The very first driverless trucks, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) may soon be seen plying the roads.
Toronto-based autonomous trucking startup Waabi recently announced that it has raised $200 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round led by existing investors Uber and Khosla Ventures.
Waabi’s latest funding round also includes Nvidia, a new investor in the company, as well as Porsche and the venture capital arm of Volvo, CNBC reported.
Waabi is expecting to launch the fully driverless trucks in 2025, and ultimately see its generative AI deployed in humanoid and warehouse robots.
The firm said many companies are working on self-driving vehicles, but it too many developers rely on people to think about everything that could go wrong on the road, using large fleets to test out scenarios.
Using generative AI, Waabi said it has built a single AI system that is capable of reasoning, just as humans do, and that can come up with problems human minds couldn’t conceptualize, CNBC further reported.
Its closed-loop simulator, called Waabi World, automatically generates all the situations a self-driving vehicle might encounter in the real world, testing out issues without wasting resources and money building models that need to be driven for millions of miles on roads.
In March, Waabi and Nvidia announced a partnership to use the chipmaker’s vehicle computing platform DRIVE Thor for generative AI-powered self-driving applications. Nvidia’s prominence as a venture investor has grown as more startups rely on AI chips, and it has made other recent investments in self-driving companies.
The new investor round brings Waabi’s total funding to $280 million since being founded in 2021. Ultimately, Waabi expects applications for its AI beyond trucking, including humanoid and warehouse robots.
Source. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/18/uber-khosla-nvidia-invest-in-autonomous-trucking-startup-waabi.html
