Waabi Raises $1 Billion for Physical AI: The Same Brain for Trucks and Robotaxis | Taha Abbasi

Taha Abbasi breaks down the largest fundraise in Canadian history—a $1 billion bet on autonomous vehicles with a unified AI approach that could reshape both trucking and ride-hailing.

Waabi just closed an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round, with an additional investment from Uber that brings the total to approximately $1 billion. But the money isn’t the story—the architecture is. Waabi’s “Physical AI Platform” uses the same AI model as a “shared brain” for both autonomous trucks and robotaxis.

One Brain, Two Form Factors

Most autonomous vehicle companies specialize: Waymo focuses on robotaxis, Aurora on trucking. Taha Abbasi notes that Waabi’s approach is different. Their system combines what founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun calls “a verifiable end-to-end AI model capable of reasoning alongside the world’s most advanced neural simulator.”

The key insight: autonomous driving is fundamentally about understanding physics, predicting behavior, and making decisions. Whether you’re driving a semi-truck on a highway or a sedan through city streets, the underlying AI challenges overlap significantly.

This shared-brain approach offers several advantages:

• Faster development: Improvements to the AI system benefit both vehicle types
• Larger training dataset: Highway driving data from trucks improves city driving models and vice versa
• Economic efficiency: R&D investment multiplies across applications

The Uber Partnership

Uber’s participation is strategic, not just financial. The companies plan to deploy 25,000 or more autonomous vehicles together—a massive fleet that would represent a significant portion of all AVs on American roads.

“We are thrilled to partner with the best-in-class ridesharing platform to bring about a safer, more efficient, and sustainable future,” said Urtasun.

Taha Abbasi observes that this partnership makes sense from Uber’s perspective. After selling its Advanced Technologies Group to Aurora in 2020, Uber has pursued a “platform of platforms” strategy—investing in multiple AV companies rather than developing in-house. Recent investments include Nuro, Lucid, Wayve, and now a deepening relationship with Waabi.

The Investor List Tells a Story

Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners co-led the round, but look at the strategic investors:

• NVentures (NVIDIA’s VC arm): Compute infrastructure for AI
• Volvo Group Venture Capital: Trucking expertise and manufacturing scale
• Porsche Automobil Holding SE: Automotive engineering and brand

This isn’t just financial capital—it’s industrial capability. Vinod Khosla put it directly: “Waabi has developed a truly groundbreaking physical AI platform that represents a fundamental leap forward in how next-generation driverless technology is being developed.”

The Simulation Advantage

A key differentiator in Waabi’s approach is their simulation-first development methodology. Rather than logging millions of physical miles (expensive, slow, and limited in edge case exposure), Waabi uses advanced neural simulation to train their AI on scenarios that might take years to encounter in the real world.

This approach, Taha Abbasi notes, could dramatically reduce the capital and time required to achieve full autonomy. Traditional AV companies have spent billions on test fleets; simulation-first development could compress that timeline significantly.

Context: The AV Funding Landscape

Waabi’s $1B round joins a competitive landscape:

• Waymo: $5.6B Series C (2024)
• Cruise: $2.75B (2021)
• Aurora: $820M stock sale (2024)

But Waabi’s unified approach to trucks and taxis is unique. If it works, they’ll have built one platform that addresses two massive markets simultaneously.

The Bottom Line

Physical AI—artificial intelligence that operates in the real world, not just digital environments—is the next frontier. Waabi’s bet is that the key to both autonomous trucking and robotaxis is the same: a simulation-trained, physics-aware AI that can generalize across vehicle types and driving conditions. With $1 billion and Uber’s partnership, they’ll get to test that thesis at scale.

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