Raquel Urtasun

Raquel Urtasun is the Founder and CEO of Waabi, the leader in Physical AI. Raquel is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and co-founded the Vector Institute for AI. Over her 25 year career within AI, she has been the recipient of several high profile and prestigious awards including a Longuet-Higgins Prize (test of time award), an Everingham Prize, an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, two NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Awards, three Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Faculty Research Award, two Best Paper Awards at CVPR, the leading conference in computer vision, and more. In 2026, she was named to the Inc. Female Founders List and was named a fellow of The Royal Society. In 2025, she was included on Fast Company’s AI 20 and The Observer’s Power Index. In 2024, she was named a fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. In 2023, she was awarded the Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s Emerging Tech CEO Award, Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI (2023) and the Order of Ontario, the highest civilian honor in the province. She has published more than 200 papers in AI, which have been cited more than 100,000 times, giving her an h-index of 132, and she has filed more than 150 patents in AI for self-driving. Prior to founding Waabi, Raquel was the Chief Scientist and Head of R&D at Uber ATG and a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision. Raquel received her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2006 and did her postdoc at MIT and UC Berkeley.