Assurance raises $1 billion, expands Robotaxis with Uber

Self-driving car startup Waabi has raised $1 billion and partnered with Uber to deploy self-driving cars on its ride-hailing platform, the company’s first expansion beyond autonomous trucking.

The financing consists of an undersubscribed $750 million Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners and approximately $250 million in milestone-based capital from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on its platform. The companies did not provide a timeline for such a large-scale rollout.

The partnership represents a bet that the startup’s AI technology can succeed where others have struggled — scaling across multiple self-driving verticals with a single technology stack. While competitors like Waymo previously tried robotaxis and trucking before shutting down its shipping program, Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi, says her company’s capital-efficient approach and generalizable AI architecture gives it a unique advantage to tackle both markets simultaneously.

“Our amazing core technology enables 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, it’s about two programs.”

The partnership brings Urtasun’s work full circle: She previously served as chief scientist at Uber’s self-driving vehicle division, Uber ATG, which Uber sold to self-driving trucking company Aurora Innovation in 2020. Waabi’s current partnership is with Uber Freight.

Waabi is one of several autonomous vehicle companies brought on by Uber to deploy self-driving vehicles on its platform globally. Other companies include Waymo,just, Afriedwifi , We are riding, MomentumAnd more.

The engagement and financing round comes on behalf of Uber It is launching a new division called Uber AV Labs Which will use its vehicles to collect data for AV partners.

Wabi is not as data-driven as some, if we are to believe Urtasun. The Waabi driver is trained, tested and validated using a closed-loop simulator called The word water that automatically builds digital twins of the world from data; Performs real-time sensor simulation. Manufactures Waabi driver endurance testing scenarios; It teaches the driver to learn from his mistakes without human intervention. The result? Urtasun says the Wabi driver can think about his surroundings like a human and choose the best maneuver. This allows the system to generalize and learn from fewer examples than traditional self-driving systems.

Waabi has spent the past four and a half years reviving the technology for highway and surface street capabilities with trucks, but Urtasun says the Waabi Brain is already generalizing to different form factors in vehicles — and she even hints that the company’s next vertical is robotics. From the beginning, the company has collected and simulated passenger vehicle data alongside its trucking business, a sign that robo-taxis were always part of the long-term plan.

Urtasun claims that this approach allowed Waabi to build faster and cheaper than competitors.

“We don’t need huge numbers of people to develop the technology and the large fleets that AV 1.0 needs,” Urtasun said. “We don’t need massive data centers, power hogs, or a gazillion state-of-the-art chips.”

This brings Waabi’s total funding to approximately $1.28 billion next Closed $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 combination of venture capital and public market proceeds.

In just five years, Wabi 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 the launch has been postponed until sometime in the next few quarters, according to Urtasun.

Waabi is working with Volvo to build purpose-built self-driving trucks, which the company is doing It was revealed last October at TechCrunch Disrupt. Urtasun says the Waabi driver is ready to go, but the trucks still need to be fully validated before launch.

But Urtasun isn’t worried. She says there is high demand for Waabi’s trucks due to the company’s direct-to-consumer model that enables shippers to purchase outfitted trucks directly, and she is confident that through the Uber partnership, Waabi will be able to “quickly penetrate the market and scale with a product that will be very reliable.”

“We are still in the early stages of deploying robotaxis,” she said. “There is a lot of scope in the future.”

Urtasun did not share more details about Uber’s rollout, such as what automaker Waabi will partner with. It said Waabi would take a similar route to its autonomous trucking startup by building its sensors and technology into the vehicle from the factory floor.

“We believe in vertical integration with a redundant platform from OEMs,” she said. “This is how you build truly secure and 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.