Recently, the newly crowned "stock king" NVIDIA made a move and invested in an autonomous truck company.
Canadian autonomous truck company Waabi announced on its official website that the company has completed Series B financing, raising $200 million (approximately RMB 1.45 billion). Multiple industry giants and well-known investment institutions participated in this investment, including Uber, Nvidia, as well as the venture capital departments of Volvo and Porsche.
Image source: Wabi official website
Wabi, an autonomous truck company, raised $200 million in financing
Wabi is an artificial intelligence company in Canada that focuses on autonomous trucks. As of this round of financing, the company has completed a total of 280 million US dollars in financing.
Wabi expects that after completing this round of financing, the company will deploy fully autonomous generative artificial intelligence autonomous trucks in 2025.
"The newly acquired capital will be used for the company's commercial operations and expanding its teams in Canada and the United States," Waby said, including opening a new Texas autonomous truck transportation terminal, collaborating with Nvidia, integrating Nvidia DRIVE Thor into Waby's closed-loop simulator "Waabi Driver," and providing long-term automated freight services for Uber Freight.
It is reported that the company's technology has now achieved L4 level autonomous driving. Wabi stated that the company has developed an end-to-end artificial intelligence system that can generalize any situation that may occur on the road, including situations that have never been seen before. Due to its ability to perform inference, the training data and computational resources required for this system are significantly reduced compared to other end-to-end methods. Meanwhile, compared with other methods, the security of the Wabi system can be verified.
Image source: Wabi official website
The modular end-to-end system is expected to be launched in 2025
At present, end-to-end systems have become an important track for autonomous driving enterprises. In May, Wave, a British autopilot enterprise, which obtained financing of 1.05 billion US dollars, also laid out end-to-end in-depth learning auto drive system. The reporter found that Nvidia was also involved in this round of financing.
What are the charms of end-to-end systems? "As a technical path, the end-to-end system can get the attention of car enterprise customers and consumers because it can bring about significant improvement in user experience. It is reported that the end-to-end system can significantly improve the system security, and for many long tail scenarios of automatic driving, it shows a strong response ability in practice. At the same time, the end-to-end system makes the driving style more personified, which is conducive to building trust between the auto drive system and users." The End to end Automatic Driving Industry Research Report (hereinafter referred to as the Report) jointly released by Chen Tao Capital, the Automatic Driving Branch of Nanjing University Alumni Association in Shanghai and other three parties said.
The report states that end-to-end technology is still in its early stages of development and faces many application challenges and pain points, such as differences in technology roadmap, high demand for data and computing power, and immature testing and verification methods. "The pain points and opportunities formed by these unmet needs will also become the direction for practitioners' future development and iteration."
"Based on top players in the autonomous driving industry proposing end-to-end mass production plans, modular end-to-end systems are expected to be launched in 2025, which will drive upstream technological progress and change the market and industry landscape," the report said.
Autonomous trucks are highly favored by capital
At present, the field of autonomous driving trucks is highly favored by capital.
The New Strategy Low Speed Autonomous Driving Industry Research Institute stated that in May, from the perspective of financing, autonomous driving trucks remained a popular financing track. In May, Beijing Jingshen Technology Co., Ltd. (DeepWay) received additional funds from the Greater Bay Area Fund and Hefei Industrial Investment, just four months after its previous round of financing. Mainline Technology has raised hundreds of millions of yuan in a new round of strategic financing. Prior to this round of financing, Mainline Technology had already completed six rounds of financing.
At the application implementation level, intelligent trucks operate frequently. In May, the Beijing Intelligent Networking Policy Pilot Zone officially opened applications for the formation and operation of intelligent networking heavy-duty trucks, and took the lead in releasing the management rules for intelligent networking heavy-duty truck formations. Xiaoma Zhixing, Mainline Technology and other enterprises have officially received the first batch of intelligent connected heavy-duty truck fleet road test notifications in Beijing. Previously, in November 2023, Xiaoma Zhixing obtained a Guangzhou autonomous driving truck formation driving test license and was allowed to conduct L4 level formation autonomous driving tests on open roads in Guangzhou. Among them, Xiaoma Zhixing has completed the overseas listing registration and plans to go public in the United States.
Recently, autonomous driving companies have also rushed to IPO. Autonomous driving enterprise Momenta Mengteng Intelligent Driving has received a notice of registration for listing in the United States; Black Sesame Intelligence has been heard by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and plans to be listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; Intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit solution supplier Youjia Innovation submitted a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; Previously, companies such as Saimu Technology and Horizon also went to Hong Kong for IPOs.
