Raquel Urtasun, founder of Waabi, an AI-driven autonomous trucking startup, has raised nearly €270 million, with backing from Uber and Nvidia. Waabi, based in Toronto, focuses on AI simulation for safe autonomous driving. The company secured €79.5 million in Series A funding and €190 million in a subsequent round, attracting investors like Khosla Ventures, Ingka Investments, and Volvo Group. Urtasun emphasizes transforming the world over selling the company.

Toronto-based autonomous truck technology maker Waabi announced a strategic partnership on Tuesday with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to jointly develop and deploy autonomous trucks. The partnership is twofold, combining Waabi’s innovations in generative AI with Volvo’s autonomous truck, the Volvo VNL Autonomous.The vertical integration comes in the form of integrating Waabi’s virtual driver system, the Waabi Driver, into the Volvo autonomous truck, which has redundant systems for safe autonomous operations. FreightWaves spoke with Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi, about the partnership. The first thing to note is this is not a retrofit, but a vertical integration: These trucks will come off the factory line fully equipped and ready.“We don’t believe that retrofit is an option for that redundant platform; we believe that our technology, and any AV player for that matter, should be vertically integrated into a redundant platform that is purposefully built for self-driving,” said Urtasun. While Volvo handles the tractor, Waabi has been cooking up its Waabi Driver, part of the next generation of autonomous vehicle progression called AV 2.0. AV 2.0 and autonomous trucking’s Kitty Hawk momentThe best way to understand AV 2.0 and what that means for autonomous trucking is to first understand what AV 1.0 did.“If you look at the industry, there was a generation of technology, what we call AV 1.0, which is a more traditional approach that is some engineered systems where there is AI on them but AI plays a very secondary role,” said Urtasun.She adds that one way to imagine AV 1.0 is smaller AI models all over the place, but there’s a system managed by humans requiring large teams to develop, necessitating many miles to see the next set of edge cases that the system can’t handle. More miles, that is followed by building a bigger dataset, but it’s very capital-intensive and time-consuming, resembling a tedious iteration. The past two years brought about the next evolution, AV 2.0: “this idea of you can have a single AI system that can do all the tests necessary for driving,” adds Urtasun. A parallel that she notes is to imagine having a large language model (LLM) that can engineer a system, versus having to manually program it in the past.With great power comes great computing responsibility. One reason Nvidia has recently been in trucking news is that its computer hardware is powering the AV 2.0 renaissance

CEO says deal gives Waabi next puzzle piece it needs for autonomous trucking at scale