Autonomous driving has made steady technical progress, but scaling it in the real world remains difficult.
Most systems struggle to adapt across vehicle types, cities, and use cases without years of retraining and heavy capital spend. This has slowed commercial rollout in both trucking and robotaxis. Here’s where Toronto-based Waabi steps in to address the issue.
In an attempt to do so, Waabi has secured $1 billion in total new funding, including a $750 million Series C round and a separate, milestone-based investment commitment from Uber.
The Series C round was co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners. The round also included participation from a mix of strategic and financial investors, including NVIDIA’s venture arm NVentures, Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, BlackRock-managed funds, and several Canadian institutional investors.
The funding will be used to further develop Waabi’s AI platform, expand its autonomous trucking business, and support its move into robotaxis. The company says this is the largest fundraising round ever completed by a Canadian startup.
Building a “physical AI” platform
Founded in 2021 by Raquel Urtasun, Waabi builds what it calls a “Physical AI” platform.
“Waabi’s Physical AI Platform has enabled us to hit an industry-leading pace in the development and commercialisation of autonomous trucks over the past few years. Our current self-driving capabilities across highways and generalised surface streets have unlocked a new direct-to-customer model that, for the first time, solves the pain points of the industry, and provides an unprecedented opportunity to quickly and seamlessly enter the robotaxi market, delivering a truly scalable solution for both verticals,” says Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi
Instead of developing separate systems for different vehicles, the company uses a single AI model that can operate both autonomous trucks and robotaxis. This model is trained and tested using a large-scale neural simulator, allowing Waabi to validate behaviour before deployment on public roads.
The Canadian company says this approach has helped it move faster than many competitors in bringing autonomous trucks toward commercial use. The same technology is now being extended to robotaxis without having to rebuild the system from scratch.
Partnership with Uber
As part of its expansion into ride-hailing, Waabi has entered an exclusive partnership with Uber. Under the agreement, robotaxis powered by Waabi’s self-driving system will be deployed on Uber’s platform.
“Waabi’s expanded focus on robotaxis marks an important milestone for their team and the AV industry more broadly. We’re very excited to deepen our partnership with Waabi as they significantly scale their Physical AI Platform and enter a new phase of an already remarkable journey,” says Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber
Uber has also committed to invest additional capital tied to development and deployment milestones, with plans to support the rollout of 25,000 or more robotaxis over time.
With new capital in place and a commercial partner for robotaxis secured, Waabi is positioning itself to address one of the autonomous driving industry’s core challenges: moving from promising pilots to systems that can operate reliably and at scale in the real world.
“We invest in the companies that are leading the AI era. Waabi has developed a truly groundbreaking Physical AI platform that represents a fundamental leap forward in the development of next-generation driverless technology. Their remarkable progress in autonomous trucking and rapid expansion into robotaxis demonstrate how their technology unlocks, for the first time, true scale in the real world. This breakthrough will define AI for decades to come,” says Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures
