Raquel Urtasun, CEO and Founder at Waabi with an automated driving truck, in Toronto on June 16.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Autonomous-vehicle company Waabi Innovation Inc. has raised US$200-million to help it launch fully driverless trucks that will make commercial deliveries on Texas roads starting next year.
The series B round for the Toronto-based company was led by returning investors Uber Technologies Inc. UBER-N and Khosla Ventures, and also includes funds from new investors Nvidia Corp. NVDA-Q, Porsche Automobil Holding and Ingka Investments, an arm of the largest operator of IKEA stores. Other funds, including HarbourVest Partners and Radical Ventures, also participated in the financing.
Waabi founder and chief executive Raquel Urtasun declined to reveal Waabi’s valuation but said that it has increased since the last round of funding three years ago.
The goal of deploying fully autonomous trucks – with no driver at the wheel – in 2025 represents a huge test for Waabi and Ms. Urtasun, a University of Toronto professor who previously worked as chief scientist for Uber’s self-driving unit. She has taken a different approach to developing autonomous vehicles (AVs) since founding Waabi in 2021, which she says will help the company avoid the issues that have hobbled competitors. “Our technology learns with a lot fewer examples than humans do,” she said. “That really sets us apart and enables us to be extremely capital-efficient.”
Many AV companies have faced huge setbacks in recent years. Developing driverless cars and trucks that can safely account for the endless number of scenarios that occur on roads has proven more challenging and expensive than first thought. Waymo, a unit of Alphabet Inc. GOOGL-Q, paused its self-driving truck program last July to focus on robotaxis, while TuSimple Holdings wound down its AV trucking program in the United States in December. Canadian-founded Embark Technology went public at a US$5.2-billion valuation in 2021, only to be sold for just US$71-million last year.
Some AV systems work by mapping the real-world environment in minute detail and following a set of hard-coded rules, which can leave vehicles ill equipped to deal with unexpected situations. The approach also involves a lot of expensive on-road testing.
Waabi has instead built a simulator to train its AV system, which the company says is much more cost-efficient, while its self-driving trucks use an AI model called Copilot4D that predicts how conditions on the road will evolve a few seconds into the future.
“Potentially this technology could be cheaper than a human, but more importantly, the machine is safer,” Ms. Urtasun said. “We’ve already seen with our Waabi driver, in quite a few instances, that it is actually better than our extremely experienced truck drivers.”
The company has been running self-driving trucks commercially in partnership with Uber Freight on a 385-kilometre stretch between Dallas and Houston since last September. A safety driver has always been at the wheel, ready to take control. That will change starting some time next year, Ms. Urtasun said, as Waabi removes humans from inside the vehicle entirely.
Companies are targeting the trucking industry with AVs in part to help alleviate driver shortages, and because the technology may prove to be cheaper. Under some proposals for how autonomous long-haul trucking would work, humans still handle the local driving that typically bookends a delivery, while an AV traverses the monotonous highway portion.
Ms. Urtasun declined to specify the exact route that Waabi’s trucks will follow in Texas, or which parts will be driverless. “We will unveil later on what exactly is the route, but with Waabi, we can actually drive autonomously to the customer,” she said.
The trucks will be remotely monitored by humans, but they will not intervene with the actual driving. “The system is always responsible for doing any driving and handling other safety-critical situations,” Ms. Urtasun said.
At least two other self-driving truck companies could hit Texas roads before Waabi. Aurora Innovation Inc. AUR-Q, co-founded by Canadian Chris Urmson, and Kodiak Robotics plan to launch fleets of autonomous trucks in the state by the end of this year. Texas has emerged as a bit of a hot spot for AVs owing to its regulatory regime and snow-free climate.
In Canada, self-driving company Gatik launched a pilot with Loblaw Cos. Ltd. L-T in 2020 to shuttle goods in box trucks on a handful of fixed routes in Ontario, such as between a distribution centre and a grocery store. One route – a 21-kilometre stretch between Loblaw headquarters in Brampton and a micro fulfilment centre in the Greater Toronto Area – is entirely driverless, though there is an individual in the passenger seat who can stop the vehicle if necessary. That’s never happened during commercial operations, according to Gatik, which has offices in California and Toronto.
“For us, it’s been a hugely successful validation of the technology, of the economics and of the customer need,” said Richard Steiner, vice-president of government relations and public affairs at Gatik. The company has similar partnerships with Walmart and Kroger in the U.S. and targets shorter, more predictable routes.
“We focus exclusively on that business-to-business use case, because it’s more constrained and it’s simpler to get a product safely to market,” Mr. Steiner said.