Canada's AI Innovators Creating breakthroughs in Canada and beyond Waabi: Revolutionizing autonomous transportation through Physical AI Twenty-seven years ago, long before the rest of the world caught on, Raquel Urtasun began building a new kind of artificial intelligence. Meet Raquel Urtasun Founder and CEO, Waabi What researchers now call Physical AI: systems and machines that can perceive, reason and act with the world around them. This technology can act and learn like humans do—generalizing from very few examples, scaling across environments, and adapting to new conditions faster than anything the industry has seen before. The applications are vast. But when Urtasun looked for where that work could have the greatest impact, the answer was clear: self-driving vehicles. Transportation moves everything. People, food, medicine, the raw materials of daily life. And it was breaking. Long-haul trucking faces a growing driver shortage. Urban roads are increasingly congested and inefficient. The systems that move people and goods are straining under their own weight. "This is where machines can really come to our rescue," Urtasun says. So she built Waabi. Based in Toronto, the company is pioneering Physical AI by taking a fundamentally different approach, starting with autonomous vehicles like long-haul trucks and robotaxis. Where others spent years hand-coding rules for every driving scenario, Urtasun and her team at Waabi built an AI system that learns, one that can adapt to new conditions, scale faster, and reach markets sooner. She named it after the Ojibwe word meaning "she has vision," a tribute from an immigrant to the original inhabitants of the land where she chose to build. "I wanted to honour that connection," she says. "And it reflects what we're doing: bringing a completely new vision to solving self-driving.” Breaking away from the road-testing trap The traditional approach to self-driving technology was focused on