The problem
North American freight cannot hire enough long-haul drivers, highway crashes keep costing lives and liability, and the first generation of self-driving truck programs tried to solve it by driving millions of expensive real-world miles — a slow, capital-hungry grind that killed several contenders.
How it works
Founded in Toronto in 2021 by AI researcher Raquel Urtasun, Waabi took the opposite path: an AI-first, simulation-centric stack where an end-to-end model maps raw sensor data straight to driving actions, and nearly all learning happens inside Waabi World, its closed-loop simulator. The simulator does triple duty — training and testing the self-driving software and designing the truck itself, including sensor placement on a digital twin — so a lean team iterates without a giant test fleet. The output, Waabi Driver, ships on OEM platforms with Volvo Group as a strategic investor and already hauls real freight on Texas roads.
Pain points
Driver scarcity and churn, the safety economics of highway freight, and autonomy development costs that historically ran into the billions before a single paid mile.
Business model
Commercializing Waabi Driver through carrier and OEM partners rather than owning fleets, reinforced by strategic cheques (Volvo, Porsche, Nvidia) and the Uber alliance covering both autonomous trucking and robotaxis.
Challenges
Safety validation that satisfies regulators state by state; executing the jump from pilots to 25,000 deployed vehicles; and holding a lead against Aurora, Kodiak, and OEM-built stacks while robotaxi economics are still unproven.
Funding
- Raised: $200M Series B (Jun 2024) led by Uber and Khosla Ventures ($280M+ total at the time); then a Series C plus a milestone-based $250M Uber commitment totalling $1B in new capital (Jan 2026) from Khosla Ventures, G2 Venture Partners, NVentures, Volvo, and Porsche — the largest single fundraise in Canadian tech history, taking total raised past $1.28B.
- Valuation: MISSING (described as Canada’s newest unicorn; no citable figure).
Latest — January 2026
Waabi secured $1B in new funding — a Series C round plus Uber’s $250M commitment — to push the Waabi Driver beyond trucking into robotaxis, with at least 25,000 Uber-network vehicles planned in what the company calls the largest self-driving deal yet.