Waabi’s Post

It’s incredible to reflect on how far we’ve come in three years and how close we are to achieving a fully driverless future. We’ve been documenting our journey, capturing some of the most exciting moments and breakthroughs along the way. Today, as we celebrate our latest milestone, we’re excited to share a glimpse of the behind the scenes with our dedicated team, innovative technology, and the passion that drives us forward in our documentary: Road to Texas. Watch it here!

We had a blast at CVPR in Seattle last month! In case you missed it, you can watch our full day tutorial on “All You Need to Know about Self-Driving”, now available on YouTube. This tutorial was updated this year to include modern advances in AI for self-driving including world models for driving, driving with LLMs, fast sensor simulation with Gaussian Splatting, language-guided actor behaviors, and more. We also discussed open- vs. closed-loop training and evaluation and recent advances in diffusion models. Let us know what you think! ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/eU9k-4N9

Rebecca Bellan from TechCrunch sat down with our founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun to learn more about our $200M Series B funding and how we’re using it to make self-driving trucks safer, smarter, and more scalable with our revolutionary generative AI technology, and so much more. “‘This technology is extremely, extremely powerful,’ said Urtasun… ‘It has this amazing ability to generalize, it’s very flexible, and it’s very fast to develop. And it’s something that we can expand to do much more than trucking in the future … This could be robotaxis. This could be humanoids or warehouse robotics. This technology can solve any of those use cases.’” Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/euJF3-dS

🚀 Advances in AI over recent years have been nothing short of remarkable. We’ve witnessed AI ace the Bar exam, produce highly sophisticated and life-like images, audio and videos, as well as transform productivity across many industries. But we’ve only scratched the surface. The next leap will see generative AI move from the virtual world into the physical world, unlocking unprecedented efficiencies, enhancing safety, and creating opportunities we can only begin to imagine. Our CEO Raquel Urtasun shared her reflections on what’s necessary to deliver this future and the pioneering role that Waabi will play. Check it out here! https://lnkd.in/em8BMGwQ

Yet another leap forward for Waabi! Today we are announcing that we have raised $200M (USD) in an oversubscribed Series B round, led by Uber and Khosla Ventures, to launch fully driverless, generative AI-powered autonomous trucks in 2025.  🚚 🎉 Only three years on from our launch, we are already on the verge of reaching Level 4 autonomy. This industry-leading pace and capital efficiency is made possible through our revolutionary approach to unleashing generative AI in the physical world. The incredible list of investors who have joined us on this round represent pioneers and trailblazers across deep tech, AI, automotive, as well as shipping and logistics ecosystems including NVIDIA, Volvo Group, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, Scania Group, Ingka Investments, HarbourVest Partners, G2 Venture Partners, BDC Capital (Canada), Export Development Canada | Exportation et développement Canada, Radical Ventures, Incharge Capital Partners, and others. A huge thank you to all our investors, partners, customers, and our incredible team for helping us achieve this milestone! Can’t wait for what’s ahead! Read more here: https://lnkd.in/ea2pEXtr

Will you be at Collision Conf this year? Be sure to catch the keynote from our founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun on “The road to autonomous driving”, on the Centre Stage tomorrow, June 18 at 2:00pm ET. Raquel will discuss the technical revolution led by generative AI over the last 18 months and answer the one question that remains on everyone’s minds: what’s next? You also don’t want to miss Raquel’s fireside chat with Akash Pasricha from The Information on “Bringing generative AI to the physical world” – PLUS get a glimpse of the Waabi Driver in person on Thursday, June 20, at 3:50pm ET on the Machine Stage! Learn all about the next frontier for artificial intelligence in this discussion on how generative AI is unlocking the future of self-driving, warehouse robots, and much more. See you there! For more details, check out the Collision conference schedule: https://lnkd.in/esg5Swps

Headed to Computer Vision Foundation's CVPR next week? We have an exciting program this year! We’re presenting UnO, our breakthrough paper on using unsupervised occupancy fields for perception and forecasting: 1) UnO: Unsupervised Occupancy Fields for Perception and Forecasting - Authored by Ben Agro, Quinlan Sykora, Sergio Casas, Thomas Gilles, and Raquel Urtasun. We’ll deliver an oral presentation on autonomous navigation and egocentric vision on Thursday, June 20, from 1 - 2:30pm PT, with a poster session to follow from 5 - 6:30pm PT. We’re also hosting a full day tutorial titled "All You Need to Know About Self-Driving", updated for 2024 to cover some of the newest approaches in the industry, on Tuesday, June 18, starting at 9am PT in room Summit 445. We’ll see you in Seattle! Check out a full rundown of our participation here: https://lnkd.in/ewKSvYTS

We are excited to be part of #ICRA2024 (May 13th-17th) showcasing SceneControl: Diffusion for Controllable Traffic Scene Generation (May 16, 4:30pm-6:00pm) and QuAD: Query-based Interpretable Neural Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving (May 16, 10:30am-12:00pm). Check out the papers here: https://lnkd.in/gR4gAWqY, https://waabi.ai/quad/