Waabi is moving beyond autonomous trucks. The autonomous vehicle startup has raised $1 billion and formed a partnership with Uber to bring self-driving cars to the ride-hailing platform, setting up the company’s first major push into robotaxis.
The plan is ambitious: Uber is providing roughly $250 million in milestone-based capital to support deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on its platform. The companies did not provide a timeline for that large-scale rollout.
What the Waabi and Uber deal includes
The new financing combines an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round with Uber’s milestone-based capital. The Series C was co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners.
Other investors in the round include Uber, NVentures, Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, BlackRock, BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund, and others.
The deal brings Waabi’s total funding raised to roughly $1.28 billion. That follows the company’s $200 million Series B in June 2024.
For Uber, the partnership adds Waabi to a growing group of autonomous vehicle companies it has brought onto its platform globally. That group includes Waymo, Nuro, Avride, Wayve, WeRide, Momenta, and more.
The agreement also builds on Waabi’s existing partnership with Uber Freight. It comes as Uber launches a new division called Uber AV Labs, which will use its vehicles to collect data for autonomous vehicle partners.
Why Waabi says one AI stack can do more
The central claim behind Waabi’s expansion is that its technology can serve more than one autonomous driving market. Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun told TechCrunch that the company’s core technology enables a single solution to work across multiple verticals at scale.
That matters because other companies have struggled to span both robotaxis and trucking. The source article notes that Waymo previously attempted both robotaxis and trucking before shutting down its freight program.
Waabi’s argument is that its approach is more capital-efficient and more generalizable. Urtasun says the company is not building two separate programs or two separate technology stacks.
The Waabi Driver is trained, tested, and validated using Waabi World, a closed-loop simulator. According to the source, Waabi World automatically builds digital twins of the world from data, performs real-time sensor simulation, manufactures scenarios to stress-test the Waabi Driver, and teaches the Driver to learn from its mistakes without human intervention.
Urtasun says this lets the Waabi Driver reason about its surroundings and choose the best maneuver. She also says the system can generalize and learn from fewer examples than traditional autonomous driving systems.
From trucking pilots to passenger cars
Waabi has spent the last four and a half years developing highway and surface street capabilities with trucks. Urtasun says the same Waabi brain already generalizes to different vehicle form factors.
Robotaxis were not an abrupt turn for the company. From the beginning, Waabi collected and simulated passenger car data alongside its trucking work, according to the source article.
The company has also hinted at robotics as a possible next vertical. For now, the new Uber partnership makes passenger cars the immediate expansion beyond autonomous trucking.
Waabi’s trucking work is still moving forward. In just five years, the company has launched several commercial pilots in Texas, with a human driver in the front seat.
Waabi had planned to launch a fully driverless truck on public highways by the end of last year. That rollout has been delayed until sometime in the next few quarters, per Urtasun.
The company is also working with Volvo to build purpose-built autonomous trucks. Those trucks were revealed last October at TechCrunch Disrupt, and Urtasun says the Waabi Driver is ready, while the trucks still need to be fully validated before launch.
The bigger test is deployment
The Uber partnership gives Waabi a potential path to scale, but the companies have left important details open. Urtasun would not share more specifics about the Uber rollout, including what automaker Waabi would partner with.
She did say Waabi would use a similar approach to its autonomous trucking rollout by building its sensors and technology into the vehicle from the factory floor. She also said the company believes in vertically integrating with a fully redundant platform from the OEM.
The stakes are clear. Waabi is betting that its simulation-heavy approach can reduce the need for the large fleets, massive data centers, energy consumption, and latest chips that Urtasun associates with earlier autonomous vehicle development.
The market comparison is also notable. 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.
Waabi’s next phase will test whether its technology can move from trucking pilots and delayed driverless truck plans into a much broader robotaxi deployment. Urtasun told TechCrunch that robotaxi deployment is still early and that there is much more scale to come.