Waabi, a Toronto, Canada-based company advancing generative AI for the physical world, raised $200m (USD) in Series B funding.
The round was led by Uber and Khosla Ventures with participation from strategic investors NVIDIA, Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, Scania Invest and Ingka Investments, and additional financial investors HarbourVest Partners, G2 Venture Partners, BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund, Export Development Canada, Radical Ventures, Incharge Capital, and others.
The new funding, which brings total investment in Waabi to more than $280 million (USD), will support the company’s deployment of fully driverless, generative AI-powered autonomous trucks in 2025.
Founded by Raquel Urtasun, Waabi is pioneering generative AI for the physical world, first by applying this technology to overhaul the autonomous trucking industry. The company has developed a single end-to-end AI system that is capable of human-like reasoning, enabling it to generalize to any situation that might happen on the road, including those it has never seen before. Because it is able to reason, the system requires less training data and compute resources compared to other end-to-end approaches. It is fully interpretable and its safety can be validated and verified. This AI system, paired with Waabi World, an advanced simulator, reduces the need for extensive on-road testing and enables a safer, more efficient solution that is highly performant and scalable from day one.
FinSMEs
18/06/2024