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EV maker Rivian has acquired Third Dimension, a U.K. startup founded by veterans of the gaming and autonomous vehicle industries that uses AI to turn images and videos into lifelike 3D worlds. Rivian isn’t getting into gaming, but it does want to leverage Third Dimension’s technology to turn real-world data into 3D worlds that can accelerate the development of its advanced driver-assistance features and the self-driving system for the robotaxis it plans to supply to Uber. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The 15-person team at Third Dimension, most of whom are based in the U.K., will be absorbed into Rivian’s autonomy and AI team led by James Philbin. The acquisition also gives Rivian an opportunity to expand its AI hub in London, Philbin said in an exclusive interview. Third Dimension, which was founded by CEO Tolga Kart and Piotr Sokólski in 2024, raised $7 million in seed funding from venture capital firms, including Abstract Ventures, MVP, Soma Capital, and Solari Capital. While the company’s technology was built to speed up video game development, the founders saw other potential applications, including defense and autonomous vehicles. Now, under Rivian, they’ll be focused on automated driving. Today, Rivian offers “Universal Hands-Free” driving software that lets drivers take their hands off the wheel on highways, while still watching the road. The company plans to, by the end of the year, release a version of the software that can handle the entire drive through surface streets and highways without touching the wheel, although the driver will still have to supervise and be ready to take over. Rivian is also working toward full autonomy, which it will deploy in the robotaxi versions of its R2 SUV that will be available on the Uber app in 2028. “The team is excited to be able to focus on one problem,” Kart told TechCrunch in an interview. “I think as a small company, having to serve many, many different masters is very hard, and so we’re very excited to come work on a problem that has such an amount of scale, where our technology makes a true difference.” Simulation is a critical tool for autonomous vehicle developers, who use it to train and validate self-driving systems. Historically, these simulators were built on rendering or video game engines and often relied on synthetic data. These virtual environments might look like the real world, but a gap between the two remains, Kart said. The workaround typically requires feeding the simulators ever-larger amounts of data in hopes of closing that quality gap. Third Dimension’s technology uses AI to match the physical world, which when combined with Rivian’s reams of data could turn into a valuable simulator. “For us, it’s about taking real scenarios, but making them simulatable,” Philbin said. “These are not synthetic kind of video game styles, they’re real things that happen in the world, but now we get that extra dial of being able to move the cameras around, shift other agents, have maybe different lighting or weather conditions. So it’s a really powerful tool for us.” It’s technology that Philbin said the company knew it wanted and had actually “done a pretty extensive kind of evaluation of a lot of different providers.” Any company developing automated driving technology needs data — and a lot of it. But the quality matters too. Real-world data collected from cameras and other sensors is especially valuable. Rivian collects driving data from tens of thousands of R1T pickup trucks, R1S SUVs, delivery vans, and R2 SUVs on the road today — essentially any vehicle whose owner has enabled external camera sharing. Rivian uses that data, which is aggregated and anonymized, to build training models for driving. According to Philbin, Rivian gets more than 400,000 sequences uploaded from its customer fleets per day. Third Dimension’s tech will allow Rivian to simulate complex driving conditions without having to wait for rare real-world edge cases to occur, Philbin said. “Especially when you think about validation, right? So that’s really the piece where you’re saying, ‘is the system good to ship?’” Philbin said. “And there, you really want to have a good sense of this sim-to-real gap, because to do that kind of hand on heart, you really need to trust that answer is in the positive. Otherwise, you’re measuring something that’s not representative of how it will actually perform in the real world.” This article was updated to include more quotes from Philbin and more details on Rivian’s automated driving strategy.
document fetched 2026-10-24 11:22 · canonical https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/rivian-buys-world-model-startup-to-accelerate-self-driving-ambitions