Nvidia, the "stock king", invested over 1.4 billion in an autonomous driving company!

With 2 billion yuan in financing in 3 years, Zhika has created another unicorn

The winter of autonomous driving has passed, but the thunder has suddenly come...

On June 18th local time, Canadian self-driving truck startup Waabi released its latest announcement, officially announcing that it had raised US$200 million (approximately RMB 1.45 billion) in an oversubscribed Series B financing round.

According to the announcement, this round of financing was led by old shareholders Uber and Khosla Ventures (a well-known American VC and also an early investor in OpenAI). Industry giants such as Nvidia, Volvo Ventures, and Porsche are also on the list of luxurious shareholders.

Among them, NVIDIA is the most eye-catching.

At the close of the U.S. stock market on June 18, Nvidia's stock price rose by 3.5%, and its share price was fixed at US$135.580 per share. Its total market value reached US$3.34 trillion (approximately RMB 24.2 trillion), taking the throne of the world's largest market value from Microsoft and becoming the new "stock king."

For reference, Apple fell 1.10% on the day, with a total market value of 3.29 trillion US dollars, ranking third in the world; Microsoft fell 0.45%, with a total market value of 3.32 trillion, ranking second in the world.

You should know that a year ago, Nvidia, which had been listed for 25 years, had a market value of over one trillion yuan. This rising speed is comparable to that of a rocket. It is truly the biggest winner in the "AI War".

As the first investment disclosed after reaching the top, Waabbi naturally attracted much attention.

Xipan, a startup, has a lineup of big names in investment. Not only did it attract dozens of shareholders in its early days, including Khosla Ventures, Uber, BDC Capital, a venture capital firm under a Canadian state-owned bank, and OMERS Ventures, one of Canada's largest pension funds, but even the "AI Godfather" Geoffrey Hinton and "AI Godmother" Fei-Fei Li also bet on it.

This round of B financing has attracted 13 investment institutions, including pioneers and developers in deep technology, artificial intelligence, automobiles, and shipping and logistics ecosystems.

With the influx of this new capital, its total investment amount has exceeded US$280 million (approximately RMB 2 billion), making it an emerging unicorn. The funds will also help Waabi achieve the commercial deployment of fully unmanned generative AI autonomous driving trucks in 2025.

This not only highlights the investors' recognition of Waabi's technology and prospects, but also once again brings the application of artificial intelligence in the field of logistics and transportation to the forefront.

At present, the world is facing many challenges, including increasingly severe supply chain pressure, labor shortage caused by aging, and carbon emissions. AI-driven self-driving truck technology is seen as a powerful tool for achieving efficient, safe, and green logistics and transportation.

As traditional manufacturing and logistics industries begin to transform and upgrade, new forces represented by Waabi have already drawn their swords and started the war in this niche market.

As a startup company that is only three years old but is about to achieve L4 autonomous driving, the reason why Waabi has been able to break through difficult times and repeatedly gain the favor of capital lies in its unique core technology.

Autonomous driving is one of the "ultimate applications" of AI in the physical world, but it is not easy to achieve large-scale commercial deployment.

The route taken by most autonomous vehicle companies is to accumulate driving data through large-scale actual road tests, and in turn train and optimize the AI ​​decision-making system. Although this "learn first and then walk" and "cross the river by feeling the stones" approach is feasible, it has pain points such as low data efficiency and high cost.

Waymo has said that its test vehicles travel an average of 25,000 miles a day.

Waabi has taken a unique "AI-first" approach, creating a single end-to-end AI system capable of human-like reasoning. It believes that only by establishing an AI system with true human-like reasoning capabilities can it adapt to any situation that may occur on the road, break through data bottlenecks, reduce costs, and achieve safe, efficient, and commercial use of autonomous driving.

“I’ve spent much of my career inventing new AI technologies that can unlock the enormous potential of AI in the physical world in a provably safe and scalable way,” said Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi.

