The road to self-driving commercialization
By: Omers Ventures
Tags: Startups, AI, Autonomous Vehicles, Autonomous Driving, Venture Capital

Written by Shawn Chance, Partner, OMERS Ventures

It’s not a question of whether or not self-driving will reach mass adoption: it’s a question of when, and perhaps more interestingly for investors, how.

I like to think of self-driving as one of the rare and radical tectonic shifts that will inevitably shape the way many industries operate. In the modern era, it sits alongside important R&D-intensive sectors such as quantum computing, genome sequencing and blockchain.

If we look back at history, we can see that important technologies tend to evolve following a non-linear pattern:

The evolution of telephones

In the example above, the telephone industry began with landlines and static terminals and evolved into what is essentially pocket computing today. Along the way, many important and revolutionary companies were created, bought and sold (Bell, AT&T and Nokia to name a few).

Looking at the automotive industry (which started with horse-drawn carriages), I believe the commercialization of this latest phase (self-driving) will continue to follow this non-linear path.

The evolution of mobility

The road ahead

At the time of writing this, we’re entering an extremely exciting phase of the technology cycle around self-driving vehicles. Commercial deployment is starting to come into view and as that happens, abundant opportunities are being created for numerous companies to build significant businesses by developing new approaches, specializing in different areas and partnering with each other to broaden the value that self-driving tech can unlock.

The application set is so vast (including everything from passenger vehicles to long haul trucking to last mile delivery robots), the problems so complex and important (when things go wrong, people’s lives are at risk) that a diverse set of technological approaches will be required.

For as much progress as we’ve made towards a self-driving future, there remains a lot of open questions around how true self-driving (also known as “Level 5 autonomy”, when no human attention is required for the vehicle to get from A to B) will reach the general population.

It is with a great deal of excitement that we have decided to invest in Waabi Technologies and to collaborate with long-time industry veteran Raquel Urtasun. We believe that starting “carte-blanche” and using an AI-first approach has the potential to solve many important problems in the self-driving space and to help accelerate the commercialization of this important technology.

Raquel is exactly the type of founder we like to get behind: She has been part of the very construction of what we know to be self-driving today (through her work at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group and Aurora), she has contributed extensively to developing foundational technologies (with over 130 published papers on self-driving) and is active in the local community (as a professor at U of Toronto). Moreover, she’s building a diverse, world class team and has chosen Toronto for the company’s headquarters.

This last point is of particular interest, both to me personally and to OMERS Ventures. As we think about “the moment” we believe Canada is having, it’s particularly interesting to see companies like Waabi establishing its foundational roots here in Toronto. It’s a testament to the level of talent that is already present in this country, but will also serve as inspiration for a new generation of up-and-coming leaders. If there were ever a time to be bullish on the future of Canada’s tech ecosystem, it’s now and we are thrilled to be part of its story.