Waabi, the Toronto-based autonomous trucking startup founded by former Uber exec Raquel Urtasun, is making a major strategic pivot. The company just closed a $1 billion funding round and announced a partnership with Uber to deploy at least 25,000 robotaxis on the ridehail platform. It's a striking shift for a startup that's yet to launch commercial self-driving trucks, but it signals where investor excitement—and capital—is flowing in the autonomous vehicle race.
Waabi just made one of the boldest bets in the autonomous vehicle space. The Toronto-based startup, which has spent the past four years developing self-driving trucks, announced it's expanding into robotaxis with a massive partnership alongside Uber. And it's got the funding to back it up—$1 billion in fresh capital, including a $750 million Series C round led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, plus additional investment from Uber tied specifically to the robotaxi push.
The centerpiece of the announcement is the commitment to deploy at least 25,000 robotaxis powered by Waabi's technology on Uber's platform. Founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun, who served as chief scientist at Uber's now-defunct Advanced Technologies Group before launching Waabi in 2021, emphasized in an interview with The Verge that 25,000 is "a floor rather than a ceiling." She called it a "massive, massive partnership" that "brings the next level of scale to the robotaxi market."
It's an audacious claim from a company that hasn't yet validated its self-driving trucks for commercial operation, let alone put a single robotaxi on the road. But Urtasun argues that Waabi's "AI-centric approach" to autonomous driving—what she calls "physical AI"—translates seamlessly from trucking to passenger vehicles. The logic is straightforward: trucks already navigate to specific loading and unloading locations, similar to passenger pickups and drop-offs. Many of the operational behaviors, she says, are already baked into Waabi's existing system.
