WAABI

Urtasun is a machine learning professor at the University of Toronto. In 2017 Uber hired her to run the research arm of its self-driving group, Uber ATG.

She watched the industry pour money into fleets of sensor-covered test cars. They drove millions of real miles just to collect data.

She thought it was slow and wildly expensive. So in 2021 she left and started Waabi in Toronto.

The idea was heretical. Teach a truck to drive mostly inside a hyper-realistic simulator, not on public roads.

Khosla Ventures backed the $83.5 million Series A that same year.

Waabi builds the AI brain that drives a truck. It does not build the truck itself.

Freight companies and truck makers are the customers. The pitch is money.

A human driver is expensive. A human can only legally drive so many hours a day.

A Waabi-powered truck can run almost around the clock. Waabi plans to sell its self-driving system as a service, charging per mile or per truck.

In 2026 it also started moving into robotaxis through a deal with Uber.

Waabi Driver is the core product. It is the full self-driving system that controls a truck.

Waabi World is the simulator where that system learns to drive. The company argues the simulator is the real secret sauce.

In 2026 Waabi said it would put its Driver into robotaxis on Uber's network, aiming for at least 25,000 vehicles. Same brain, different vehicle.

The whole company is a bet on simulation. Waabi built a virtual world called Waabi World where its AI drives billions of miles without touching a real road.

Here is the thing. Real-world testing is the biggest cost in self-driving.

If you do most of it in software, you get cheaper and faster than rivals like Aurora Innovation. That single choice is why investors keep writing bigger checks.

It is also the exact thing that has to work for any of this to matter.

Nobody has made real money hauling freight with fully driverless trucks yet. Waabi keeps promising commercial driverless runs in Texas.

A robot with no human in the cab has to be nearly perfect. One bad crash can freeze an entire industry overnight.

Waabi also burns cash at a rate only mega-rounds can feed. It has raised roughly $1.28 billion and still has not run a paying driverless truck at scale.

The clock and the bank balance are both ticking.

Khosla Ventures has backed Waabi from the first check and led the $83.5 million Series A in 2021. Uber came in too, which makes sense because Urtasun used to run its self-driving research.

The 2024 Series B brought in $200 million co-led by Uber and Khosla Ventures. Nvidia, Volvo Group and Porsche joined that one.

The January 2026 Series C was the monster. $750 million co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners.

Uber committed up to another $250 million tied to milestones, pushing the round toward $1 billion. BlackRock and Nvidia's venture arm joined too.