Tech
Waabi raises $1B and expands into robotaxis with Uber
Autonomous vehicle startup Waabi has raised $1 billion and struck a partnership with Uber to deploy self-driving cars on the ride-hailing platform — the company’s first expansion beyond autonomous trucking.
The funding consists of an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners and roughly $250 million in milestone-based capital from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on its platform. The companies did not provide a timeline for such a large-scale deployment.
The partnership represents a bet that the startup’s AI technology can succeed where others have struggled – scaling across multiple self-driving verticals with a single technology stack. While competitors like Waymo previously attempted both robotaxis and trucking before shutting down its freight program, Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun says her company’s capital-efficient approach and generalizable AI architecture give it a unique advantage to tackle both markets simultaneously.
“Our incredible core technology really enables, for the first time, a single solution that can do multiple verticals, and they can do them at scale,” Urtasun told TechCrunch. “It’s not about two programs, two stacks.”
The tie-up brings Urtasun’s work full circle: she previously served as chief scientist at Uber’s autonomous vehicle division, Uber ATG, which Uber sold to self-driving trucking firm Aurora Innovation in 2020. It also builds on Waabi’s existing partnership with Uber Freight.
Waabi is one of several AV companies that Uber has brought on to deploy self-driving vehicles on its platform globally. Other companies include Waymo, Nuro, Avride, Wayve, WeRide, Momenta, and more.
The tie-up and funding round come as Uber launches a new division called Uber AV Labs that will use its vehicles to collect data for AV partners.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
Waabi isn’t as reliant on data as some, if Urtasun is to be believed. The Waabi Driver is trained, tested, and validated using a closed-loop simulator called Waabi World that automatically builds digital twins of the world from data; performs real-time sensor simulation; manufactures scenarios to stress-test the Waabi Driver; and teaches the Driver to learn from its mistakes without human intervention. The result? Waabi’s Driver can reason about its surroundings as a human would and choose the best maneuver, says Urtasun. This allows the system to generalize and learn from fewer examples than traditional autonomous driving systems.
Waabi has spent the last four and a half years bringing that technology to life for highway and surface street capabilities with trucks, but Urtasun says the Waabi Brain already generalizes to different vehicle form factors – she has even hinted at the company’s next vertical being robotics. From the beginning, the company collected and simulated passenger car data alongside its trucking work, a signal that robotaxis were always part of the long-term plan.
The approach has allowed Waabi to build faster and cheaper than competitors, Urtasun claims.
“We don’t need the gazillion humans to develop the technology and the large fleets that AV 1.0 needs,” Urtasun said. “We don’t need the massive data centers, energy consumption, or a gazillion latest chips.”
The deal brings Waabi’s total funding raised to roughly $1.28 billion after it closed a $200 million Series B in June 2024. Competitors Aurora Innovation and Kodiak Robotics have raised $3.46 billion and $448 million to date, respectively, through a combination of venture capital and public-market proceeds.
In just five years, Waabi has launched several commercial pilots (with a human driver in the front seat) in Texas. The company had planned to launch a fully driverless truck on public highways by the end of last year, but the rollout has been delayed until sometime in the next few quarters, per Urtasun.
Waabi is working with Volvo to build purpose-built autonomous trucks, which the company revealed last October at TechCrunch Disrupt. Urtasun says Waabi’s Driver is ready to go, but the trucks still need to be fully validated before launch.
Urtasun’s not worried, though. She says there’s plenty of demand for Waabi’s trucks due to the company’s direct-to-consumer model that enables shippers to buy the outfitted trucks directly, and she’s confident that with the Uber partnership, Waabi will be able to “quickly penetrate the market and scale with a product that will be very reliable.”
“We’re still in the first innings of deployment of robotaxis,” she said. “There’s a lot more scale to come.”
Urtasun wouldn’t share more specifics about the Uber rollout, like what automaker Waabi would partner with. She did say that Waabi would take a similar route to its autonomous trucking rollout by building its sensors and technology into the vehicle from the factory floor.
“We believe in vertically integrating with a fully redundant platform from the OEM,” she said. “That is how you really build safe and truly scalable technology.”
Other investors in Waabi’s Series C include Uber, NVentures (Nvidia’s VC arm), Volvo Group Venture Capital, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, BlackRock, BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund, and others.
Tech
Cursor makes its biggest India push yet ahead of SpaceX acquisition with localized pricing
Weeks before its expected acquisition by SpaceX closes, AI coding startup Cursor is making its biggest push into India yet, launching its first country-specific subscription as the company bets on one of the world’s largest developer markets to drive its next stage of growth.
On Monday, the startup introduced Cursor Start, a ₹649-a-month (about $7) subscription built specifically for India — and priced well below Cursor’s standard $20-a-month Pro subscription.
The move reflects India’s growing importance to Cursor’s business. The startup says India is already its third-largest market globally and home to its highest concentration of power users, with its user base in the country more than tripling over the past year.
That scale, coupled with India’s deep pool of software engineering talent, made it the first market where Cursor chose to localize pricing, Simon Green, Cursor’s head of Asia-Pacific and Japan, told TechCrunch. “We felt that we had an opportunity there to right-size the commercial model and drive scale,” Green said. “The technical competency of the country and the engineering talent that already exists make it a very natural fit.”
India has emerged as one of the world’s largest software developer hubs. Earlier this year, GitHub said that the country has more than 27 million developers on its platform, second only to the U.S., with more than two million joining in 2026 alone.
Cursor Start includes access to Cursor’s Composer 2.5 model and Grok 4.5, with higher usage limits than the free tier, alongside cloud agents, its iOS app, plugins, Model Context Protocol support, hooks, and skills. The startup said the plan is aimed at developers who need more AI-assisted coding capacity than the free tier offers without upgrading to its full Pro subscription.
