The first time Waabi's autonomous truck drove in rain, it had never seen rain before. Zero training data. Zero interventions required. For Raquel Urtasun, that was the "aha moment" that proved her AI-first approach to self-driving could work.
Now her Toronto-based company is on track to deploy fully driverless trucks in Texas by the end of 2025—and close a financing round that would value Waabi at $3 billion.
Who Is Raquel Urtasun?
Raquel Urtasun is a Spanish-Canadian computer scientist, entrepreneur, and one of the world's leading experts in machine perception for autonomous vehicles. She co-founded the Vector Institute with Geoffrey Hinton and is the founder and CEO of Waabi.
Urtasun's career spans academia and industry at the highest levels. She's published over 200 papers, accumulated 100,000+ citations, filed 100+ patents, and holds an h-index of 117—placing her among the most influential computer vision researchers in the world.
What Is Raquel Urtasun's Research Background?
Urtasun's academic journey took her from Spain to Switzerland to the United States before landing in Toronto.
Education and Early Career
Her research focuses on machine perception for self-driving vehicles, spanning machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and remote sensing. She held the Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision.
Research Impact
Her work has earned numerous awards, including two Best Paper Awards at CVPR (the leading computer vision conference), the Longuet-Higgins Prize (test of time award), the Everingham Prize, and the NSERC EWR Steacie Award—Canada's top honor for early-career scientists.
How Did Raquel Urtasun Co-Found the Vector Institute?
In 2017, Urtasun co-founded the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence alongside Geoffrey Hinton and other Toronto AI leaders. The institute was created to drive AI research, commercialization, and talent development in Canada.
Vector has since become one of the world's leading AI research institutions, training thousands of AI practitioners and attracting global attention to Toronto's AI ecosystem. Urtasun remains a Vector Faculty Member while running Waabi.
"My goal with Waabi is to really put Canada at the forefront of self-driving. We have an amazing opportunity here and I think we have the talent here." — Raquel Urtasun, on founding Waabi in Toronto
What Was Raquel Urtasun's Role at Uber?
Before founding Waabi, Urtasun spent four years leading autonomous vehicle research at Uber.
Uber ATG Toronto (2017-2020)
Uber hired Urtasun to establish an R&D lab in Toronto focused on self-driving technology. She brought eight of her graduate students with her and split her time between Uber (four days) and the University of Toronto (one day per week).
The Toronto lab focused on research rather than deployment—developing the machine perception systems that would enable autonomous vehicles to understand their environment.
The Aurora Acquisition
In December 2020, Uber sold its Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) to Aurora Innovation for $4 billion. However, the Toronto R&D lab—and Urtasun herself—were not included in the deal.
Aurora CEO Chris Urmson explained that Aurora "weaves research into development and engineering work, rather than having a separate research and development team." Of 1,200 ATG employees, about 850 received offers from Aurora. The Toronto team did not.
This became Urtasun's opportunity to build something new.
What Is Waabi?
In June 2021, Urtasun founded Waabi—an autonomous trucking company taking an "AI-first" approach to self-driving. The name means "she has vision" in Indigenous Canadian languages and "simple" in Japanese.
The AI-First Approach
Unlike traditional autonomous vehicle companies that rely heavily on real-world testing and manual tuning, Waabi's approach centers on generative AI and simulation.
"This technology is extremely, extremely powerful. If you can build systems that can actually do that, then suddenly you need much less data. You need much less computation." — Raquel Urtasun, TechCrunch 2024
Urtasun's insight was that end-to-end learning and foundation models could solve autonomous driving more efficiently than the traditional software stack approach.
"It blew my mind in terms of how the problem of self-driving is much bigger than I thought. It was very clear to me that end-to-end systems and foundational models would be the thing." — Raquel Urtasun, Fast Company 2025
What Is Waabi World?
Waabi World is the company's proprietary closed-loop simulator that trains autonomous vehicles almost entirely in virtual environments.
How Waabi World Works
The simulator allows Waabi to test scenarios that would be too dangerous or impractical to encounter in real-world driving—teaching the AI to handle situations it has never seen before.
"It doesn't matter how much you test unless that simulation really reflects reality. If you're testing something that is not realistic, even if you solve all the cases, who cares, if it's not correlated with reality?" — Raquel Urtasun, Tech Brew 2025
CoPilot 4D
Waabi also developed CoPilot 4D, a foundational AI model that can envision the world in 3D to improve decision-making for autonomous trucks. This allows the system to understand and predict the 3D structure of its environment.
The Rain Moment
Urtasun's confidence in the approach was confirmed when Waabi's truck handled rain for the first time:
"It's amazing—to give an example, the first time that we drove in rain, the system had never seen rain before. And it drove with no interventions in rain, even though it never saw the phenomenon before. That for me was the 'aha' moment." — Raquel Urtasun, Fast Company 2025
How Much Has Waabi Raised?
