Autonomous driving startup Waabi recently announced a $1 billion funding round and formed a deep strategic partnership with Uber. This funding marks Waabi's official expansion from autonomous freight to the driverless taxi (Robotaxi) sector.
It is reported that the $1 billion in funding includes a $750 million Series C round led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, as well as a milestone investment of about $250 million from Uber. According to the agreement, Waabi will deploy at least 25,000 driverless taxis equipped with the "Waabi Driver" system exclusively on the Uber platform.
Founder and CEO of Waabi, Raquel Urtasun (previously Chief Scientist at Uber ATG), emphasized that the company's core technology is versatile enough to conquer both the freight and passenger markets with a single technology stack. Unlike traditional autonomous driving companies that heavily rely on large-scale road testing data, Waabi uses an "end-to-end" AI architecture, primarily trained through its closed-loop simulator Waabi World. This approach not only enables logical reasoning like humans but also allows the system to learn from mistakes without human intervention, significantly reducing R&D costs and computing power consumption.
Currently, Waabi has launched multiple commercial pilots in Texas. Although the fully driverless truck originally planned for the end of last year was delayed, with this substantial funding injection and Uber's vast traffic access opening up, Waabi is expected to achieve leapfrog growth in the competitive autonomous driving market.
Key Points:
💰 Waabi completed a $1 billion funding round, with investors including Uber, NVIDIA (NVentures), and the Volvo Group.
🚖 Deeply integrated with the Uber ecosystem, planning to deploy over 25,000 driverless taxis, achieving a strategic expansion from truck freight to passenger transportation.
🧠 The technical advantage lies in **"simulation-driven"** rather than "road test-driven", enabling more efficient and logically capable AI self-driving evolution through simulators.
