The Self-Driving Startup Nobody Saw Coming | E2289
May 15, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readThe episode examines how two self-driving companies, Wave and Wabi, have pursued scalable autonomy through similar technical and commercial choices. Both built on end-to-end learning systems and world models at a time when those methods faced skepticism. Their leaders describe decisions around generalization, simulation, licensing models, and capital deployment that shape their paths toward consumer vehicles and robotaxis.
Technical foundations and simulation priorities
Wave and Wabi both treat world models as core infrastructure rather than add-ons. These models learn representations of driving environments from large, diverse datasets that include cameras, radar, and lidar. The models function as controllable simulators that generate safety-critical scenarios for training and validation, reducing reliance on real-world miles alone.
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of Smart Money Happy Hour with Rachel Cruze and George Kamel
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (01:18) **Intro to Wave and Alex Kendall** - Host welcomes back the CEO to discuss recent progress in self-driving
- 2 (03:23) **How Wave's world models work** - Explanation of representation learning and simulation benefits
- 3 (07:36) **Sensor flexibility and minimum requirements** - AI driver supports camera, radar, and LiDAR combinations
- 4 (09:32) **Partnerships and deployment timeline** - Supervised robo-taxi trials and consumer vehicle integrations
- 5 (11:08) **Current state of self-driving** - Economic scaling remains unsolved despite technical progress
- 6 (12:09) **Wave's licensing business model** - Contrarian approach of licensing to any OEM or fleet
- 7 (14:21) **Risk assessment: science vs execution** - Scientific risk largely cleared for hands-off systems
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
IM8 Health: IM8health.com/TWIST
Squarespace: Squarespace.com/TWIST
Render - Render.com/TWIST
Self-driving just stopped being a science problem and became an engineering challenge instead. That's the through-line of today’s double-header with the CEOs of two of the most important AV companies in the world — Wayve's Alex Kendall and Waabi's Raquel Urtasun. Between them: ~$2B raised in the last six months, Uber as a partner, Nissan and Volvo as OEMs, and a shared bet that end-to-end AI plus world models beats Waymo's city-by-city map-and-pray approach.
If you want to understand the state of the self-driving industry beyond recent Waymo announcements, this is the episode for you.
Guest Links:
Wayve: wayve.ai/
Waabi: http://waabi.ai/
Alex Kendall https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgkendall/
Raquel Uratsun: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raquel-urtasun-298400139/
Company Links:
Wayve’s GAIA-2 world model: https://wayve.ai/thinking/gaia-2/
Wayve’s 500 city roadshow: https://wayve.ai/thinking/ai-500-roadshow-500-cities/
Wavye’s most recent funding round: https://wayve.ai/press/series-d/
Waybe + Uber: https://wayve.ai/press/wayve-nissan-uber-robotaxi-collaboration/
Waabi closed-loop simulator: https://waabi.ai/insights/waabi-world
Waabi + Uber: More from this podcast