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.
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Questions asked in this interview
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0:29How does that partnership work given that you and I have been talking for a couple years?
2:31And this is a separate partnership from Uber's deal with Lucid and with Neuro, that's another lane that they're exploring?
2:50And then I want to talk about the funding round in a second here broadly, but the $250 million that is milestone-based, what are the milestones that you need to hit to get the full 250 million from Uber?
This week, autonomous trucking company Waabi raised $1 billion in new funding. $750 million came from a series C that Coastal Ventures and G2 Venture Partners co-led. The other $250 million will come from Uber, but that amount is a milestone-based capital agreement. Joining me now is Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi. Raquel, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here.
Let's start with the partnership with Uber. How does that partnership work given that you and I have been talking for a couple years? We traditionally thought about Waabi as an autonomous trucking company. Uber doesn't have that many trucks. Talk a little bit of how this works.
Yeah, so the vision for Waabi was really to lead the physical AI revolution. From day one we actually built technology that could serve multiple verticals and over the past four and a half years we've been focusing on our first product that was driving trucks. And now that the technology is ready, it is the perfect time for us to actually enter our next vertical which is robo-taxis. And that's where the new partnership with Uber makes total sense because when you think about Uber, it's really the global leader and really the market for robo-taxis. So that's where that additional partnership with Uber actually resides on, enabling us to really enter very quickly, very swiftly, and at a scale with more than 25,000 robo-taxis that we can deploy together on the Uber network, bringing that to the next level of scale that we see today.
And so are you the software that Waabi has developed, the autonomous driving system, the physical AI system that you're developing, are you installing it in cars that Uber owns? How does this agreement actually work?
Yeah, so we will have a single AI system, a single physical AI platform, single brain that will actually drive both robo-taxis as well as trucks. We will be having the software in robo-taxis yet to be announced into which OEM we're going to do this, and then that will be deployed at the scale in the Uber network.
Yes, a separate partnership. This is a massive partnership that Uber is doing with Waabi, as you know, the scale of that deployment that we just talked about.
And then I want to talk about the funding round in a second here broadly, but the $250 million that is milestone-based, what are the milestones that you need to hit to get the full 250 million from Uber?
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Urtasun, R. (2026, January 31). Inside Uber’s $250M Robotaxi Deal with Waabi [Interview transcript]. The Information. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/675560/
MLA
Raquel Urtasun. "Inside Uber’s $250M Robotaxi Deal with Waabi." The Information, 31 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/675560/.
BibTeX
@misc{urtasun2026_675560,
author = {Raquel Urtasun},
title = {Inside Uber’s $250M Robotaxi Deal with Waabi},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Information. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/675560/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
