Autonomous transportation startup Waabi and Volvo will jointly develop and deploy self-driving trucks in a deal announced on Tuesday that expands on Volvo’s strategic investment in the company.
Volvo Autonomous Solutions and Waabi will integrate Waabi Driver into Volvo’s existing autonomous truck technology and the production of the Volvo VNL Autonomous truck that is manufactured in New River Valley, Virginia, its largest truck-making plant. The VNL Autonomous was first unveiled by Volvo in May 2024 and first hit the road in December through a deal with DHL.
Waabi’s tech will add to the safety redundancies already built into the autonomous trucks for steering, braking, communication, computation, power management, energy storage and vehicle motion management systems.
Waabi’s Ai enables autonomous trucks to understand various scenarios that may be encountered on the road, and that its approach to self-driving safety stand out from most developers who rely on people to think about everything that could go wrong on the road, and then use large fleets to test out scenarios. Its generative AI reasons and, the company claims, can come up with problems human minds couldn’t conceptualize. This approach cuts down on resource usage, both human capital and capital investments, that is needed for traditional models that require driving millions of miles of roads.
Testing is expected in the Volvo trucks this year.
Volvo is not a new partner for Waabi, with Volvo Group Venture Capital the first strategic investor in the company, and an investor in its $200 million Series B venture fundraising. Uber, Khosla Ventures, Nvidia, and Porsche are also investors. The company has raised a total of $280 million.
Last March, Waabi and Nvidia announced a partnership to use the chipmaker’s vehicle computing platform DRIVE Thor for generative AI-powered self-driving applications.
Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi, and who was named a CNBC Changemaker last February, said in a statement about the Volvo deal that the plan is to “realize the future of self-driving trucks everywhere.”
She previously told CNBC that Waabi’s approach “to generalize and handle the unknown, is more efficient to train, and its safety can be mathematically validated and verified.”
Over 70% of freight moves across the U.S. by truck, and it is a market that has suffered from driver shortages in recent years.
Waabi Driver was first integrated into Uber Freight’s logistics system for the U.S. transportation market as part of a 10-year partnership that began in September 2023, with an initial focus on usage around Dallas and Houston.