Autonomous car startup Waabi has raised $1 billion and is partnering with Uber to deploy self-driving cars on the ride-hailing platform — the company’s first expansion beyond autonomous trucks.

The funding consists of an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners and nearly $250 million in milestone-based capital from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on its platform. The companies did not provide a timeline for such a large-scale deployment.

The partnership represents a bet that the startup’s AI technology can succeed where others have struggled — scaling multiple self-driving verticals with a single technology stack. While competitors like Waymo previously tried robotaxis and trucking before shutting down its cargo program, Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun says his company’s capital-efficient approach and common AI architecture give it a unique advantage in dealing with both markets simultaneously.

“Our unique core technology can really create, for the first time, a solution that can do multiple verticals, and they can do it at scale,” Urtasun told TechCrunch. “It’s not about two programs, two stacks.”

The tie-up brings Urtasun’s work full circle: he previously served as chief scientist at Uber’s autonomous vehicle division, Uber ATG, which Uber sold to self-driving trucking firm Aurora Innovation in 2020. It also founded Waabi’s current partnership with Uber Freight.

Waabi is one of several AV companies Uber has brought on board to deploy self-driving cars on its platform around the world. Some companies include WaymoOnly, AvrideWave, WeRide, Momentand so on.

The tie-up and funding round comes as Uber launched a new division called Uber AV Labs which will use its vehicles to collect data for AV partners.

Waabi is not as data reliant as others, if Urtasun is to be believed. The Waabi Driver is trained, tested, and validated using a closed-loop simulator called Word of Water that automatically builds the world’s digital twins from data; performs real-time sensor simulation; created scenarios to stress-test the Waabi Driver; and teaches the Driver to learn from its mistakes without human intervention. The result? Waabi’s Driver can reason about its environment like a human and choose the best maneuver, Urtasun said. This allows the system to generalize and learn from fewer examples than traditional autonomous driving systems.

Waabi has spent the last four and a half years bringing the technology to life for highway and on-road capabilities with trucks, but Urtasun says the Waabi Brain is already generalizing to a variety of vehicle form factors — he even announced the company’s next vertical is robotics. From the beginning, the company collected and simulated data on passenger cars along with its truck work, a signal that robotaxis is always part of the long-term plan.

The method allows Waabi to build faster and cheaper than competitors, Urtasun claims.

“We don’t need a gazillion people to develop the technology and the big ships that AV 1.0 needs,” Urtasun said. “We don’t need huge data centers, energy consumption, or a gazillion of the latest chips.”

The deal brings Waabi’s total funding to nearly $1.28 billion after it closed a $200 million Series B by June 2024. Competitors Aurora Innovation and Kodiak Robotics have raised $3.46 billion and $448 million to date, respectively, through a combination of venture capital and public market proceeds.

In just five years, Waabi has launched several commercial pilots (with a human driver in the front seat) in Texas. The company plans to launch a fully driverless truck on public highways at the end of last year, but the rollout has been delayed until some time in the next quarters, according to Urtasun.

Waabi is working with Volvo to build autonomous trucks with a purpose, which the company revealed last October at TechCrunch Disrupt. Urtasun says Waabi’s Driver is ready to go, but the trucks still need to be fully validated before launch.

However, Urtasun is not worried. He said there is a lot of demand for Waabi’s trucks because of the company’s direct-to-consumer model that allows shippers to buy trucks directly, and he is confident that in partnership with Uber, Waabi will be able to “enter the market quickly and scale a product that is very reliable.”

“We’re still in the early innings of deploying robotaxis,” he said. “There’s a lot more scale to come.”

Urtasun would not share more details about Uber’s launch, such as what the car’s Waabi partner will be. He said Waabi will take the same route with the autonomous trucking rollout by building its sensors and technology into the car from the factory floor.

“We believe in vertical integration with a fully redundant platform from the OEM,” he said. “That’s how you build secure and truly scalable technology.”

Other investors in Waabi’s Series C include Uber, NVentures (NVia’s VC arm), Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, BlackRock, BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund, and others.