Rivian Acquires World-Model Startup Third Dimension to Speed Self-Driving Work
Rivian has acquired UK startup Third Dimension, whose AI turns images and video into 3D worlds, to accelerate driver-assistance and robotaxi development; the 15-person team will join its autonomy unit.
The 15-person Third Dimension team, most of whom are based in the UK, 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 with TechCrunch.
Third Dimension was founded by CEO Tolga Kart and Piotr Sokolski in 2024 and raised $7 million in seed funding from venture capital firms including Abstract Ventures, MVP, Soma Capital and Solari Capital. Its technology was built to speed up video game development, but the founders saw other potential applications, including defense and autonomous vehicles. Under Rivian, the team will focus on automated driving.
“The team is excited to be able to focus on one problem,” Kart told TechCrunch in the 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. Such 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, combined with Rivian’s reams of data, could turn into a valuable simulator.
Rivian is collecting driving data from tens of thousands of R1S trucks and SUVs, delivery vans and R2 SUVs on the road today — essentially from any vehicle in which the 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 technology will allow Rivian to simulate complex driving conditions without waiting for rare real-world edge cases to occur, Philbin said. Rivian is not getting into gaming, but it wants to leverage Third Dimension’s technology to turn real-world data into 3D worlds for driver-assistance and robotaxi development.
Editor's Summary
Rivian has acquired Third Dimension, a 15-person UK startup whose AI technology converts images and video into lifelike 3D worlds, to support development of advanced driver assistance and robotaxi systems. The team will join Rivian’s autonomy and AI unit and help expand its London AI hub. Rivian plans to combine the startup’s simulation technology with driving data from its customer fleet to train and validate automated driving systems.