Toronto-based autonomous vehicle company Waabi says its self-driving transport truck is ready to hit the road.
The news: In a fireside chat at the Nrth Frestival on Wednesday, Waabi COO Lior Ron told BetaKit reporter Josh Scott that the company’s autonomous driving system is highly mature and claimed it’s ready to be deployed “today,” barring some additional work from Waabi’s partner.
Ron said that Waabi is just waiting for Volvo, the Swedish automaker it’s partnered with, to finish the final validation work on its upcoming autonomous truck. That work is expected to be done by the end of this year, Ron said, making way for the truck to be deployed in its inaugural market of Texas by early 2027, and across the US Sun Belt by the end of next year.
From the source: “The system is highly, highly, highly mature in the initial deployment area in Texas,” Ron said. “It feels like a Waymo … people cut you left and right, you need to do unprotected lefts, you go through a hodgepodge of surface area, you see crazy stuff on the road, and the truck smoothly navigates all of that.”
The context: Waabi, which was recently featured in BetaKit Most Ambitious, was founded by University of Toronto computer science professor and former Uber chief scientist Raquel Urtasun in 2021. When the company struck its partnership with Volvo in late 2025, Urtasun called the deal “a massive step forward” and the last piece her startup needed to build an autonomous trucking solution that can scale. Waabi sped up its efforts to commercialize self-driving trucks earlier this year with a $750 million USD ($1.02 billion CAD) Series C round.
Final thought: At last year’s Toronto Tech Week, Urtasun called for Canada to “wake up,” claiming that its institutions, including regulators, had yet to realize that the physical AI revolution is here.
Just over a year later at Nrth, Ron expressed a more optimistic view about Waabi’s Canadian future. While he said he’d never seen a more supportive ecosystem at both the US state and federal level, with customer demand “overflowing,” he still predicted that Waabi will have full North American deployment in the next four to five years.
BetaKit is an Nrth media partner. Feature image courtesy of Nrth Festival.