Longtime entrepreneur and tech leader Joseph Sunga will join autonomous vehicle startup Waabi, part of a growing cohort of Seattle engineers at the Toronto-based startup.
Sunga will be a group product manager, helping the 2-year-old company launch new products. He was most recently a staff product manager at Pittsburgh, Pa.-based self-driving company Aurora.
“Excited to go back to my startup roots, and it’s been inspiring to see such a fresh approach to solving self-driving efficiently and at scale,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
Sunga started as a product manager at TeachStreet, an online marketplace that matched students and teachers, which was acquired by Amazon in 2012. He later joined Seattle startup Mighty AI, which was acquired by Uber in 2019. He joined Aurora after it acquired Uber’s self-driving unit before taking a year-long sabbatical.
Sunga’s move to Waabi comes as the startup is steadily adding Seattle-based employees.
Last year the startup hired Daryn Nakhuda, a longtime startup engineering leader in Seattle, as head of software. Nakhuda co-founded Mighty AI and also joined Aurora after its acquisition of Uber’s self-driving unit.
Waabi in January hired senior software engineer Errol Limenta, previously a software development engineer at Amazon, working on its Scout delivery devices.
In March, it added software engineer Tyler Swayne, a former engineering manager at Seattle-based startup Shelf Engine who also worked at Mighty AI and Uber.
Waabi does not have any “specific targets” for building a team in Seattle, as it is primarily focused on its headquarters locations in Toronto and San Francisco for on-site roles, Nakuda told GeekWire via email.
“That said, we’re always excited to hire top talent where we can find it and currently have a pretty diverse remote team spread across a variety of locations in the U.S. and Canada,” he said.
Wabbi was founded by computer vision expert and former professor Raquel Urtasun, who previously was chief scientist of Uber’s self-driving arm. The startup emerged from stealth mode in 2021 after raising $83.5 million. It was among Canada’s largest funding rounds and included participation from Khosla Ventures, Uber, Aurora, and others.
Wabbi aims to make software to automate trucks on commercial delivery routes. It’s among a bevy of startups in the autonomous trucking space, including well-funded competitors Waymo, TuSimple, Aurora, and others.