The lower-priced plan is intended to broaden access rather than replace Cursor’s flagship offering, Green said. Unlike the $20-a-month Pro subscription, Start does not include access to frontier AI models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, or advanced features including Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations, and the Cursor SDK.
The plan is billed in Indian rupees and supports payments through credit and debit cards as well as India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Green told TechCrunch that Cursor would use multiple checks to ensure the India-only subscription is available only to individual users in the country, including measures to deter people from accessing the plan through virtual private networks (VPNs).
Cursor is not alone in tailoring its pricing for India. OpenAI and Anthropic have also rolled out India-specific plans over the past year as global AI companies compete for users in one of the world’s fastest-growing AI markets.
While Cursor Start is initially limited to India, Green told TechCrunch that the startup could expand localized pricing to other markets if the model proves successful.
“We will continue to do everything we can to fuel the demand and serve those clients that are using us,” Green said. “Now, if this model proves that we could take it to other markets, perhaps we will. But I think it’d be crazy to say we would never do it elsewhere.”
OpenAI provides one precedent for this strategy, having launched its sub-$5 ChatGPT Go in India before expanding the lower-priced subscription to other markets.
In addition to the localized pricing strategy, Cursor is also expanding its presence in India through new hires. Green told TechCrunch that the startup recently hired its first salesperson in India and expects another leader to join in Delhi. The company is also building out its a government affairs office, alongside three technical customer support hires, as it expands its presence in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.
Cursor’s enterprise push is still in its early stages in India, Green said, where adoption has so far been driven largely by individual developers, startups, and universities. He said Cursor sees significant opportunities in sectors including banking and large enterprises as it expands its local sales efforts.
Green said, the India-specific pricing was designed to be commercially sustainable rather than a loss leader. He said the lower-priced plan is viable because it is built around Cursor’s own AI models, which carry lower operating costs than relying primarily on third-party frontier models.
Cursor’s India expansion comes a little over a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX agreed to acquire the AI coding startup in a $60 billion all-stock deal, following SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering. The acquisition is expected to close in Q3. However, SpaceX has been partnered with Cursor since April to develop a next-generation “coding and knowledge work AI.”
Green said Cursor will continue to operate independently until the transaction closes and that the company’s India expansion plans were already in motion before the deal. Once the acquisition closes, however, Green said SpaceX’s existing presence in India through Starlink could help Cursor expand faster by lowering commercial and operational barriers.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Lyft and Baidu enter London’s robotaxi battleground as testing begins
Chinese tech giant Baidu has started testing autonomous vehicles in London as part of its partnership with Lyft and Freenow, the German taxi and multi-mobility app that Lyft now owns. Baidu is the latest in a string of companies to test self-driving technology in the UK ahead of commercial robotaxi deployments.
The testing, which began Tuesday with human safety operators, comes nearly a year after the two companies struck a strategic partnership to deploy Baidu’s purpose-built Apollo Go RT6 robotaxi across key European markets through the Lyft platform. The vehicles will eventually be available through Freenow, which Lyft acquired in 2025 for about $197 million.
That deal gave Lyft a foothold in Europe’s ride-hailing market, where a handful of well-funded companies are now jockeying to be first to market with robotaxis.
London is particular is shaping up to be a key battleground in the region. In April, Waymo began testing its autonomous vehicles with human safety operators in the city. Uber and its self-driving tech partner, Wayve, also announced plans to launch a robotaxi service in London this year. That initial service — which customers can now sign up for on an interest list — will have human safety operators behind the wheel before fully driverless operations begin later.
Baidu and Freenow by Lyft (as the latter service is now called) said they expect to invite the public to hail their robotaxis in 2027. The companies, which didn’t provide a more detailed timeline, noted that the launch will depend on regulatory approval.
For now, dozens of test vehicles will operate within London’s borough of Brent. Lyft and Freenow said they continue discussions with safety and city officials, including Transport for London (TfL) and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV). The UK government is in the process of creating autonomous vehicle regulations and opened applications in May for companies interested in an AV pilot program that lets companies test self-driving vehicles under government oversight.
When the service does launch, Freenow by Lyft said it will operate a hybrid network — employing the same language rival Uber has used — meaning human drivers operating taxis and private-hire vehicles will work alongside the robotaxis.
“As a platform with deep roots in the taxi industry, our priority is ensuring that autonomous technology supports the professional drivers who keep London moving,” Thomas Zimmermann, CEO of Freenow by Lyft, said in a statement.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Granola launches an Apple Watch app
AI note-taking app Granola is launching an app for the Apple Watch in hopes that its users will want to record meetings and take notes without using their smartphones.
Users can set the Granola app as one of the watch faces to start transcribing at any time. The app can also surface reminders about upcoming meetings, and works with the iOS app, which launched last year.
The company’s co-founder, Chris Pedregal, told TechCrunch that the Apple Watch app is meant to be a way to capture in-person meetings without having to take your phone out of your pocket — for example, if someone is having a walking one-on-one meeting.
When Granola tested its app with employees who had Apple Watches, a big chunk of their mobile usage switched from iOS to the Watch, the company said.
In the past year, companies have released auxiliary devices that can be used with smartphones to record and transcribe meetings. Granola said it considered it easier to develop an app for Apple Watches rather than integrate with another hardware product at this point. Dictation app Monlogue earlier this year also added support for meeting note-taking, for both online and offline modalities, along with Apple Watch support.
Granola became a unicorn earlier this year with a $125 million Series C round that was led by Index Ventures.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Mets rack up 19 hits, 14 runs in demolition of Braves
Brandon Lowe’s heroics help Pirates down Diamondback in 10
