Self-driving truck maker Waabi has hired autonomous vehicle industry veteran and Uber Freight CEO Lior Ron to step in as chief operating officer, as the startup looks to scale its commercial operations ahead of its planned launch of driverless trucks on public highways later this year.
Rebecca Tinucci, who previously spent six years building Tesla’s charging network before the automaker gutted its charging staff last year, will take over as head of Uber Freight. Ron will stay on as Uber Freight’s chairman.
“[Ron] will lead the go-to-market strategy, expanding key partnerships, and really bringing Waabi from the phase that we’ve been in to commercialization at scale,” Raquel Urtasun, Waabi’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. “He has shown his ability to scale from inception to a $5 billion revenue company with Uber Freight.”
Urtasun and Ron go way back: Ron previously co-founded self-driving truck company Otto, which Uber acquired in 2016. He overlapped with Urtasun at Uber, where the latter was chief scientist, leading the ride-hail firm’s self-driving research from 2017 to 2021.
Uber Freight is a digital marketplace connecting shippers with carriers, and the company aims to integrate self-driving trucks with the platform via partnerships with startups like Aurora Innovation and Waabi. Uber’s partnership with Waabi isn’t affected by Ron’s departure, he said.
While working at Uber Freight, Ron says, he met regularly with chief supply chain officers and big carriers that he said “could not wait” for self-driving trucks.
“If the most impactful thing to do in the next decade is autonomy, and if the timing is right, then for me it’s really about joining forces with who I think is most positioned to lead the transformation,” he added.
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Urtasun claims Waabi’s “AI-first” approach to scaling autonomy has allowed it to do more with fewer resources and in less time than competitors. Given this is a capital-intensive industry that’s seen several promising startups, like TuSimple and Embark, crash and burn, efficiency can be a major advantage.
Since it was founded in 2021, Waabi has raised $287.7 million in total, the bulk of which came from a $200 million Series B in 2024. Urtasun claims the company doesn’t need to raise more to get to its next phase of growth.
The startup’s chief competitor is Aurora, which this year launched the first commercial driverless trucking route in the U.S., and has raised nearly $3.46 billion through a combination of venture capital and its public listing.
Waabi has managed to launch commercial pilots quickly because it does most training, testing, and validation in Waabi World, its closed-loop simulator that both virtually tests the self-driving software and teaches it in real time. More recently, Waabi took its simulator to the test track, overlaying virtual environments onto real-world driving conditions to simulate scenarios like accidents and construction zones without the actual risk, according to Urtasun.
“At the beginning of the year, we reached feature complete, which basically means we have all the necessary things to remove the driver and [are focused] on the final performance improvement and validation,” Urtasun said. “We are on track for our driverless launch by the end of the year, which is the start of commercialization.”
The startup plans to launch in Texas, which has become the autonomous freight capital of the U.S., but it hasn’t yet disclosed which routes it’ll operate on or with which launch partners. The startup is working with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to develop and deploy custom-built AVs.
“Waabi will lead the technology and it will scale autonomy faster than ever expected,” Ron said, adding that he’s excited with the prospect of integrating the technology into the customers’ operations. Part of that is a feature that would enable Waabi’s trucks to drive straight to customer depots, avoiding the need to build terminals for a hybrid setup.
“We’re going to create a commercial-ready solution that can really meet them,” Ron said.
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