Thanks Raquel for joining today. For those who don't know, Raquel is the founder and CEO of Waabi. A world-renowned expert within the field of AI, Raquel is pioneering the field of physical AI, starting with the most scalable and safest self-driving solution. Raquel is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. Prior to founding Waabi, Raquel was the chief scientist and head of R&D at Uber ATG, and a Canada Research Chair in machine learning and computer vision. One of the things we wanted to talk about with Raquel being here is the billion-dollar round, but also just talking about Waabi in general and Waabi's journey. I've had the very fortunate opportunity to be connected to Raquel for the last decade and had a front seat from Waabi's initial creation to now. So I think it'd be wonderful to talk about Waabi itself, and then the financing round that was just closed, which is one of the largest in Canadian history and a monumental event for the Canadian ecosystem, but of course, Waabi more particularly.
So thank you, Chad, and I will say that I am the one who is fortunate to have the opportunity to know you for over a decade, I think. We are each ourselves here. And from when I was an academic, you were fundamental in terms of helping navigate what it was to transition into industry, to then transition to be an entrepreneur, and really setting up myself and the company for the amazing success that we have had over the last five years, and the incredible future ahead of us. So I would say that I always consider you an advisor that knows with everything as it relates to business, which is actually really rare to have the rigor of law together with a very business mindset. And I consider you a friend as well, that we've been navigating a lot of these really fundamental moments in my life over the last 10 years. So yeah, thank you for having me here, and thank you for everything that you have done.
Thank you very much. And I echo the same. I consider you a friend, and it's wonderful to have the opportunity to work with friends on something as consequential as Waabi to the future of tech in Canada. So just jumping into some questions. You describe Waabi as a physical AI company. So what does that actually mean for the viewers, and what makes your approach to building autonomous technology fundamentally different from the rest of the field and the competitive companies?
Yeah. So I think by physical AI, the way to think about it is really AI systems that interact with the physical world. And the canonical example is really robots, right? And one of the things that maybe not everybody realizes is that over the next five to 10 years, robots are going to be everywhere. And they're going to be able to really help us in everyday tasks. They're going to help us to bring safety to roads, to bring so much economic value. It's like the new currency. 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. And as it relates to Waabi, why we've been so successful, and it's really about we have a very differentiated technology, and this is very important as a startup, is not just be one of many, but being the one at the forefront of that sector. And in particular, when I started Waabi, it was very contrarian, the idea of what I wanted to build. And this is five years ago, this is before, just for context, the ChatGPT moment. And it was this idea that you can build into any AI systems, so a single AI system that will be very fireable, so you can prove safety, but at the same time will be able to reason like humans we do. So it can learn from very little data and can really act safely in the world. Together with this idea that data is super important for AI, and you will never see enough in the real world, so you need to build a simulator that is as realistic as the real world. And this was at the time when everybody was building brand new systems, what we call AV 1.0 in the industry, raising billions of dollars and saying, 'Yeah. It's here. I'm going to show you next month.' Right? If we fast-forward into five years into the future, it's very clear that 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, right? Something like this, Chad. And it's really by building something and being ahead of the pack in terms of what will be that future. But it was very contrarian. And you fast-forward, as I said, into today, many of the companies that were almost there are not here anymore.
So just talking about that financing round, the company announced it closed up to a US $1 billion round. It's one of the largest in Canadian history. It was also oversubscribed. It was closed in a quarter. And had some of the most sophisticated investors in the world participating in the round. What do you think they saw in Waabi that convinced them this was the right moment to invest in a company like Waabi and the autonomous vehicle space?
Yeah. I would say that there was a clear realization that physical AI, and self-driving in particular, is here and it's now. So it's not any more an if. This is really going to happen, and then the question is about who do they believe that will actually win this many trillion dollar race? There was that, I would say, broad adoption. And when you look at the technology differentiation and this next generation super powerful AI technology, Waabi was fully set apart compared to anybody else. The fact that we've been able to hit every single milestone on time and under budget in a field like self-driving, where there is a lot of lost promises and whatnot, was tremendously important as well. The commercial traction, our partnership with Volvo, where we are soon to deploying fully driverless on public roads for the first time in the industry with a fully validated platform. And the amazing pipeline of customers of many, many billions of dollars that we have behind, that was also very important for investors. And the fact that when you look at the future really in trucking, Waabi is the clear winner on that race, is what attracted best in class across, whether it is strategics, whether it is financial investors, growth investors, et cetera. And obviously the Canadian ecosystem, that was very important for me in particular to make sure that we have enough Canadian participation on the cap table. And I would say that the last bit that was a cherry on top was the fact that for the first time we can actually do not just one form factor, not just our self-driving trucks, but we are also entering robotaxis, and it's the same brain that is actually going to do both use cases. So suddenly, for the first time ever, you can actually have a single technology, our physical AI platform, that can drive all of these different form factors. And then it's a massive accelerator in terms of another $5 trillion market, and build this disruptor for Waymo as well. So that was massive, and it came with a massive partnership with Uber, the largest, I think, partnership in robotaxi history, where Uber committed to deploy a minimum of 25,000 robotaxis. So when you put all this together, you have the leading technology in trucking, you're entering robotaxi, a massive opportunity. It's existential for Uber, you have all the power of Uber behind and this massive deal, et cetera. It was too good to pass on for these investors.
And with the capital, how do you see that accelerating Waabi's, essentially their development with the company from both a self-driving trucking perspective and a robotaxi perspective?
