Raquel Urtasun, Founder and CEO of Waabi
Waabi
AI-powered lorries could be hauling commercial freight in Texas as soon as 2025. That’s the timeline set by Wabi, a self-driving startup led by AI scientist Raquel Urtasun, with $200 million in new capital, the company’s largest funding round to date, with backing from Uber, Khosla Ventures, Nvidia and others.
Ulterson’s three-year-old Toronto-based company believes it can succeed in the self-driving truck space, where many of its competitors, including TuSimple, Embark, Ike and Starsky, have failed, thanks to a generative artificial intelligence platform it developed. Ulterson argues that her software can assess and respond to road conditions in a way that’s closer to a human. Not only will the driving system, which has been refined through intensive computer simulation training and road testing that began last year, be able to handle real-world situations, it should also be less complicated and costly than its competitors, she said.
“Many of the companies that are not here today had overly complex and very brittle technology. You need to explicitly build the necessary knowledge into your systems,” she said. Forbes“I built Waabi on an entirely different technology that will enable us to achieve our goal of launching a driverless service and, more importantly, rolling out our driverless product in many geographies much faster, much safer and in a much more capital-efficient manner.”
The pace of development of self-driving cars has been slower and with mixed results than many proponents predicted a decade ago. In addition to failed robot truck startups, billions of dollars have been poured into companies that have gone bankrupt, like Ford-Volkswagen’s joint venture Argo AI, been sold off, like Uber’s ATG unit, where Urtasun was once chief scientist, or suffered major setbacks, like General Motors’ Cruise robotaxi unit. Even Waymo, the most successful self-driving technology company to date, has put its robot truck business on hold to focus on its robotaxi business, which is beginning to generate significant revenue. One of Wabi’s few potentially successful competitors might be Gattic, a Silicon Valley startup that makes less complicated, fixed-route, “middle-mile” deliveries for customers such as Walmart and Kroger.
Wabi’s robotic trucks are expected to start hauling commercial freight without human drivers in Texas in 2025.
Waabi
Texas, where privately held Wabi is testing its system on the roads, will be the company’s first commercial market for driverless trucks. Urtasun declined to provide details on how many trucks will be in the first commercial fleet. Truck makers Volvo and Scania also participated in the latest funding round, along with Porsche and Ikea-affiliated Ingka Investments.
“Wabi is developing self-driving trucks by applying cutting-edge generative AI to the real world,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, a key technology partner of Wabi, said in a statement. “I have supported Raquel’s pioneering work in AI for more than a decade, and her tenacity to solve the impossible is inspiring.”
In its latest funding round, Wabi raised more than $280 million, far less than rivals such as Aurora, which is also preparing to start using driverless trucks for commercial deliveries, but Urtasun believes his approach is much less expensive to develop and maintain.
The difference, she said, is that Wabi’s AI drivers are “trained to understand the consequences of their actions: the inference that, ‘If I do this, this is what’s going to happen, so this is not good.'” In contrast, the more data-driven approach to AI driving employed by competitors is more of a case of “tell me what to do,” Urtasun said, without naming any of the companies. That means machine learning models are trained on countless rule-based examples of how to deal with specific situations, like objects on the road or weather.
“Wabi’s AI-first approach offers a highly compelling solution that is both scalable and capital efficient,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement.
From Forbes
