Waabi Secures $1 Billion Funding for Autonomous Vehicles

Toronto has seen big rounds before, but January 28, 2026 landed different. Waabi did not tiptoe into the news cycle, it drove straight through it with a $750 million Series C that was oversubscribed, loud, and precise. Add a $250 million milestone based commitment from Uber and the total announced capital hits $1 billion. Not vibes. Not hype. A physical number that now sits as the largest single technology raise in Canadian history, with gravity that can be felt from Bay Street to Sand Hill Road.

Waabi exists because Raquel Urtasun has spent two decades refusing to separate theory from pavement. After serving as Chief Scientist at Uber Advanced Technologies Group, co-founding the Vector Institute with Geoffrey Hinton and Brendan Frey, and building a research career most founders only reference in pitch decks, Raquel Urtasun launched Waabi in 2021 from Toronto with a blunt conviction. Autonomy does not scale by driving millions of random miles. It scales by understanding the world well enough to simulate it, interrogate it, and prove it.

That belief lives inside Waabi World, a neural simulator clocking a 99.7 percent simulation to reality fidelity score in 2025, and Waabi Driver, a single end to end generative AI brain that powers both autonomous trucks and robotaxis. One system. Interpretable, auditable, and designed to generalize without rebuilding the model city by city. The word Waabi sounds soft until you realize it means the AI is doing the thinking before the rubber ever hits the road.

The capital followed the clarity. Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners co-led the Series C, with Uber Technologies, NVentures from NVIDIA, Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, BlackRock, HarbourVest, Radical Ventures, Linse Capital, Incharge Capital, BDC Capital, Export Development Canada, TELUS Global Ventures, and BMO Global Asset Management leaning in. This is not a tourist table. It is a boardroom of operators betting that simulation first autonomy beats brute force every time.

Execution now sits with a team built for pressure. Raquel Urtasun sets the technical spine. Lior Ron, former CEO of Uber Freight and co-founder of Otto, steps in as Chief Operating Officer to turn models into miles. Kunal Bhalla takes the finance seat as the numbers start carrying real operational weight. Around them are partners like Volvo, integrating Waabi Driver into the VNL Autonomous platform, NVIDIA powering the stack with DRIVE Thor, and Uber opening the door to autonomous freight in Texas and an exclusive robotaxi pathway targeting more than 25,000 vehicles.

Waabi has raised $1.28 billion to date, employs roughly 250 people, and is aiming squarely at fully driverless trucking in Texas in 2026 while building toward robotaxi deployment on Uber’s global platform. The name says simulation. The roadmap says deployment. The money says patience is over. If Physical AI is going to earn trust at highway speed, this is what it looks like when the math, the machine, and the moment finally line up.