Raquel Urtasun
Waabi, founded by AI pioneer and visionary Raquel Urtasun, is building the next generation of self-driving technology, unleashing the power of AI to “drive” safely in the real world and bringing the promise of self-driving closer to commercialization.
The company’s breakthrough, AI-first approach, developed by a team of world leading technologists, leverages deep learning, probabilistic inference and complex optimization to create software that is end-to-end trainable, interpretable and capable of very complex reasoning. This, together with a revolutionary closed loop simulator that has an unprecedented level of fidelity, enables testing at scale of both common driving scenarios and safety-critical edge cases. This approach significantly reduces the need to drive testing miles in the real world and results in a safer, more affordable, solution.
Waabi is led by Raquel, a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and, alongside Radical’s co-founders Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen, co-founded the Vector Institute for AI. The Waabi team is considered to be at the forefront of innovation in the self-driving industry, having published more papers in the field of AI-powered self-driving than all other self-driving companies and research teams combined. The team will initially focus on deploying Waabi’s software in logistics, specifically long-haul trucking, an industry where self-driving technology stands to make the biggest and swiftest impact due to a chronic driver shortage and pervasive safety issues.
We are proud to build on our longtime relationship with Raquel and to support Waabi’s work to change the world for the better.
