Waabi

Waabi is an autonomous-driving company founded in 2021 and headquartered in Toronto by Raquel Urtasun, a leading self-driving AI researcher who previously led Uber's autonomy group. It is the standout AI-native bet in the space: rather than hand-engineering a stack of separate modules, Waabi trains an end-to-end learned system and validates it largely in a high-fidelity generative simulator it calls Waabi World.

That simulation-first approach is the company's distinctive thesis — the claim that a generalizable driver can be taught and tested far more efficiently in simulation than by driving millions of physical miles. In January 2026 Waabi raised roughly one billion dollars (a Series C co-led by Khosla and G2, plus milestone funding from Uber), with investors including NVIDIA, Volvo Group, and Porsche, and began expanding from autonomous trucking toward robotaxis on Uber's network alongside Volvo autonomous semis.

The honest framing: Waabi has the strongest pure-AI narrative in autonomous driving, but it is pre-commercial-scale — the generative-simulation approach is genuinely differentiated and genuinely unproven at driverless commercial scale. It is a bet on a method as much as a product.