Autonomous startup Waabi raises $750 million to expand into robotaxis

Autonomous trucking startup Waabi said Wednesday it has raised $750 million in funding by entering into a partnership to install driverless systems in light commercial vehicles. Uber robotaxi services.

Waabi’s series C round is led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, it was announced Wednesday. The deal is one of the largest single rounds ever by a Canadian tech startup.

Waabi, ranked 35th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptive 50 list, is headquartered in Toronto and has some operations in Texas.

The new funding will allow the company to adapt its “physical AI” to develop driverless systems that can be made to operate relatively quickly with high safety in new locations, conditions and form factors, founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun told CNBC.

In addition to Waabi’s Series C, Uber has committed to investing $250 million in the startup based on future milestones. With additional funding from Uber, Waabi will deploy at least 25,000 autonomous vehicles privately through its ridehailing platform. Urtasun was previously chief scientist working on AV technology in Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group.

“It’s been 16 years of autonomous driving for me,” he said. “But this has finally arrived, the scale has arrived. And the next few years are going to be amazing.”

Waabi has not yet announced the vehicle models that will include its systems.

The startup has previously developed driverless trucks with trailers produced in partnership with automakers. volvo and Peterbilt before that. Urtasun, who is also a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, said Waabi has now moved to a “driver-as-a-service” business model, while it operates a fleet of its own driverless trucks to transport customers’ cargo.

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and co-founder of computer hardware firm Sun Microsystems, told CNBC that his fund backs Waabi because it takes a “capital efficient” approach to “physical AI” and has a late mover advantage.

Khosla said Waabi can do a fraction of what pioneers in the autonomous vehicle industry accomplished with thousands of engineers and billions of dollars spent on research, development and safety testing.

Urtasun agreed, pointing to profound advances in artificial intelligence, sensor technology and more since the early days of the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004, an influential competition that inspired the development of driverless ground vehicles.

Urtasun said Waabi does not compromise on the technology the startup uses as it focuses on security, time to market and cost.

“We use multiple sensors, lidar, cameras and radar,” he said. “This is important because they each have very different properties and failure modes, and if you use them all they are much more robust.”

Many self-driving trucking startups have come and gone, but Waabi’s trucking technology is still around the likes of Aurora, Kodiak AI, Bot Auto and Tesla’s. Elon Musk’s automobile manufacturer Tesla It is preparing to produce more Semi-electric trucks in 2026 and promises to develop autonomous driving systems for them.

Competition is even fiercer in the newly formed robotaxi market.

Competitors currently operating or developing driverless, light-duty passenger vehicles include other Uber partners such as: AlphabetAutomakers developing their own driverless systems, including Waymo, Nuro, and WeRide, as well as Tesla and rivya Xiamoi and BYD in the US and China.

Other investors in Waabi’s series C round include Nvidia venture capital arm NVentures, Volvo Group Venture Capital and Porsche Automobil Holding SE.

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