Uber Freight CEO joins self-driving truck company Waabi, says era of autonomous big rigs on U.S. roads is here
Raquel Urtasun (L), Waabi founder and CEO, and Lior Ron (R), who has joined Waabi as chief operating officer after growing Uber Freight to a $5 billion revenue company.
Waabi
Lior Ron, founder and CEO of Uber Freight, is joining self-driving truck startup Waabi as chief operating officer.
The move, Ron says, is based on his belief that the era of autonomous big rigs on the roads at scale is here, with the freight industry to be transformed by the economics of driverless technology in the semi cab.
“The first decade of my career in logistics was building Uber Freight, putting the rails in place to usher in the era of digitalization for logistics,” Ron said. “It’s time to focus on the most fundamental shift of the next decade, which is automation. I can’t think of something that will be as helpful to the next era of logistics and innovation and how goods are being moved. The technology is now here,” he added.
Waabi expects fully driverless trucks to be handling freight routes across the U.S. Southwest by the end of the year. The region was chosen as the first area of the nation to deploy the technology at scale due to the massive amount of freight that travels in the Sun Belt, from states including Texas and Arizona to California, and the lack of severe weather conditions like snow and ice (removing one variable for the autonomous technology to navigate). But Ron said the goal is to cover all of North America with driverless freight trucks over the next five years.
Ron will remain chairman of Uber Freight, with Rebecca Tinucci, current head of Uber’s electrification strategy and former Tesla charging business leader, taking over as CEO.
Ron grew Uber Freight to a $5 billion annual revenue business over the past decade, working with one-third of Fortune 500 shippers, according to the company, and managing close to $20 billion in freight overall for clients including Colgate, Nestle, and Anheuser-Busch InBev.
The ties between Ron and Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun (the two executives have known each other for a decade) — and between Waabi and Uber — are longstanding. Urtasun worked at Uber in an advanced technology unit before founding Waabi. Uber is a major investor in her company, and Uber Freight has been a key partner in testing Waabi’s autonomous trucking technology on the roads, with a program underway in Texas since 2023 and an existing goal of deploying across billions of miles. Commercial loads are currently carried by Waabi trucks between Dallas and Houston.
“Over the last four years, we’ve focused on the product development and R&D, and now we’re entering the commercialization phase,” said Urtasun, who added that Ron will be focused on the “go-to-market strategy, foundational partnerships such as Uber Freight that push the company to the next level, new partnerships, and positioning the business to scale.
Waabi ranked No. 35 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list.
Currently, Waabi’s approach has included drivers in the cabs as part of its testing phase. But Ron said by the end of the year, there will be no driver on board the vehicles. “It has been four years since Waabi’s inception and it’s go time,” he said. “We start with specific routes and scale fast across multiple customers,” he said, including Uber Freight.
Truck OEMs, such as Volvo (with which Waabi already has a deal), are already making the investments, “gearing up and leaning all in,” Ron said. Now, he added, “It’s about the people who buy the trucks.”
Ron expects a relatively fast adoption cycle — among both logistics firms looking to replenish freight fleets and shippers, such as major retailers, with their own trucking assets and operations. Current constraints in the freight trucking sector will serve as tailwinds to adoption, he said. Traditional freight trucks can move cargo seven to eight hours a day, with autonomous trucks able to more than double that with the costs associated with a driver, and with a better safety profile and greater fuel efficiency.
In five years time, Ron says, driverless freight trucks will be “a common sight across the U.S. in the supply chain, and especially in the Sunbelt corridors.”
Self-driving AI company Waabi is teaming with existing investor Volvo for development and deployment of autonomous trucks.
Waabi
While much of the public focus on self-driving remains on the novelty of Waymos and Tesla robotaxis (Texas and Arizona are key test markets for these companies as well), the Waabi executives say the costs in the freight trucking industry make a much stronger case for the deployment at scale.
“Costs always come down with scale,” Ron said, and he contends that autonomous freight will allow customers to recoup their investment “faster than any other investment in a trucking fleet.”
For truck drivers, the jobs won’t disappear overnight, and with an average age of a truck driver in the U.S. around 55, according to Ron, the next decade will provide the time for those already in the career to remain in their jobs. The Waabi executives do expect more driving jobs in the future to be within last-mile delivery, which is a more complex task for autonomous systems to master, and for there to be the emergence of new technician jobs related to autonomous freight operations.
