamlessly across all verticals, and it’s able to do that at scale.”
This impressive funding, along with Waabi’s technological advances, line them up as a serious contender not just in the autonomous trucking space, but the robotaxi market. The company is learning and iterating on its product all the time. Its vision is to transform the transportation ecosystem of urban dwellers by providing nimble, reliable, and highly effective autonomous vehicles.
