Autonomous vehicle startup Waabi has raised $1 billion and partnered with Uber to deploy self-driving cars on the ride-hailing platform — the company’s first expansion beyond autonomous trucking.
The funding consists of an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners and approximately $250 million in stage capital from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 or more robotaxis powered by Waabi Driver exclusively on its platform. The companies did not provide a timeline for such a large-scale rollout.
The partnership represents a bet that the startup’s AI technology can succeed where others have struggled — spanning multiple autonomous driving verticals with a single technology stack. While competitors like Waymo previously dabbled in both robotaxis and trucking before ending its freight program, Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun says her company’s capital-efficient approach and generalizable AI architecture give it a unique advantage in tackling both markets simultaneously.
“Our incredible core technology really enables, for the first time, a single solution that can do multiple verticals, and they can do it at scale,” Urtasun told TechCrunch. “It’s not two programs, two stacks.”
The tie-up brings Urtasun’s work full circle: She was previously chief scientist at Uber’s autonomous vehicle division, Uber ATG, which Uber sold to autonomous trucking company Aurora Innovation in 2020. She also draws on Waabi’s existing partnership with Uber Freight.
Waabi is one of several AV companies that Uber has recruited to deploy autonomous vehicles on its platform globally. Other companies include WaymoOnly, AvrideWayve, UsRide, Momentaand more.
The tie-up and funding round comes as Uber launches new division called Uber AV Labs which will use its vehicles to collect data for AV partners.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
Waabi is not as data dependent as some, according to Urtasun. The Waabi driver is trained, tested and validated using a closed loop simulator called water word which automatically creates digital twins of the world from data; performs real-time sensor simulation; creates scenarios to test the Waabi pilot; and teaches the Driver to learn from his mistakes without human intervention. The result? Waabi’s driver can reason about its environment like a human would and choose the best maneuver, Urtasun explains. This allows the system to generalize and learn from fewer examples than traditional autonomous driving systems.
Waabi has spent the last four and a half years bringing this technology to life for highway and street capabilities with trucks, but Urtasun says the Waabi brain is already generalizing to different vehicle form factors – she even hinted that the company’s next vertical would be robotics. From the start, the company collected and simulated data on passenger cars alongside its trucking work, a sign that robo-taxis were still part of the long-term plan.
This approach has allowed Waabi to build faster and more cheaply than its competitors, Urtasun says.
“We don’t need billions of humans to develop the technology and large fleets that AV 1.0 requires,” Urtasun said. “We don’t need massive data centers, power consumption, or billions of the latest chips.”
Deal brings Waabi’s total funding to approximately $1.28 billion closed a $200 million Series B in June 2024. Competitors Aurora Innovation and Kodiak Robotics have raised $3.46 billion and $448 million, respectively, to date, through a combination of venture capital and public market proceeds.
In just five years, Waabi has launched several commercial pilots (with a human driver on the front) in Texas. The company had planned to launch a fully driverless truck on public roads by the end of last year, but the rollout was delayed until the next few quarters, according to Urtasun.
Waabi is working with Volvo to build purpose-built autonomous trucks, which the company revealed last October at TechCrunch Disrupt. Urtasun says the Waabi pilot is ready to go, but the trucks still need to be fully validated before launch.
But Urtasun is not worried. She says there is strong demand for Waabi trucks due to the company’s direct-to-consumer model that allows shippers to purchase the equipped trucks directly, and she is confident that with the Uber partnership, Waabi will be able to “enter the market quickly and scale with a product that will be very reliable.”
“We are still in the early stages of deploying robotaxis,” she said. “There’s a lot more scale to come.”
Urtasun would not share further details about the Uber rollout, such as the one with which automaker Waabi would partner. She said Waabi would take a similar route for its autonomous truck deployment by integrating its sensors and technology into the vehicle from the factory.
“We believe in vertical integration with a fully redundant OEM platform,” she said. “This is how you truly build technology that is secure and truly scalable.”
Other investors in Waabi’s Series C include Uber, NVentures (Nvidia’s VC arm), Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, BlackRock, BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund, and others.