They also noted that there is a longstanding shortage of truck drivers in the U.S., a sign that long haul is not a highly sought career option. “No one wants to be a long haul trucker,” said Urtasun. “This is not something humans should be doing, but as the labor shifts, it will done over a period of time, so not a massive disruption,” she added.
Self-driving regulation is still primarily handled at the state level, one reason Texas has featured in Waabi’s early days, but Urtasun said a recent meeting she attended with Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy indicated a “willingness to get a federal framework to enable a faster, more simple path to commercialize this technology.”
“All the benefits are clear and the U.S. wants to maintain the leadership position here, and this administration wants to double down in making that possible, but it does remain state-by-state policy,” she said.
Waabi refers to itself as a “physical AI” company, with the ultimate goal of having its systems deployed beyond trucks, whether in robotaxis, warehouse robots or humanoid robots. “It’s clear to us that at the right time we will do more than trucks,” Urtasun said.
But the goal right now, she said, is to build the autonomous trucking business to scale and grow the revenue stream upon commercialization. There are no current plans to pursue an initial public offering. “Lots of people are courting Waabi for our next series, but our capital efficiency enables us to not need to raise capital. We don’t have plans now to IPO,” she said. “The first mission is to bring the solution to market,” she added.
In addition to Uber, Waabi is backed by Khosla Ventures, Nvidia, Volvo Group Venture Capital, and Porsche Automobil, among others.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum attend the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
China has told companies to refrain from using Nvidia‘s H20 chips after the chipmaker recently received approval to resume shipping the less advanced artificial intelligence product, Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Authorities have recently told companies to avoid using the Nvidia chips, or those from Advanced Micro Devices, for government and national security use cases, according to the news outlet.
The report comes after the White House confirmed on Monday that both Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give 15% of all China revenues to the U.S. government.
Last month, both companies said they would soon resume China shipments after the administration started requiring export licenses earlier this year. Both Nvidia’s H20 chip and AMD’s MI380 were created to work around previous AI chip restrictions to China due to national security fears.
Shares of both stocks teetered on Tuesday.
During a press conference Monday, Trump called Nvidia’s H20 chip “obsolete” and said he wouldn’t allow the higher-end Blackwell shipments there without 30% to 50% decrease in performance.
China is a key market for AI chipmakers such as Nvidia and AMD.
Earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said getting pushed out of the China market would be a “tremendous loss” for the company. He estimated the country’s AI market will hit $50 billion over the next two to three years.
Over the weekend, a social media account connected to Chinese state media said that the H20 chips were not “safe.”
One-day stock chart of Nvidia and AMD.
The Perplexity app in the Apple App Store on a smartphone arranged in Washington, DC, US, on Sunday, June 1, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI has made an unsolicited $34.5 billion bid for Google’s Chrome browser, CNBC confirmed on Tuesday.
That figure is higher than Perplexity’s current valuation, but the company said several investors have agreed to back the deal. In July, Perplexity was valued at $18 billion as part of an extension that valued the company at $14 billion months earlier.
Google did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. The Wall Street Journal was first to report the bid.
Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. Last month, it launched its own AI-powered browser called Comet.
The startup is in the middle of a battle for supremacy in generative AI, with companies including Meta and OpenAI offering massive salaries and signing bonuses to top engineers. Megacap tech companies are spending tens of billions of dollars a year on AI infrastructure to build large language models and run hefty workloads, while startups are raising billions of dollars from venture investors, hedge funds and tech giants to pay for the hardware and headcount needed to compete.
Perplexity was approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.
Perpexity’s bid comes after the U.S. Department of Justice proposed Google divest Chrome as part of the antitrust suit the company lost last year. The judge in the case ruled that Google has held an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search.
In response, Google said the DOJ was pushing “a radical interventionist agenda,” and that the agency’s proposal was “wildly overbroad.” The company has not yet disclosed how it plans to adjust its business following the antitrust ruling.
Chrome, which Google launched in 2008, provides the search giant with data it then uses for targeting ads. The DOJ said in a filing following the court’s decision that forcing the company to get rid of Chrome would create a more equal playing field for search competitors.
