Uber hires University of Toronto AI expert Raquel Urtasun to oversee development of new AI research lab in Canada
Uber is hiring Raquel Urtasun, a prominent artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Toronto, as the ride-hailing company aims to build a lab for driverless car research …
Context & Ripple Effects
Uber has spent two years assembling its autonomy research operation piece by piece: first the raid that pulled 50 robotics experts out of Carnegie Mellon, then the acquisition of Geometric Intelligence to stand up A.I. Labs under Gary Marcus and Zoubin Ghahramani, alongside a university partnership in Arizona. Hiring Raquel Urtasun extends that playbook into Toronto, home to one of the deepest academic AI talent pools in North America.
The hire matters because it anchors Uber's driverless-car ambitions in Canada rather than Pittsburgh alone — and the arc runs long: Uber later commits $150M over five years to its Toronto engineering hub, and Urtasun herself eventually leaves to launch self-driving startup Waabi on a $100M CAD Series A.
First-order effects
- The University of Toronto loses one of its most prominent computer-vision researchers to industry, while Uber gains a lab lead with direct access to Toronto's academic pipeline.
Second-order effects
- Uber's Toronto bet compounds — the company follows up with a five-year, $150M commitment to expand the hub and its self-driving operations there, making the city a second center of gravity for its autonomy work.
Third-order effects
- Corporate labs pulling star academics into dedicated autonomy research becomes the standard structure — and the reverse flow matters too, as lab veterans like Urtasun spin their research programs out as funded startups rather than staying put.
The trend: Ride-hailing and tech giants are institutionalizing autonomous-driving research by recruiting star university researchers into dedicated corporate labs, seeding both national AI hubs and the next generation of self-driving startups.