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Self-driving truck startup Waabi is partnering with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to jointly develop and deploy autonomous trucks, an important milestone as it gets closer to a commercial launch.
The tie up also marks Volvo’s second partnership to co-develop self-driving big rigs with a startup partner. In May 2024, Volvo teamed up with Aurora Innovation to reveal the Volvo VNL Autonomous truck.
Waabi will be using the same truck, but it will have Waabi’s tech on it, including its sensor suite, compute, and the Waabi Driver software.
“We now have everything we need to scale our product,” Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi, told TechCrunch. “We have the next-generation AV 2.0 technology, we have an approach that is much more capital efficient, and a much faster path to market.”
Waabi plans to launch commercial pilots with the Volvo-built trucks in Texas over the next couple of months, with a product-ready driverless demonstration on public roads planned for the end of 2025.
A fully driverless commercial launch – directly between customer depots from day one, rather than via terminals – will follow soon afterwards, according to Urtasun.
Urtasun, who previously served as chief scientist at Uber ATG before launching Waabi in 2021, claims to have built AI models that can reason as a human would, which in turn speeds up commercial deployment and makes for a more efficient system overall. She has reasoned that a better quality AI will require much less data and compute to understand and react to the world around it.
Waabi has relied on its simulation technology to not just test and train its self-driving technology, but also to help design trucks for OEM integration. The startup unveiled its first purpose-built truck — with sensors, compute, and software built in at the assembly line — in 2022.
By contrast, competitor Kodiak Robotics has developed a self-driving system that includes all of the redundant hardware and software system, but is not tied to one manufacturer. Urtasun is more interested in integrating the Waabi Driver into autonomous trucks at the factory level with no interruption to an OEM’s assembly line.
Urtasun believes this is the best approach to building a safe, reliable product.
Waabi’s partnership with Volvo builds on the automaker’s strategic investment into the startup two years ago via its venture arm, Volvo Group Venture Capital. Volvo later participated in Waabi’s $200 million Series B.
Volvo will build trucks for Waabi at its production-ready facility in Virginia. Urtasun said the first “handful” would come off the assembly line in 2025, and that she expects a timeline of around two to three years to reach volume scale.
Over that time, Urtasun also noted that capital efficiency will be “an absolute must” to be successful in this industry. She says Waabi’s “AI-first approach” means the startup’s capital needs to get to a driverless launch will be “a tiny fraction of what you see in the industry today.”
To date, Waabi has raised $282 million, per PitchBook data, and Urtasun says the startup has enough to launch a driverless operation on public roads and beyond. Its main competitors, Aurora and Kodiak, have raised $3.46 billion and $243 million, respectively.
Aurora plans to launch a driverless commercial trucking operation by April, and Kodiak last month delivered its first autonomous trucks to a commercial partner that will use them for off-road operations.
“2025 is the year of trucking; it’s a make it or break it situation,” Urtasun said. “I think there will be potentially more consolidation.”
There aren’t many players left in the game since Embark and TuSimple shut down and Waymo paused its autonomous truck ambitions.
When asked if Waabi was considering a merger or acquisition, Urtasun replied: “Absolutely not. Trucking is only the beginning. We’re going to do so much more than trucking – robotaxis, warehouse robotics. I have tremendously big plans for the company, and we are going to remain a fully independent company.”
