Waabi has entered a strategic partnership with Volvo Autonomous Solutions for the joint development and deployment of autonomous trucks. The collaboration aims to transform the $1 trillion North American freight industry by vertically integrating the Waabi Driver into the Volvo VNL Autonomous truck with redundant systems for enabling safe autonomous operations, with the partners preparing for testing in 2025.

“Waabi is at the forefront of developing self-driving technologies leveraging the full power of AI,” said Shahrukh Kazmi, Chief Product Officer at Volvo Autonomous Solutions. “We are excited to integrate Waabi’s cutting-edge technology into our autonomous truck platform and work together to jointly develop a safe, efficient, and scalable autonomous transport solution.”

The VNL Autonomous, produced at Volvo Group’s flagship New River Valley assembly plant, is based on its autonomous technology platform that supports diverse operational needs, use cases, and Volvo Group truck brands.

“At Waabi, we believe that vertically integrating next-generation AI technology directly into an OEM’s vehicle production is the path forward to bring safe, robust autonomous vehicles to the road at scale,” said Raquel Urtasun, Founder and CEO of Waabi. “Volvo’s leadership in safety, commitment to excellence in engineering, and investment in forward-looking innovation makes them an ideal partner to realize the future of self-driving trucks everywhere.”

Waabi’s next-generation AV2.0 approach—based on an end-to-end interpretable and verifiable AI model powered by what its creator calls the industry’s most realistic neural simulator—enables autonomous trucks that can safely generalize to different scenarios on the road. Integrated with Volvo’s purpose-built autonomous truck, the innovation is expected to enable a safe autonomous solution that supports broader commercial deployment.

 

Fast developments

The new partnership is a continuation of Volvo’s collaboration with Waabi over the past two years, with Volvo Group Venture Capital becoming a strategic investor in the company in January 2023 and later investing in the company’s $200 million Series B round in June 2024.

The latter funding round was led by Uber and Khosla Ventures and included participation from strategic investors Nvidia, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, Scania Invest, and Ingka Investments. It brought total investment in Waabi to more than $280 million, the new capital being used to grow Waabi’s commercial operations and expand the company’s team in both Canada and the U.S.

“Change never comes from incumbents but from the innovation of entrepreneurs that challenge the status quo,” said Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures, in June 2024. “Raquel and her team at Waabi have done exactly that with their products and business execution. We backed Waabi very early on with the bet that generative AI would transform transportation and are thrilled to continue on this journey with them as they move towards commercialization.”

“Raquel is a visionary in the field and, under her leadership, Waabi’s AI-first approach provides a solution that is extremely exciting in both its scalability and capital efficiency,” added Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber.

The company in quick succession announced a partnership with Uber Freight in September 2023, running autonomous shipments for Fortune 500 companies and top-tier shippers in Texas; a collaboration with Nvidia to integrate Drive Thor into the Waabi Driver in March 2024; and the opening of its Texas AV trucking terminal in April 2024.

“Waabi is developing autonomous trucking by applying cutting-edge generative AI to the physical world,” said Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of Nvidia. “I’m excited to support Raquel’s vision through our investment in Waabi, which is powered by Nvidia technology. I have championed Raquel’s pioneering work in AI for more than a decade. Her tenacity to solve the impossible is an inspiration.”

Announced during Nvidia GTC, the Drive Thor for Waabi’s generative AI-powered self-driving application delivers an industry-leading 1000 teraflops of compute and an inference transformer engine purpose-built for AI.

“The transportation industry, including the trucking sector, will be redefined by accelerated computing and generative AI,” said Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive at Nvidia, at GTC 2024. “The integration of Drive Thor, purpose-built to support the massive onboard AI workloads critical for safe self-driving, will help advance Waabi’s generative AI-powered autonomous trucking system.”

Nvidia’s next-generation compute platform integrates a range of intelligent functions into a single AI compute platform using Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture designed for transformer, LLM, and generative AI workloads.

 

Urtasun on gen AI approach

Founded in 2021, Waabi has been developing Level 4 autonomy at an industry-leading pace and capital efficiency made possible through the company’s approach using generative AI in the physical world. It has pioneered a single end-to-end AI system that is capable of human-like reasoning, enabling it to generalize for any situation that might happen on the road including those it has never seen before. Because it can reason, the system requires significantly less training data and compute resources compared to other end-to-end approaches.

Further departing from traditional approaches, Waabi’s system is fully interpretable and its safety can be validated and verified. Paired with Waabi World, the “world’s most advanced simulator,” the end-to-end AI system reduces the need for extensive on-road testing and is said to enable a safer, more efficient solution that is highly performant and scalable from day one.

“I have spent most of my professional life dedicated to inventing new AI technologies that can deliver on the enormous potential of AI in the physical world in a provably safe and scalable way,” explained Urtasun, in June 2024. “Alongside the incredible team at Waabi, I have had the chance to turn these breakthroughs into a revolutionary product that has far surpassed my expectations. We have everything we need—breakthrough technology, an incredible team, and pioneering partners and investors—to launch fully driverless autonomous trucks in 2025.”

Going with the generative-AI-centric approach is a key enabler in the company’s quick development.

“Thanks to generative AI technology and thanks to the simulator we are building, we are empowering machines to have that ability to learn like humans by interacting with the world in a way that is safe,” said Urtasun. “If you want to go from a traditional robotics-centric approach to an AI-centric approach, you need very different DNA in the company. And that’s why building a new company was the way to go.”

She decided to start the company because it became clear to her that the industry had consolidated around an approach that she didn’t think “was going to get us there,” and it also became clear that AI, in particular generative AI, was going to really disrupt the self-driving field.

“So Waabi is doing things differently,” she said. “We’re going to just go away from this paradigm by instead, empowering a generative AI model to learn, from the unsupervised world. This means that there is no human intervention. You don’t need to look and tell the system, well, you should reason about vehicles, you should reason about pedestrians and all these things. Instead, you’re going to say, if you were driving in the world, this is how you will observe the world, and then learn from this about which actions are good to perform, which is a very, very different paradigm.”

A key enabler of this is Waabi World, the simulator and immersive clone of the real world.

“Waabi World is really like a driving school for the autonomy stack or the brain of our trucks,” she said. “And because the simulator is the same as reality, we can train the brain, without safety issues. And then the technology that we deploy in the real world, which is this brain is super performant from day one.”

She said it is “a very different approach from anything that we’ve seen in the industry where we would typically build a prototype you discover your issues, you try to fix them, and then you iterate. A year ago, we did not own trucks. We did not have hardware built. If you think that this has been fast, I think it’s only going to get faster and more impressive as we go on.”

This has been a tremendous advantage for Waabi.

“We can do things so much faster than the rest of the industry and really build technology that scales, which is the important thing,” she said. “It’s not about who will be the first to market in a small lane, it’s who can generate technology that can really expand to all of the different geographies that we need in order to empower the movement of freight in North America and beyond.”