Canadian AI company Waabi has announced the acquisition of $200 million in new funding to accelerate the development and deployment of its self-driving trucks. The Toronto-based startup's latest Series B round, led by Uber and Silicon Valley's Khosla Ventures, also received support from notable companies such as Nvidia, Porsche, and Volvo.
This round of financing has brought the company's total investment to $280 million in just three years, bringing it closer to its plan to deploy fully autonomous trucks driven by generative AI in Texas by 2025.
Note: Image from Waabi
Given the significant failures in the autonomous trucking sector in recent years, such as the closure of Embark and TuSimple's withdrawal from the US market, Waabi's progress is particularly noteworthy. The company attributes its success to its so-called "revolutionary approach to unleashing generative AI in the real world."
Through an end-to-end AI system, the company claims it can reason like humans and even envision problems that the human mind cannot imagine. This focus on AI is markedly different from the approach taken by many other autonomous driving technology developers, who often predetermine potential problem scenarios and then deploy fleets to observe how they handle these situations.
Similarly, UK-based Wayve has also secured a hefty $1 billion in 2024 to develop technologies that drive autonomous vehicles.
According to Waabi, the focus on AI has brought several key benefits. Firstly, its system requires significantly less training data and computational resources. Waabi also states that its technology is fully interpretable and verifiable. When combined with the company's Waabi World closed-loop simulator, it reduces the need for road testing, enabling a safe and scalable solution that accelerates and lowers the cost of the development process.