Raquel Urtasun

Founder & CEO — Waabi Professor of Computer Science — University of Toronto Director of Self-Driving Research — Uber

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Raquel Urtasun is one of the most technically credentialed founders in the autonomous vehicle industry, and she has spent the last several years making a contrarian bet that the rest of the field is doing it wrong. As Founder and CEO of Waabi, she argues that you cannot build safe self-driving by grinding out hundreds of millions of real-world miles and hand-coding rules for every edge case. Instead, Waabi trains and validates its “Waabi Driver” almost entirely inside Waabi World, a generative-AI simulator that reconstructs the physical world as digital twins and conjures dangerous scenarios that may never have happened on a real road. For developers, this is the interesting part: Urtasun is one of the clearest real-world examples of “simulation-first” AI, where the training environment is itself a learned generative model rather than a hand-built game engine.

Her academic pedigree is unusually deep for a startup CEO. Urtasun holds a PhD from EPFL, did postdocs at MIT and UC Berkeley, and has been a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto since 2014, where she co-founded the Vector Institute alongside Geoffrey Hinton. She is a genuinely prolific researcher — 200-plus papers and an h-index north of 120 — whose work on the KITTI benchmark, 3D object detection from LiDAR, and deep structured models shaped an entire generation of perception research. If you have read almost any autonomous-driving vision paper from the 2010s, you have brushed against her citations.

From 2017 to 2021 she was Chief Scientist of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, building out Uber’s self-driving research and its Toronto lab. When Uber offloaded ATG in 2021, Urtasun left to found Waabi with the thesis that autonomous trucking — long, structured highway routes — is where driverless technology will scale profitably first, ahead of chaotic urban robotaxis. That bet has attracted serious money: Waabi raised a $200M Series B in 2024 and then a $750M Series C in January 2026, co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners with an Uber partnership, one of the largest venture rounds in Canadian history and a valuation around $3–4B.

What sets her apart from Waymo, Tesla, and Aurora is not just trucks — it’s the AI-first philosophy. Where others treat simulation as a supplement to fleet data, Urtasun treats it as the primary teacher, and pushes an end-to-end “single brain” model rather than a modular perception-planning-control stack. It’s a bold, still-unproven position — Waabi’s own driverless timeline slipped past its end-of-2025 target — but it makes her one of the most important people to watch on whether generative AI can safely operate in the physical world.