In early June, after several years of delays, Germany, Italy, France and 15 other European Union countries signed a joint declaration<\/a> to coordinate autonomous vehicle testing across borders, intended to facilitate the regulatory path and adoption of the technology across Europe.<\/p>\n Uber has placed bets on a few AI autonomous technology companies that could compete with the likes of Waymo and jump-start a larger-scale commercial rollout of autonomous vehicles, which has been harder than anticipated due to high costs, safety issues, and tight regulations. Among other ventures, it has introduced robotaxis with Chinese AI firms WeRide in Spain and Pony.Ai in Croatia, as well as other pilots in the Gulf.<\/p>\n \t Earlier this month, the San Francisco-based company teamed up with Autobrains, the developer of a self-learning artificial intelligence technology for assisted and autonomous driving, for its latest venture, this time in Germany.<\/p>\n Autobrain\u2019s autonomous driving software system takes a different path than other self-driving technologies, relying on several specialized AI agents for the various processes involved in driving, which is meant to create a system that\u2019s both safer and more cost-effective.<\/p>\n \u201cFor automakers and autonomy developers, the challenge is not just building autonomous vehicles \u2014 it\u2019s bringing them into a commercial network where they can reliably serve riders at scale,\u201d said Sarfraz Maredia, Uber\u2019s global head of autonomous mobility and delivery. \u201cThis program creates a new path to do that by combining vehicle-agnostic autonomy, leading AI compute, and Uber\u2019s ride-hailing platform.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n By cutting down on the compute power required to operate the self-driving vehicle, a major barrier to scaling up autonomous driving, the Uber robotaxis planned for Munich will need only an affordable, off-the-shelf mass production Nvidia chip and six cameras that cover the same field of vision as a human would have, according to\u00a0Autobrains founder and CEO Igal Raichelgauz.<\/p>\n \u201cAutonomous driving will not scale by relying on a single model to solve every driving scenario,\u201d said Raichelgauz. \u201cOur autonomous driving system uses AI agents, similar to an array of specialized drivers, that are being called on the fly for assessing different traffic situations on the road and making decisions in real time, whether it is getting into a roundabout, overtaking a truck, or driving on a rainy day on a highway.\u201d<\/p>\n \t Unlike many of its competitors, which rely on a single, monolithic AI model that handles all driving tasks, Autobrains uses an array of specialized AI agents that work together to guide the vehicles using standard \u200bautomotive \u2060sensors. One agent senses and evaluates what is happening around the car, while another uses reason to assess risks involved in any move, and another selects responses in real-time.<\/p>\n Other systems, like Mobileye, Israel\u2019s leading maker of self-driving car technologies, use machine learning, teaching and training computers to recognize objects and scenarios by feeding them millions of images and data. The process is labor-intensive and needs very high computational power.<\/p>\n Raichelgauz argued that Autobrains\u2019 orchestrated system can handle road uncertainty more accurately and safely than the other model.<\/p>\n \u201cEven the most expensive and advanced system, like Waymo, cannot reason beyond what it was shown or trained, and that\u2019s the gap that we are closing with agentic AI and the common sense embedded in those agents,\u201d said Raichelgauz. \u201cOur system is designed to learn and improve through reasoning and thinking, not heavy data, or compute.\u201d<\/p>\n Mor Kaspi, head of the Shlomo Shmeltzer Institute for Smart Transportation at Tel Aviv University, cautioned that the issues involved in scaling up autonomous vehicles went far beyond the inner workings of the self-driving system.<\/p>\n \u201cEven if the technology significantly advances the brains of the autonomous vehicles, it\u2019s not enough to get these vehicles on the roads \u2014 the vehicles need to be cheap enough for services to use them, or for the government to invest in them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \t \u201cIn addition, there are also psychological, social, moral. regulatory and legal aspects, and they all need to be resolved in order for us to see autonomous vehicles at large scale on our roads,\u201d Kaspi added.<\/p>\n Raichelgauz said the Autobrains system does not require a specialized vehicle outfitted with custom sensors, and also provides other cost savings.<\/p>\n \u201cOur autonomous driving technology can be installed in a regular car, doesn\u2019t depend on a fleet of custom vehicles, and removes the need for heavy and expensive sensor stacks, or any prerequisite to do infrastructure work like high-definition mapping, which are cost barriers for commercializing robotaxis at scale,\u201d he said. \u201cFor the mapping, we use AI technology that matches aerial satellite imagery with vehicle camera data.\u201d<\/p>\n Autobrains was founded in 2019 by Raichelgauz as a spinoff from the Cortica Group, an autonomous AI tech firm he co-founded with Karina Odinaev, a specialist in brain sciences, alongside computer vision and neuroscience professor Josh Zeevi.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea was to develop AI for the physical world based on the human brain,\u201d said Raichelgauz,\u00a0a graduate in electrical engineering from Haifa\u2019s Technion \u2013 Israel Institute of Technology and a veteran of the Israeli army\u2019s elite 8200 tech unit. \u201cOne of its key characteristics is that it\u2019s not one neural network, but a lot of specialized networks, and there is an orchestration process going on, and so the whole inspiration for our technology is modelled on neuron activity and learning mechanisms occurring in the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n \t With operations in Tel Aviv and Munich, Autobrains employs about 100 AI experts coming from backgrounds in neuroscience, quantum physics, autonomous driving, and software development. To date, the startup has raised about $140 million from investors including Temasek, BMW i Ventures, Toyota Ventures, Continental, Knorr-Bremse, and VinFast.<\/p>\n The Munich pilot is meant to serve as a testing springboard to develop a model for the rollout of autonomous robotaxi fleets in several dozen cities worldwide, pending regulatory approvals, safety certifications, and assuming the tech works and is economically viable.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a plan that by 2028 to scale to 20 cities and Munich is a good benchmark,\u201d said Raichelgauz. \u201cThe focus for us will be heavily on Europe and South Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/AP9990848063923127-640x400.jpg\")
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\n\t\tIllustration of WeRide and Uber\u2019s Robotaxi GXR in Madrid, Spain. (Business Wire)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Igal-Raichelgauz-Autobrains-Founder-CEO.jpg-300x480.jpeg\")
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\n\t\tAutobrains founder and CEO Igal Raichelgauz. (Courtesy of Autobrains)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/AP23077013488725-640x400.jpg\")
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\n\t\tPassengers try to figure out why a Waymo driverless taxi won\u2019t move while traffic backs up behind it in San Francisco, February 15, 2023. (AP Photo\/Terry Chea)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/mobileye-robotaxi-640x400.jpg\")
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\n\t\tAn autonomous taxi powered by Mobileye\u2019s driving tech with Moovit\u2019s ride-hailing app in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, September 2021. (Mobileye\/Intel)<\/p>\n
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