Women are Rarely Founders of AI Companies

It's a gross understatement to say that AI is a male dominated field, but could it be changing? Women are flooding into AI and the world is changing faster than we might expect.

'This is a combination of my 20-year career in AI as well as more than 10 years in self-driving'

Raquel Urtasun starts Toronto self-driving company Waabi

There's a lot of buzz in the robo-taxi space inspite of a lack of real significant progress. The bottlenecks are almost begging for new innovation to occur.

• Waymo got $2.5 Billion more funding
• Cruise has a $5 Billion line of credit before rolling out its Robo-taxi service
• Luminar Technologies unveiled its “Blade” self-driving sensor architecture?

A lot is happening under the hood of self-driving vehicles and the robo-taxis as late to the party. Make that about another 10 years late!

This enables newer companies with fresh ideas on how to solve the bottlenecks some time to get new startups together. Raquel Urtasun might have some fresh ideas in AI to enable self-driving cars to happen. She aims to create an autonomous driving platform capable of complex reasoning.

Urtasun, who is considered a pioneer in AI, led the R&D efforts as a chief scientist at Uber ATG, which was acquired by Aurora (who are imho likely to be acquired by Amazon) in December. Six months later, we have Waabi. The company’s?mission is to take an AI-first approach to solving self-driving technology.?

I really like this story! Here we have a Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) luminary Raquel Urtasun moving on from Uber’s self-driving unit and launching her own company with the goal of disrupting the autonomous driving landscape. The Toronto AI scene is for real in 2022.

She Has a Vision - How Waabi is Special

In 2021 it's been the summer of Canadian IPOs. Canada is suddenly having quite a good pipeline of AI companies. Urtasun’s new company, Waabi, comes out of stealth with over $100 million CAD ($83.5 million USD) in initial capital. The Series A round marks one of the largest rounds of initial financing ever raised by a Canadian startup.

So who supports women in AI these days? The round was led by Khosla Ventures, which has invested in the likes of Square, Stripe, and DoorDash, as well as Canadian startups like Wattpad and Deep Genomics.?Waabi won't be the first company (Wayve comes to mind) to decide to take an AI-first approach to the problem.

So how is she qualified to be a founder in this area? Urtasun way more qualified than most founders in the space. Urtasun launched Waabi in January (2021) after departing Uber ATG. Urtasun had been working with Uber’s self-driving unit?since 2017?as both chief scientist and head of Uber ATG’s research and development (R&D) lab, which was based in Toronto.

Urtasun is considered an expert in the field, with some of her accolades including awards from Google, Amazon, NVIDIA. She is also a professor at The University of Toronto’s Department of Computer Science and one of the co-founders of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Other backers include Uber, and Aurora, the AV startup that ended up acquiring Uber ATG in a deal last year. Funding was also raised from 8VC, Radical Ventures, Omers Ventures, BDC, AI luminaries Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Pieter Abbeel, Sanja Fidler, and others.

According to the Verge, Waabi’s approach will be to focus on trucking, using its proprietary software to automate driving on commercial delivery routes.?The self-driving of Trucking really makes sense also since there is a shortage of drivers in some parts of North America, while other truckers will retire in the coming years and it's easier to automate.

So why in 2021? With its innovative (AI-first) approach to simulation and machine learning, Waabi says it’s poised to commercialize its technology faster and cheaper than most of the AV startups working today.

I love her emphasis of AI as their leading edge. Her company, Waabi, is really taking full advantage of the power of AI to bring self-driving closer to commercialization than ever before. Waabi has raised $83.5 million. With a startup headcount of 40+, Waabi means “she has vision” in Ojibwe and “simple” in Japanese — hints at her approach and ambitions.

Waabi's emergence is twofold and I may not have explained this properly before. There's that “incredible” shortage of truck drivers, which Urtasun said could be rectified by the rapid deployment of fully autonomous big-rigs. The second is that highways are “simpler” than complex city streets for autonomous vehicles to navigate.

I'm very excited to see more women leading AI, since I feel white-male dominance has led to some bad outcomes so far. It's not just about the science or engineering, it's also about how women run companies and board rooms differently (and actually better). We live in an age of corporate social responsibility, of ESG and of making a difference in inclusion and creating healthy companies within and without. Obviously we need more female founders to meet the demand of the challenges we are facing at scale.

As quoted in TechCrunch, Urtasun says she solved these lingering problems (of why self-driving AI is not so good yet) around deep nets by combining them with probabilistic inference and complex optimization, which she describes as a family of algorithms. When combined, the developer can trace back the decision process of the AI system and incorporate prior knowledge so they don’t have to teach the AI system everything from scratch.

Waabi's AI simulator may turn out to be better. ?The simulator that will allow the Waabi team to test at scale common driving scenarios and safety-critical edge cases. If your AI is better, it won't matter just who has the most miles training on real roads (Waymo or Baidu or Cruise or xyz).

Waabi might bring a piece of the puzzle to market that could be acquired by Aurora or another AI robo-taxi stack maker eventually. Urtasun said. “The field is in need of a diverse set of approaches to solve this and it became very clear that this was the way to go.” Thankfully more female founders in AI is part of our future.

Female founders, journalists and peak performers in any industry unfortunately also face more opposition, criticism and barriers than their male counterparts. How good of an engineer does Urtasun even have to be to be able to found her own AI startup?

She's clearly one of the best in the world at what she does. So long as we have a white male VC culture in Silicon Valley and America in general, women founders won't flourish here. Let me be really clear here, the VC community and culture is totally the most significant barrier. But more women go into engineering and AI every day in the 2020s, and fair access to leadership in tech for women ends the day they start their own companies.

Waabi, might just be a trail-blazer. In more ways than one. In Canada, few young people want to be truck drivers any longer. Canada is expected to have a shortage of more than 25,000 truck drivers by 2023, a 25 per cent increase from the 2019 vacancies, a study from the Canadian Trucking Alliance and the Conference Board of Canada found.

While we might have to wait 10 years later than many predicted (2035) for robo-taxis to disrupt transportation and car ownership at scale but it's the TAM of the market that's so impressive. The global autonomous vehicles market presents a sizeable market opportunity, with?expectations?it will reach $325.9 billion USD by the end of 2030.