Jaden Schaefer

But they kind of did these things, or at least the way they announced them, that happened at the same time.

I'm sure there was probably talk that helped

to raise the money.

But this is essentially a partnership with Uber to deploy self-driving cars on their ride-sharing platform, which is going to make Wabi's first expansion beyond just autonomous trucking.

So they've kind of been working on.

So this is their Series C. It was co-led by Coachella Ventures, G2 Ventures, and then, you know, that and a bunch of others kind of put in $750 million.

But

And alongside that, you have Uber that came in with $250 million, so they did a total of $1 billion.

I think that Uber backing that $250 million is tied to deploying about 25,000 or more of Wabi driver-powered robo-taxis.

And what's interesting is this is exclusively on Uber's platform.

Even though the company didn't share a timeline for when they're going to have all of this rolled out,

And I think right now when you're looking at it, it looks like a really big bet that Wabi's first, you know, kind of this AI first approach is possibly going to succeed where a lot of others have struggled in this.

This is not an easy thing.

Scaling a single autonomous driving system across a whole bunch of different vehicle types and then commercial use, I think, adds a whole nother level of complexity.

to all of this.

So there's a bunch of competitors doing this, right?

I think everyone knows about Waymo and of course, Tesla.

Waymo actually previously attempted to operate both robo taxis and autonomous trucking before they got out of autonomous trucking altogether, they completely left that industry.

So Wabi's founder and CEO is Raquel Ertzson, and she said that her company's capital efficient strategy and generalized AI architecture give it a bit of a structural advantage.

This is a direct quote.