27. Waabi

Founder: Raquel Urtasun (CEO)
Launched: 2021
Headquarters: Toronto
Funding: $1.28 billion
Valuation: N/A
Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, deep neural networks/deep learning, generative AI, machine learning, robotics, digital twins
Industry: Automotive
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 1 (No. 35 in 2025)

Waabi, founded and run by former Uber autonomous technology executive Raquel Urtasun, is in a race to make autonomous freight trucking an everyday reality — sooner rather than later.

Its self-driving big rigs already operate on commercial routes in Texas, serving companies including Uber Freight, Samsung and additional Fortune 500 clients, and with OEM partners including Volvo. While humans remain in the cabs today, Waabi expects fully driverless trucks to be handling freight routes across the U.S. Southwest by the end of the year, and it has set the goal of having all of North America covered by driverless freight trucks over the next five years.

"It has been four years since Waabi's inception and it's go time," Uber Freight founder and CEO Lior Ron, who joined Waabi as chief operating officer last August, told CNBC at the time of his move. "We start with specific routes and scale fast across multiple customers," he said.

The success of autonomous freight trucks and self-driving more broadly are key tests for the application of what is sometimes called "physical AI" — real-world AI applications — at scale.

Waabi has considerable competition, and not just from Tesla and its long-held goal of autonomous semis. Aurora Innovation — which acquired Uber's autonomous tech group in 2020 — has run autonomous freight routes between Dallas and Houston, and it recently started a 1,000-mile route between Fort Worth and Phoenix, notable for being beyond what a human trucker could handle without a stop. Kodiak AI, which has operations linking Houston, Dallas and Oklahoma City, expects to have self-driving semis with no drivers on long-haul routes in the second half of this year.

In response to a recent question from the New York Times about Aurora being first in Texas to go fully driverless, Urtasun said, "We are not behind on this path."

In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, she said Waabi is taking what it sees as a deliberate approach, and the right approach, to the rollout of true driverless trucks, without "prototype parts" being necessary, and not before complete buy-in from both OEMs and tier one freight companies that the technology is ready for the roads. "We're not concerned about the competition," she said. "We have the most scalable approach, ready to launch and scale significantly."

"We're not launching before the platform from the OEM is ready," she added.

The OEM she was referring to is Volvo, which she noted already publicly said a few quarters back it would be providing final validation for the autonomous software within a few quarters, and expects hundreds of driverless trucks by next year. "The software is ready and awaiting final validation from the Volvo platform. The launch of driverless trucks is really, really soon ... really, really imminent," she said. "That gives you a sense for the time frame and scaling," Urtasun said.

Waabi is also spreading its bets, engineering what it refers to as a "shared brain" across self-driving trucks and robotaxis, a technology approach that will set Waabi apart from competitors, Urtasun told CNBC on Tuesday.

In January, the company raised $750 million in a deal led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, one of the largest single rounds ever raised by a Canadian tech startup (Urtasun is also a full professor of computer science at the University of Toronto). A key goal for Waabi with the major capital raise is the development of robotaxis, where the competition is also fierce. Concurrent with the deal, Uber committed to invest $250 million as part of plans to exclusively deploy at least 25,000 autonomous vehicles for its ride-hailing platform.

"For me, it's been 16 years in self-driving," Urtasun told CNBC at the time of the recent fundraising. "But this is — it's finally here, scale is here."