Cofounder, Waabi
Search every verified Raquel Urtasun interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Raquel Urtasun, co-founder and CEO of Waabi, has been active in discussing the company's autonomous vehicle technology and recent developments. In a keynote at the CVPR 2026 WDFM-EAI Workshop in Denver, Urtasun emphasized the importance of generalization in autonomous systems, stating that they must handle dynamic situations not previously observed. She described Waabi's approach of using a single "brain" or autonomous system that can operate across different vehicle form factors, including self-driving trucks and robotaxis. Urtasun also noted that Waabi has raised a billion dollars in funding and announced a partnership with Uber to deploy a minimum of 25,000 robotaxis. In an interview with Osler, Urtasun discussed Waabi's journey and its landmark US $1 billion financing round, which she described as one of the largest in Canadian history. She attributed the company's success to its differentiated technology, capital efficiency, and a focus on safety. Urtasun stated that Waabi's physical AI platform can drive multiple form factors, calling it a "massive accelerator" for entering the robotaxi market. She also highlighted the importance of "grit" for founders, noting that startups involve ups and downs and require perseverance. Urtasun expressed optimism about Canada's opportunity to lead in physical AI, which she described as "the new thing" beyond digital AI.
“It's not just digital AI, it's actually physical AI what's going to be the new thing. So Canada has a tremendous opportunity ahead in terms of really leading that revolution.”
“We were spot on in terms of this is a technology that truly will bring scale in a safe manner and in a capital efficient manner. And that only Waabi has this type of technology. So it really put us in an amazing position that this is why we were able to raise a billion dollars in about three months.”
“Unlike our competitors, we are not at the mercy of Wall Street, and one node, and investors, and this and this, and show progress every quarter, and then compromise safety and other things that they are there doing. And then really not having the time to really invest in terms of this next stage of growth of the compan...”
“The number one quality, I think, is grit. No matter how successful you are, it's a startup. There is ups and downs all the time, and you really need to plow through mountains, and to bring everybody along in your journey.”
“I say medicine gets better the population is getting older so there is more and more need to provide mobility and we want to reduce the cost of transportation so that everybody can actually access the service.”
“It was estimated by a third party that just building High Definition maps of the US will cost 1 billion dollars. Let me pass that 1 billion mapping once. The world is constantly changing right. So my team is pioneer in building automation methods to be able to build these maps with a fraction of the cost that you will...”
“There is 1.3 million people that die every year on the road there is 20 to 50 people that actually get you know severely damaged and disabled due to traffic accidents.”
“Now that the technology is ready, it is the perfect time for us to actually enter our next vertical, robo taxis. That's where the partnership with Uber makes total sense because we can deploy more than 25,000 robot taxis together on the Uber network.”
“A billion dollars of new capital basically for us — think of it as infinite capital.”
“We're going to be deploying more than 25,000 robot taxis on the Uber network.”
“The regulatory framework in the US is way ahead of Canada. We are working with the regulators in order to make it possible for us to safely deploy the technology here as well.”
“Self-driving is where we believe that the big revolution is going to happen first, and there's been a big shift in the industry in terms of how this was approached 20 years ago to today, with the impact that this next generation of AI is bringing to finally building a scalable solution.”
“Self-driving trucks represent the pinnacle of engineering robots because they really need to work reliably in a very large market and can reshape logistics and supply chains if done properly.”
“Our approach is an end-to-end AI system that can do all the tasks for driving, interpret what it senses, reason about possible actions and their consequences, and always choose the right action, allowing it to generalize with very little data to things it has never seen before.”
“We built a simulator that is the same as the real world, allowing us to expose the system to accident and safety-critical situations and corner cases that would take many lifetimes to observe, enabling training and testing without real-world consequences.”
At the CVPR 2026 WDFM-EAI Workshop (https://wdfm-eai.github.io/CVPR26/) in Denver, Raquel Urtasun (CEO - Waabi & Professor at The University of Toronto), delivered a keynote titled “Reimagining the Physical World with AI"
In this interview, Osler partner Chad Bayne sits down with Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi, as part of Osler's Deal Points Report: Venture Capital Financings, a series spotlighting Canada's most innovative founders and growth-stage companies. Raquel shares the story behind Waabi, a physical AI company pioneering the most scalable and safest autonomous trucking and robotaxi technology in the world, and how her contrarian vision five years ago, before the ChatGPT moment, positioned Waabi ahead of an entire industry. They discuss Waabi's landmark US $1B financing round, one of the lar…
Things that we have done in order to get to this one single AI system that can actually do perception prediction and motion ...
Waabi CEO Raquel Urtasun details her company's $1 billion funding round and new partnership with Uber. She explains how Waabi's "single brain" will power both trucks and taxis. Subscribe: https://www.theinformation.com/subscr... The Information’s TITV airs weekdays on YouTube, X and LinkedIn at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Or check us out wherever you get your podcasts.
Raquel Urtasun, Waabi Founder and CEO, says the company’s single-brain AI gives it an edge in autonomous trucking and robotaxis, backed by $1 billion in funding and a major Uber partnership to scale safely and efficiently.
Raquel Urtasun, CEO & founder of Waabi, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss the company's development of AI for autonomous trucks and robotaxis. +++ Subscribe to BNN Bloomberg to watch more videos: / bnnbloomberg Connect with BNN Bloomberg: For the latest news visit: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca For a full video offering visit BNN Bloomberg: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/video BNN Bloomberg on Twitter: / bnnbloomberg BNN Bloomberg on LinkedIn: / bnn-bloomberg -- BNN Bloomberg is Canada’s only TV service devoted exclusively to business, finance and the markets. #BNNBloomberg #Canadia…
At Web Summit, Raquel Urtasun and Sven Strohband discuss the future of Physical AI with Wired's Lauren Goode, exploring how ...
At CES 2025, Raquel Urtasun, CEO and Founder of Waabi, joined Christopher Andrews, Norm Marks, Burkhard Huhnke, and ...
Raquel Urtasun, Founder & CEO of Waabi, has been utilizing AI technology for decades. Now, she's applying generative AI to build better tech for self-driving vehicles. Urtasun discusses how and why she built Waabi to solve these issues facing the trucking industry and how the company is helping to fix the world's supply chain issues. Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?s... Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row sea…
In this episode, Dom and Becca dive into the future of trucking with Raquel Urtasun, CEO and co-founder of Waabi, a company ...
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