Uber and Chinese autonomous vehicle technology company WeRide plan to expand a commercial robotaxi partnership and bring the service to another 15 cities over the next five years. The expansion comes five months after the two companies launched a commercial robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi. 

As part of that expansion, Uber will increase its investment into WeRide by $100 million, according to a Wednesday regulatory filing. WeRide said it expects the cash to come through by the second half of 2025.

The companies said the expansion will include cities in Europe. Under the partnership, WeRide’s robotaxi services are available through the Uber app. The relationship is similar to Uber’s deal with Waymo, in which the ride-hailing company handles the network routing and fleet operations, while the autonomous vehicle company remains responsible for the AV tech.

Uber and WeRide, which went public on the Nasdaq in late October, operate together in Abu Dhabi and announced plans to add Dubai. In Abu Dhabi, they work with local Tawasul Transport to handle fleet operations.

The additional 15 cities will focus on cities outside of China and the United States.

Uber has locked up more than 15 partnerships with a wide-range of autonomous vehicle technology companies over the past two years across ride-hailing, delivery, and trucking. In the past two months, Uber has announced deals with Ann Arbor, Michigan-based May Mobility  Volkswagen, and Chinese self-driving firm Momenta.

It’s most high-profile partnership in the U.S. — and one that is commercially operating today — is with Waymo. The companies offer a Waymo on Uber service in Austin and are about to do the same in Atlanta.

This story was originally published May 5. It has been refreshed with Uber’s capital commitment to WeRide.

A team at Hugging Face has released a freely available, cloud-hosted computer-using AI “agent.” But be forewarned: It’s quite sluggish and occasionally makes mistakes.

Hugging Face’s agent, called Open Computer Agent, is accessible via the web and can use a Linux virtual machine preloaded with several applications, including Firefox. Similar to OpenAI’s Operator, you can prompt Open Computer Agent to complete a task — say, “Use Google Maps to find the Hugging Face HQ in Paris” — and sit back as the agent opens the necessary programs and figures out the required steps.

Open Computer Agent can handle simple requests well enough. But more complicated ones, like searching for flights, tripped it up in TechCrunch’s testing. Open Computer Agent also often runs into CAPTCHA tests that it’s unable to solve.

You’ll also have to wait in a virtual queue to use Open Computer Agent — a queue seconds to minutes long, depending on demand.

Of course, the Hugging Face team’s goal wasn’t to build a state-of-the-art computer-using agent. Rather, they wanted to demonstrate that open AI models are becoming more capable — and cheaper to run on cloud infrastructure.

“As vision models become more capable, they become able to power complex agentic workflows,” Aymeric Roucher, a member of the agents team at Hugging Face, wrote in a post on X. “[Some of these models] support built-in grounding, i.e. [the] ability to locate any element in an image by its coordinates, [and] thus [can] click any item [in a virtual machine].”

While it’s far from perfect, agentic technology is attracting increasing investment as enterprises look to adopt it to boost productivity. According to a recent KPMG survey, 65% of companies are experimenting with AI agents. Markets and Markets projects that the AI agent segment will grow from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030.

The autonomous navigation market — where ships, guided by AI, steer themselves, resulting in fuel and time savings — is projected to sail past $11 billion by 2028. As a result, companies in this space are pushing on an open door. The latest is Orca AI, which closed a Series B funding round of $72.5 million led by Brighton Park Capital. Existing investors Ankona Capital and Hyperlink Ventures also participated. The London-based company has now raised over $111 million, including a $23 million funding round last year.

So what drove the new round? In a word: defense. 

Founded in 2018 by CEO Yarden Gross and CTO Dor Raviv, Orca AI applies AI-powered decision making and autonomous capabilities to ships based on a marine visual dataset of over 80 million nautical miles. By employing AI in navigation, it’s possible to significantly reduce collisions and allow crews to focus attention on other aspects of the voyage.

“The main business still is in the commercial sector. We already have collaborations and POCs,” Gross told TechCrunch. “But we see opportunities in defense coming from navies around the world around autonomy,”| he added, “where they want more cost-effective assets that can operate more efficiently with less human intervention. We’ve already signed the first contract in the defense field, deployed on a navy ship.”

Orca’s growth is also benefiting from the expansion of Starlink, which allows real-time data to be transmitted to Orca AI for mapping routes, traffic monitoring, and sharing critical information. 

“Starlink enables us to collect data at scale directly from the ship sensor. We see that as a huge opportunity,” Gross said.

The company claims that a 2024 analysis of Orca AI’s alerts system showed a 54% reduction in close encounter events leading to an average of $100,000 savings in fuel per vessel per year.

Other companies working on autonomous navigation at sea include Avikus (subsidiary of Hyundai HD) and Sea Machines.