Female-led AV Startup Raises $83 Million, Focuses on Trucking

The race is on to deploy safe and reliable autonomous vehicles on the world’s roads, with no shortage of hiccups along the way. But an innovative company that uses efficient testing methods to introduce AVs to the most receptive atmosphere – highways – has just raised $83.5 million. Oh, and their CEO just happens to be a woman.

Female CEOs are rare enough, but in the automotive space, they’re almost unheard of.

The Verge profiles one of the latest rising superstars, Raquel Urtasun, who’s lent her expertise to artificial intelligence for more than two decades, and who recently led Uber’s Advanced Technology Group’s Toronto outpost.

Urtasun’s new autonomous vehicle startup, Waabi, just raised $83.5 million in their series A round, and the company’s focus is fascinating.

Waabi’s AV focus is on trucking, for the simple fact that autonomous technology is particularly suited to long, monotonous highways/freeways/insert regional slang here. Urtasun also claims that fully autonomous big-rigs would quickly solve our endemic shortage of truck drivers.

And to arrive at the finish line before its competitors – including big names like Waymo, TuSimple, Aurora, Volvo, and Daimler – Waabi’s “AI centric” approach will use a “closed loop” simulation program that, according to The Verge, reduces the need to accrue millions of miles of testing on public roads and highways.

“So for us in simulation, we can test the entire system,” Urtasun said. “We can train an entire system to learn in simulation, and we can produce the simulations with an incredible level of fidelity, such that we can really correlate what happens in simulation with what is happening in the real world.”

You can read more here.