Waabi , a woman-led autonomous vehicle startup , raises $83.5 million

Waabi is an autonomous vehicle startup that has several reasons to stand out from its competitors. For starters, it was founded by Raquel Urtasun, a renowned computer vision expert who ran the Toronto branch of Uber Advanced . Technology Group , making it one of the few autonomous vehicle startups led by a woman. The second is that the Toronto company has just raised $83.5 million, one of the largest amounts ever raised in Canada.
The funding round was led by Khosla Ventures, with additional participation from Urtasun’s former company, Uber, and Aurora, the autonomous vehicle startup that ended up acquiring Uber ATG last year. It also secured funding from 8VC, Radical Ventures, Omers Ventures, BDC, AI luminaries Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Pieter Abbeel , and Sanja Fidler , among other firms.
A welcome start for a company joining a very competitive environment with a dozen startups trying to solve what is probably the world’s most difficult problem: how to make cars and trucks drive themselves safely. , reliably and efficiently.
Waabi ‘s focus will be on trucks, using its proprietary software to automate driving on commercial delivery routes. With its innovative approach to simulation and machine learning, Waabi says it is poised to bring its technology to market faster and cheaper than most autonomous vehicle startups today.
Urtasun says that his expertise in artificial intelligence, which he has been working on for the past twenty years, also gives Waabi a clear advantage: “I have seen what really works and what doesn’t for AI and the technology used. in a lot of commercial software”.
There are two reasons why Waabi has set its sights on trucks rather than robotaxis or last-mile delivery vehicles. One is the shortage of truck drivers, which Urtasun hopes to rectify with the rapid rollout of fully autonomous large rigs. The second is that highways are easier than full city streets for autonomous vehicles to navigate. This explains why, by 2030, it is estimated that the demand for truck drivers will be reduced by 50 to 70%.