Waabi partners with Uber Freight to deploy autonomous trucks at scale

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Waabi announced a strategic partnership with Uber Freight to accelerate the deployment of AI-powered autonomous trucks at scale. Waabi provides carriers with the services and infrastructure to deploy, maintain, and manage their autonomous assets seamlessly. 

The strategic agreement pairs Waabi’s core technology, its Waabi Driver, with Uber Freight’s vast logistics platform and marketplace technology to deliver a turnkey driver-as-a-service system. Waabi hopes its unique system will empower carriers to dynamically and effectively deploy the Waabi Driver while also unlocking critical capacity for shippers and driving value throughout the supply chain. 

Over the next 10 years, Waabi and Uber Freight plan to deploy Waabi Drivers with billions of miles of capacity alongside carrier partners on the Uber Freight network. The companies hope the technology will have a meaningful impact on shippers and carriers over the long term. 

The autonomous commercial loads, which started running this week, will run regularly between Dallas and Houston, giving thousands of shippers and carriers on the Uber Freight network an opportunity to better understand what the future of supply chain operations will look like with autonomous trucking. As the partnership continues to advance, Waabi plans to expand to other key lanes in Texas and beyond. 

Waabi offers a bundled autonomous driving system that can help increase asset utilization significantly as well as drive profitability for carriers of all sizes. 

Waabi’s autonomous trucks have already been deployed on the Uber Freight network to gather insight for the joint system. This early deployment has also given Uber customers early access to autonomous freight capacity. 

Waabi hopes that by offering its autonomous driver as a driver-as-a-service model it will be able to make it easier to integrate its technology into a scaled freight network that can optimize load matching, orchestrate hub-to-hub operations, and provide carriers a streamlined experience for onboarding, load booking and execution, trailer hand-offs, payments, and asset maintenance. 

This driver-as-a-service model is at the center of the partnership that will pair the Waabi Driver with Uber Freight’s technology and services. In the future, carriers with Waabi Driver-enabled trucks will have the option to deploy their assets instantly and seamlessly on the Uber Freight network. This allows them to take advantage of continuously optimized routes and an ecosystem of partnerships with transfer hub infrastructure, roadside assistance, and national maintenance providers. 

Waabi was launched in 2021 by Raquel Urtasun, who was the chief scientist at Uber ATG before it was sold to Aurora. It raised $83.5 million in its Series A funding round.