Autonomous vehicle startup Waabi has secured $1 billion in new funding and announced a partnership with Uber that will bring its self-driving technology to the ride-hailing giant’s platform. The move marks Waabi’s first step outside autonomous trucking, signaling a broader push into passenger vehicles as competition heats up across the self-driving industry.
The financing includes an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, along with about $250 million in milestone-based funding from Uber. The Uber capital is tied to plans to support the rollout of at least 25,000 robotaxis powered by Waabi Driver that would operate exclusively on Uber’s platform. The companies have not said when that level of deployment could take place.
The deal reflects a broader wager that Waabi’s AI can scale across multiple self-driving use cases using the same underlying technology. That has proven difficult for others. Waymo, for example, once pursued both robotaxis and autonomous trucking before ultimately shutting down its freight operation.
Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun argues her company is better positioned, pointing to a more capital-efficient strategy and an AI architecture designed to generalize across both passenger and freight markets.
“Our incredible core technology really enables, for the first time, a single solution that can do multiple verticals, and they can do them at scale,” as Urtasun stated to TechCrunch. “It’s not about two programs, two stacks.”
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The partnership also brings Urtasun’s career back to familiar ground. She previously served as chief scientist at Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit, Uber ATG, before the company sold that business to autonomous trucking firm Aurora Innovation in 2020. The deal with Uber expands on Waabi’s existing relationship with Uber Freight.
Waabi now joins a growing roster of autonomous vehicle companies working with Uber to deploy self-driving technology on its platform around the world. That list includes Waymo, Nuro, Avride, Wayve, WeRide, Momenta, among others.
The agreement and fresh funding come as Uber rolls out a new division, Uber AV Labs, which will use Uber-owned vehicles to gather data in support of its autonomous vehicle partners.
Waabi’s approach also differs from many rivals in how heavily it leans on real world data. Urtasun says the company’s Waabi Driver is developed and validated primarily inside a closed loop simulator known as Waabi World. The system builds detailed digital twins from data, runs real time sensor simulations, and generates edge case scenarios to stress test the software. It also allows the driver to learn from its own errors without human input.
According to Urtasun, that process enables Waabi Driver to reason about its environment in a more humanlike way and select the safest or most effective maneuver. The company says this design helps the system generalize better and improve with far fewer training examples than traditional autonomous driving approaches.
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The latest round pushes Waabi’s total capital raised to about $1.28 billion, following a $200 million Series B completed in June 2024. By comparison, autonomous trucking rivals Aurora Innovation and Kodiak Robotics have raised roughly $3.46 billion and $448 million, respectively, drawing on a mix of venture funding and public market capital.
Founded just five years ago, Waabi has already rolled out multiple commercial pilots in Texas, operating with a human safety driver in the cab. The company had aimed to put a fully driverless truck on public highways by the end of last year, but Urtasun said that milestone has now been pushed back to one of the coming quarters.
Waabi is also partnering with Volvo on the development of purpose-built autonomous trucks, a project the company unveiled last October at TechCrunch Disrupt. Urtasun says the Waabi Driver itself is ready, but the vehicles must still complete full validation before they can be rolled out commercially.
Beyond the lead investors, Waabi’s Series C round also drew backing from a wide range of strategic and financial players. Participants included Uber, NVentures, the venture arm of Nvidia, along with Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, BlackRock, BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund, and several others.