Waabi secured $200M to develop fully autonomous driverless trucks

Waabi, a pioneer in generative AI for autonomous vehicles, has raised $200 million in Series B funding to deploy fully driverless trucks by 2025. The round was led by Uber and Khosla Ventures, with participation from industry giants like NVIDIA, Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, and Scania Invest; and financial investors including HarbourVest Partners, G2 Venture Partners, BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund, Export Development Canada, and Radical Ventures. The Series B adds Waabi's total investment up to $280 million.

Waabi's unique approach to autonomous vehicles has led the company to be about to reach Level 4 autonomy just three years after its creation. Waabi has developed an AI system capable of generalizing from the situations it has experienced to extract information that will be helpful when facing unexpected and previously unknown situations. These generalization capabilities require less training data and computing resources than alternative approaches that rely heavily on computer vision algorithms that learn by imitation. Additionally, unlike black-box generative AI models, Waabi's AI system is fully interpretable, which means its decisions can always be traced so its safety can verified and validated.

The AI system is trained, tested, and validated with Waabi World, a closed-loop simulator that builds digital twins of real-world scenarios, designs tests by simulating sensor data, evaluates the AI driver's capabilities by creating stress-test scenarios, and teaches the AI-powered driver (the Waabi Driver) to learn from its mistakes while unsupervised by humans. Waabi expects its approach, industry-leading pace, and capital efficiency, supported by the recent Series B, will enable it to deploy driverless, fully autonomous trucks in 2025.