Canadian Artificial Intelligence Companies Waabi Announced $200 million in new funding to accelerate the development and deployment of its self-driving trucks. The Toronto startup’s new Series BFinancingLed by Uber and Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, the round also received support from well-known companies such as Nvidia, Porsche and Volvo.
The round brings the company’s total investment to $280 million in just three years and brings it one step closer to its plan to deploy fully driverless trucks powered by generative AI in Texas by 2025.
Note: The picture is from Waabi
Waabi’s progress is particularly noteworthy given some notable failures in the self-driving truck space over the past few years, such as the shuttered Embark and TuSimple’s exit from the U.S. The company attributes its success to what it calls its “revolutionary approach to unleashing generative AI in the real world.”
With an end-to-end AI system, the company claims it can reason like a human and conceive of problems that even the human brain can’t. This focus on AI is a marked departure from the route taken by many other self-driving technology developers, which often involves humans identifying potential problem scenarios in advance and then deploying fleets of vehicles on the road to see how they respond to them.
Similarly, UK-based Wayve has received a massive $1 billion in funding through 2024 in hopes of developing technology that can drive self-driving vehicles.
According to Waabi, the focus on AI brings some key benefits. First, its system requires far less training data and computing resources. Waabi also says its technology is fully explainable and can be verified and validated. When paired with the company's Waabi World closed-loop simulator, it reduces the need for road testing, enables safe and scalable solutions, and speeds up and reduces the cost of the development process.