Waabi has announced the appointment of former Uber Freight CEO Lior Ron as the company’s chief operating officer. The appointment comes as Waabi prepares for a driver-out milestone by the end of the year, followed by a commercial launch and scaling operations with major partners including Volvo and Uber Freight.
“This really signifies that Waabi is moving from the R&D phase that we were in into commercialization and scale,” Waabi’s founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun told FreightWaves in an interview. “And there is no other leader that I could think of that would be better suited to partner with in this new journey of the company.”
The transition is part of a broader industry shift from digital logistics solutions to physical autonomous applications. “I think of my first decade in logistics with Uber Freight as building the digital infrastructure of the industry, and helping build that. The next decade is going to be about building the autonomy infrastructure of the industry and making that a commercial reality,” Lior Ron told FreightWaves.
During Ron’s tenure at Uber Freight, he served as founder and CEO, growing the company into an end-to-end logistics platform generating over $5 billion in annual revenue. In his new role at Waabi, Ron will focus on go-to-market strategy, scaling existing partnerships, and bringing new collaborations to the company’s portfolio.
“I think for me, it really starts from the deep belief that autonomy is here and the technology is ready, and it’s time to scale,” Ron told FreightWaves. “It’s time to actually make this a commercial reality, a solution reality, a supply chain reality that will fundamentally alter the shape of supply chain and logistics over the next decade.”
Uber Freight is both a partner and investor in Waabi.
“Uber Freight is a big partner of Waabi. No changes there. We’re looking forward to continuing to scale the Waabi driver on the Uber Freight network, and we see a lot of opportunities to continue that collaboration. So this is definitely sort of done in coordination, but it’s also a personal choice of mine, because, as I articulated, it’s something that I fundamentally believe is the future,” Ron added.
Urtasun added, “We have a partnership with Uber Freight that will continue full steam ahead as well. We’ll go to market. It’s more than Uber Freight—you know, direct-to-customer is important for us as well. But we fundamentally believe that Uber Freight is a great partner in our future.”
The appointment follows several major Waabi milestones, including a strategic partnership with Volvo Autonomous Solutions and technical breakthroughs in simulation technology. Waabi World, the company’s neural simulator, recently achieved a 99.7% simulation realism score, while the company also unveiled Mixed Reality Testing as an alternative to closed-course testing.
For the team at Waabi, the timing could not have been better, as both OEMs and autonomous technology companies appear to be converging on timelines for mass production and commercialization over the next two years. The next challenge, and one Ron hopes to tackle, is turning that technology into an operational reality.
“The time to engage on that is now, because that technology is ready. Autonomy is ready for prime time. Driver-out soon. Truck OEMs are ready, and they’re all making their own plans on when they’re going to start mass production, but it’s going to be in the foreseeable near future. So if you’re looking at a 12- to 24-month purchasing decision cycle in logistics by big shippers and big carriers,” said Ron.
