Waabi, a self-driving technology startup created by AI scientist Raquel Urtasan, has hired Lior Ron, CEO of Uber’s trucking business, to help it build up commercial operations as the Toronto-based company prepares to begin hauling loads for customers in fully autonomous semis.
Ron, who’s led Uber’s trucking business since 2016, will be Waabi’s chief operating officer and help expand its relations with shipping customers. Urtasan and Ron previously worked together when she was chief scientist for Uber’s former autonomous tech unit. Waabi’s previously announced partnership to put its trucks on Uber Freight’s network will continue as Ron takes his new role, they told Forbes.
“We’re entering a new phase from R&D into commercialization,” Urtasan said. Under Lior, Uber Freight became a $5 billion annual revenue business. At Waabi, he’ll “focus on go-to-market strategy, taking the foundations of partnerships we have and bringing them to the next level as well as add new partnerships.”
As of yet, there’s no clear leader in the robot trucking space, which five years ago seemed to be on a faster track for broad commercialization than robotaxis developed by companies like Waymo. The shortage of human truck drivers and rising demand for shipping goods rapidly have made it an attractive application for automation, especially since trucking was a $900 billion revenue industry last year. Since then, however, it’s undergone big changes, marked by the flaming out of once-promising startups including TuSimple, Embark and Ike. Even Waymo shelved its autonomous trucking program in 2023 to focus exclusively on robotaxis, a market it now leads.
Waabi, founded four years ago by Urtasan, is moving relatively fast, promoting a lower-cost development approach to designing its AI-enabled driving tech than competitors such as Aurora, relying heavily on simulation to train its AI. The company, which has raised $283 million from investors including Uber, Khosla Ventures and Nvidia, has a partnership with Volvo for its trucks and wants to begin running them without a human driver later this year. Lior expects commercial business to begin growing after that, hitting larger commercial scale in 2027.
Truckmakers “are getting ready for initial scaling” of Waabi’s autonomous models, Ron said. “It'll take some time for the trucks to be fully ready, but you can look at next year as basically warming up the engine and getting into initial deployments–and then in 2027 this is becoming a scale commercial reality for trucking.”
Demand for autonomous trucks won’t be a problem, he said. “I've been meeting with chief supply chain officers, carrier fleet managers and CEOs for my day job over the past 10 years. They cannot wait. The demand is insane,” Ron said.