Canadian autonomous truck startup Waabi Innovation Inc. announced today that it has raised $750 million in new funding and secured a separate, milestone-based future investment of up to $250 million from Uber Technologies Inc.

The latter deal is to support a new partnership to deploy robotaxis powered by the Waabi Driver exclusively on the Uber platform. As for the new funding, it’s aimed at fueling the continued advancement of Waabi’s Physical AI Platform, accelerate the company’s commercial progress in autonomous trucking, and support its expansion into robotaxis.

Founded in 2021, Waabi is building a general-purpose artificial intelligence system to operate autonomous vehicles safely and at large scale in the real world. The company says its Physical AI offering combines large-scale machine learning with a deep understanding of physics to allow autonomous systems to reason, predict and act reliably in complex, dynamic environments.

Waabi Driver, the company’s autonomous vehicle system, is designed to generalize across different vehicle platforms rather than being tightly coupled to a single use case. The system is built around a learned model that can adapt to new scenarios, road conditions and driving behaviors with minimal retraining. That’s in contrast to other solutions that use autonomy stacks relying heavily on hand-coded rules.

“Waabi’s Physical AI Platform has enabled us to hit an industry-leading pace in the development and commercialization of autonomous trucks over the past few years,” explained founder and Chief Executive Raquel Urtasun. “Our current self-driving capabilities across highways and generalized 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.”

The $750 million Series C round was led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners. Also participating were Uber, NVentures, Volvo Group Venture Capital AB, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, BlackRock Inc., Radical Ventures LP, HarbourVest Partners, Linse Capital, Incharge Capital, BDC Capital Inc., Export Development Canada, TELUS Global Ventures and BMO Global Asset Management Inc.

“We invest in the companies that are leading the AI era,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “Waabi has developed a truly groundbreaking Physical AI platform that represents a fundamental leap forward in how next-generation driverless technology is being developed.”

Along with the funding, the new partnership with Uber will see Waabi enter the robotaxi market. Waabi is exclusively partnering with Uber to deploy robotaxis powered by Waabi Driver on the Uber platform.

Uber will invest additional milestone-based capital to support the development of Waabi’s robotaxis and the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis over time.

“Waabi’s expanded focus on robotaxis marks an important milestone for their team and the AV industry more broadly,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. “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.”

Photo: Waabi