Rivian buys London's Third Dimension, a 15-person world-model startup, to build its robotaxi simulator
What's the deal? Rivian has acquired Third DimensionDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a London startup that uses AI to turn images and video into lifelike 3D worlds, TechCrunch reported on 22 October. Terms were not disclosed. The 15-person team, most of whom are based in the UK, joins Rivian's autonomy and AI team led by James Philbin, who said the deal also lets Rivian expand its AI hub in London.
Who's who? CEO Tolga Kart and Piotr Sokólski founded Third Dimension in 2024, drawing on backgrounds in gaming and autonomous vehicles. It raised a $7 million seed round from investors including Abstract Ventures, MVP, Soma Capital and Solari Capital. Its technology was built to speed up video game development, and the founders saw defence and self-driving as other uses.
Why Rivian wants it: Driving simulators built on game engines and synthetic data never quite match the real world. Rivian receives more than 400,000 driving sequences a day from its customers' vehicles, Philbin said, and Third Dimension's world models make those real scenes "simulatable": Rivian can move the cameras, shift other road users or change lighting and weather to test rare edge cases without waiting for them to happen on the road.
Why now? Rivian plans to release, by the end of the year, a version of its driver-assistance software that handles whole journeys on surface streets and highways without hands on the wheel (still supervised). It is also working toward full autonomy for robotaxi versions of its R2 SUV, due on the Uber app in 2028.
The signal: World models, AI systems that generate realistic 3D environments, are moving from gaming into physical AI, and carmakers are buying small specialist teams to get them. "As a small company, having to serve many, many different masters is very hard," Kart told TechCrunch.
Source: TechCrunch
Photo: Rivian's Universal Hands-Free driving software (Rivian)