Waabi has raised over $280 million and is in advanced talks for a round that could exceed $750 million.
Funding History
Pending $3 Billion Valuation
According to The Globe and Mail, Waabi is in advanced talks to close a financing round exceeding $750 million—one of the largest ever for an early-stage Canadian tech company. The deal would value Waabi at $3 billion before the new funds.
The round is co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, with Uber contributing $250 million. Strong demand led Waabi to increase the round size from an initial $500 million target.
"You build the strongest companies when you fundraise in moments that are actually difficult, and the AV industry in particular has seen a lot of setbacks." — Raquel Urtasun, TechCrunch 2024
Who Are Waabi's Key Partners?
Waabi has secured partnerships with major players in logistics and trucking.
The Uber Freight partnership is particularly significant—a 10-year collaboration that started in Dallas and Houston and is expected to expand throughout Texas and beyond.
What Awards Has Raquel Urtasun Received?
Urtasun has accumulated an extraordinary list of honors across academia and industry.
Major Awards
She was also named a CNBC Changemaker in 2024 and Waabi was named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list in 2025.
What's Next for Raquel Urtasun and Waabi?
Near-Term Milestones
- Fully driverless operations — Removing safety drivers in Texas by end of 2025
- Close Series C — Finalize ~$750M round at $3B valuation
- Texas expansion — Grow beyond Dallas/Houston corridor
- Volvo deployment — Begin commercial deployment on Volvo trucks
Long-Term Vision
Urtasun sees autonomous trucking as just the beginning:
"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." — Raquel Urtasun, TechCrunch 2024
The simulation-based approach Waabi has developed could potentially transfer to robotaxis, warehouse robotics, and even humanoid robots—making Waabi a platform company rather than just a trucking company.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Raquel Urtasun?
Raquel Urtasun is a Spanish-Canadian computer scientist and entrepreneur. She is a Full Professor at the University of Toronto, co-founder of the Vector Institute (with Geoffrey Hinton), and founder and CEO of Waabi, an autonomous trucking company valued at approximately $3 billion.
What did Raquel Urtasun do at Uber?
Urtasun served as Chief Scientist and Head of R&D at Uber ATG (Advanced Technologies Group) from 2017 to 2020. She led the Toronto research lab focused on autonomous vehicle technology. When Uber sold ATG to Aurora in 2020, her team was not included in the acquisition.
What is Waabi?
Waabi is a Toronto-based autonomous trucking company founded by Raquel Urtasun in 2021. The company uses an "AI-first" approach with generative AI and simulation to develop self-driving trucks. Waabi has raised over $280 million and is targeting fully driverless operations in Texas by the end of 2025.
How much is Waabi worth?
Waabi is in advanced talks for a financing round that would value the company at approximately $3 billion. The round, expected to exceed $750 million, would be co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, with $250 million from Uber.
What is Waabi World?
Waabi World is Waabi's proprietary AI-powered simulator that trains autonomous vehicles in virtual environments. Using generative AI, it can create millions of driving scenarios—including rare edge cases—without putting anyone at risk on real roads.
Did Raquel Urtasun co-found the Vector Institute?
Yes. In 2017, Urtasun co-founded the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence alongside Geoffrey Hinton and other Toronto AI leaders. She remains a Vector Faculty Member while running Waabi.
What awards has Raquel Urtasun won?
Major awards include the TIME 100 AI (2023), the Order of Ontario (Ontario's highest civilian honor), Royal Society of Canada Fellow (2024), the NSERC Steacie Award (best scientist in Canada), and two CVPR Best Paper Awards.
Related Reading
The Toronto AI Ecosystem
- Geoffrey Hinton: Godfather of AI — The Nobel laureate who co-founded Vector Institute with Urtasun
- Vector Institute Complete Guide — The AI research institute Urtasun co-founded
- Toronto: Canada's AI Enterprise Capital — Why Toronto became the center of Canadian AI
Canadian AI Companies
- Canadian AI Unicorns: Complete Guide — Waabi and the other billion-dollar Canadian AI companies
- Aidan Gomez: Cohere Founder — Another Toronto AI founder building a global company
- Cohere Enterprise LLM Guide — Inside Canada's most valuable AI startup
The Research Pipeline
- The AI Triangle: Canada's Three Superpowers — Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver's AI collaboration
- Yoshua Bengio: Deep Learning Pioneer — The Turing Award winner leading AI safety research
Building in Canada
- AI Founder Resources Canada — Programs and funding for AI founders
- Canadian AI Accelerators & Incubators — Where to launch your AI startup
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Data current as of January 2026. Funding data from Crunchbase, The Globe and Mail, and TechCrunch. Biographical information from Wikipedia, University of Toronto, and Vector Institute.