In addition, she also said that fully unmanned self-driving trucks will be launched in 2025, which is a milestone for the industry and will truly mark the beginning of the next frontier of artificial intelligence.

Judging from the past track record of Urtasun and its core team, Waabi does have the confidence to say this.

Dr. Urtasun graduated from the Computer Science Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), majoring in computer vision and machine learning. He then conducted postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2014, he became a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He is a genius with an "academic" background.

In 2017, Urtasun joined Uber as Chief Scientist and Head of R&D for the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), contributing to Uber's many breakthroughs in autonomous driving.

In 2021, Urtasun raised $100 million in initial funding to establish Waabi, and attracted a number of big names to join, such as Eyal Cohen, former head of hardware at Uber ATG, Daryn Nakhuda, former CEO of Mighty AI, and Jur van den Berg, former senior researcher at Google. Shi Zhujia, the "product first person" who helped TuSimple go public, also joined Waabi as product manager in 2022.

That’s why Urtasun said in the announcement: “We have breakthrough technology, an incredible team, and pioneering partners and investors!”

Generative AI is one of the most popular research directions in recent years. Although multimodality has become a trend, large text-based language models still dominate the market.

Waabi focuses on enabling generative AI to communicate with the physical world. For example, in road tests, Waabi AI can understand the danger of a physical object suddenly appearing in front of it without relying on prior knowledge, and actively avoid it, rather than identifying it as a specific object before driving.

This is very similar to human driving: we don't need to know specifically whether the obstacle is a ball or a box, we just need to determine that it is an obstacle.

For safety issues, Waabi has developed a high-fidelity closed-loop simulator - Waabi World.

It can automatically generate all the situations that a self-driving car might encounter in the real world and test the entire self-driving system with a near-zero domain gap . This means that the AI ​​system being tested should drive exactly the same way in simulation as it would when it encounters the same situation in the real world.

Furthermore, Waabi World is a super-intelligent engine that can effectively create scenarios that have a high probability of making the system under test fail and cover all possible faults it may have, which provides extraordinary efficiency for testing.

For an AI company, financing is not only about obtaining funds, but also about the opportunity to deepen market layout. The $200 million Series B financing will undoubtedly help Waabi accelerate its commercialization and expand into new market areas.

Waabi said it will open an AV truck terminal in Texas, deepen its cooperation with NVIDIA, and continue to cooperate with Uber Freight to provide autonomous freight services to Fortune 500 companies and top shippers in Texas.

In March of this year, Waabi officially announced its cooperation with NVIDIA to integrate NVIDIA's "new big move" automotive computing platform DRIVE Thor into its own autonomous driving application.

At the same time, new car manufacturers such as Xiaopeng and BYD will also install the DRIVE Thor platform in future models. This indicates that generative AI is expected to become the "brain" of the next generation of cars, redefining human-computer interaction and travel experience.

In addition to technology companies, Waabi's financing also includes many automobile manufacturers such as Porsche and Volvo, which are betting on the future of travel.

It is estimated that truck transportation accounts for more than 70% of the total freight transportation in the United States. However, in recent years, this industry has been plagued by many problems such as driver shortage, safety hazards and inefficient supply chain. Waabi's generative AI-driven autonomous driving truck technology brings new ideas to solve these industry pain points.

Lutz Meschke, Member of the Executive Board for Investment Management at Porsche AG, said:

"With its innovative AI-driven approach, Waabi has built a compelling, cost-effective, and scalable solution for safe autonomous driving across a wide range of applications. Their self-driving truck technology has great potential to solve some of the key challenges facing the industry. We are proud to support this company as they lead the way into a new autonomous future."

In the foreseeable future, the technology, automobile, logistics and other industries will form an autonomous driving ecological community to jointly promote the realization and application of this disruptive technology. Among them, the continuous breakthroughs in new technology routes, the improvement of infrastructure and regulatory environment, and cross-border integration and innovation will all be key forces to promote the industrialization of autonomous driving trucks.