Waabi raises $200 million to deploy driverless trucks by 2025

Autonomous driving startup Waabi Innovation Inc. has raised $200 million from investors including Uber Technologies Inc., Nvidia Corp. and Volvo AB’s venture wing to support its deployment of driverless trucks as soon as 2025.

Toronto-based Waabi will use the investment to grow its commercial operations and expand its team in Canada and the US, where it recently opened a trucking terminal in Texas, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. Founded in 2021, it’s one of a handful of autonomous trucking startups, including Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, whose Via unit specializes in freight, as well as Aurora Innovation, Gatik AI, and TuSimple Holdings Inc.

Unlike Waymo and other self-driving rivals including Tesla Inc., Waabi’s approach does not rely on the capital- and compute-intensive operation of a fleet of vehicles driving for millions of miles on public roads for training purposes. Instead, it uses a digital simulator to design and test different scenarios to teach its AI system how to handle different real-world challenges.

This approach keeps costs down and gives its AI system “human-like reasoning, enabling it to generalize to any situation that might happen on the road, including those it has never seen before,” the company said in the statement.

Khosla Ventures led the oversubscribed funding round with Uber, with contributions from Porsche Automobil Holding SE and Ingka Investments among others. The round brings Waabi’s total funding to about $280 million.