“To remedy these harms, the [Initial Proposed Final Judgment] requires Google to divest Chrome, which will permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet,” the DOJ wrote.
Perplexity’s bid for Chrome is not the first time it’s taken a big swing.
The startup submitted a proposal to merge with the short-form video app TikTok in January. TikTok’s future in the U.S. has been uncertain since 2024, when Congress passed a bill that would ban the platform unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divested from it.
As of August, Perplexity’s proposed structure has not materialized.
WATCH: Perplexity makes unsolicited $34.5 billion bid for Google’s Chrome browser
Technology
Tesla is hiring robotaxi test drivers in New York City, but company hasn’t applied for permits
A Tesla robotaxi drives on the street along South Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas, U.S., June 22, 2025.
Joel Angel Juarez | Reuters
Tesla is recruiting test drivers in New York to operate cars with “automated driving systems,” but the company hasn’t applied for the permits it would need to test autonomous vehicles in the nation’s largest city.
A job opening on Tesla’s website says the company is looking to hire vehicle operators in the borough of Queens. The hires will be “responsible for driving an engineering vehicle for extended periods, conducting dynamic audio and camera data collection for testing and training purposes.”
A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Transportation told CNBC on Monday that Tesla has not applied for approvals to test AVs on city streets in New York. InsideEVs, an electric vehicles news site, previously reported that Tesla was hiring test drivers for its robotaxis in Brooklyn.
Any company that obtains a permit to test AVs in New York has to keep “a trained safety driver behind the wheel, ready to take control of an AV-enabled vehicle at all times,” according to the DOT spokesperson.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Alphabet’s Waymo, the robotaxi leader in North America, has applied to test its AVs in New York, but its application remains under review, the DOT said Monday.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been trying to sell investors on a future for his company that’s built around AI and robotics, rather than sales of its existing vehicles. But Tesla still earns almost all of its revenue from sales of EVs and battery energy storage systems.
Tesla’s EV sales have been on the decline this year, especially in Europe, partly due to Musk’s decision to focus on the Cybertruck, rather than producing a more affordable EV with mainstream appeal. Some of the company’s struggles are the result of a political backlash against Tesla because of Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric, work with President Donald Trump, and endorsements of Germany’s anti-immigrant AfD party.
Along with its recruiting efforts in Queens, Tesla is also seeking to hire test drivers for its Autopilot team to gather data from drives in cities and suburbs of Dallas, Houston, Tampa, Orlando and Miami, as well as Palo Alto, California, home to Tesla’s engineering headquarters.
The current listings on Tesla’s website say Autopilot vehicle operators may need to travel to international and domestic destinations and must be familiar with “automated driving systems,” suggesting planned or ongoing testing of Tesla’s robotaxi and FSD or Full Self Driving system, currently marketed as FSD Unsupervised in the U.S.
Tesla notched a win in Texas last week, obtaining a permit to run a ride-hailing service in the state. The Tesla Robotaxi LLC permit and state regulations do not require Tesla to keep a human safety driver on board.
However, Tesla has been operating a fleet of robotaxis in Austin since late June, with employees riding in the front passenger seat, tasked with manually intervening during a trip if necessary. The service has only been accessible to invited users. Musk said in a post on X over the weekend that he intends for the Austin service to open to the general public next month.
In San Francisco, Tesla is also operating a limited, manned car service but promoting it as “autonomous ride-hailing.”
Musk posted last week that the company is “working as quickly as possible to get 100+ Teslas operating for autonomous ride-hailing (can’t use the word “taxi” or “cab” in California) in the Bay Area and allow anyone to request a ride.”
The company is not authorized to carry passengers on public roads in autonomous vehicles in California, the California Public Utilities Commission told CNBC in a recent email.
Tesla’s approach to AVs has drawn federal probes, product liability lawsuits and recalls following injurious or damaging collisions that occurred while drivers were using the company’s Autopilot or FSD systems.
The California DMV previously sued Tesla, accusing it of false advertising around its driver assistance systems.
While Tesla owners manuals say the Autopilot and FSD features in their cars are “hands on” systems that require a driver ready to steer or brake at any time, Tesla and Musk have shared statements through the years saying that a Tesla can “drive itself.”
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