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What Waabi’s launch means for the self-driving car industry

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2021-06-14 13:30:10

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It is not the best of times for self-driving car startups. The past year has seen large tech companies acquire startups that were running out of cash and ride-hailing companies shutter costly self-driving car projects with no prospect of becoming production-ready anytime soon.

Yet, in the midst of this downturn, Waabi, a Toronto-based self-driving car startup, has just come out of stealth with an insane amount of $83.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures, with additional participation from Uber, 8VC, Radical Ventures, OMERS Ventures, BDC, and Aurora Innovation. The company’s financial backers also include Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Peter Abbeel, and Sanja Fidler, artificial intelligence scientists with great influence in the academia and applied AI community.

What makes Waabi qualified for such support? According to the company’s press release, Waabi aims to solve the “scale” challenge of self-driving car research and “bring commercially viable self-driving technology to society.” Those are two key challenges of the self-driving car industry and are mentioned numerous times in the release.