Rivian hires Third Dimension team for self-driving tests

Rivian bought Third Dimension on October 23.

The 15-person UK startup will help rebuild real roads as 3D test environments for the electric vehicle maker's self-driving software. TechCrunch first reported the deal. Rivian did not say how much it paid.

Third Dimension launched in 2024. Its founders come from autonomy work. CEO Tolga Kart spent more than two years on Autopilot simulation at Tesla. Before that, he led engineering at Parallel Domain. Cofounder Piotr Sokólski spent four years at Wayve building neural simulators for self-driving cars.

The whole team now works in Rivian's autonomy and AI group. That group is led by James Philbin. The hire also gives Rivian a larger presence in London. Philbin told TechCrunch that simulation is central to how the company trains and validates its driving systems. He said Third Dimension has built impressive technology that turns real-world data into detailed 3D environments.

Rivian uses footage from owners of the R1S, R1T, R2 and commercial vans who opt in to camera sharing. Philbin said the fleet sends back more than 400,000 driving sequences every day. Most of that video shows routine driving. Rare events are harder to find. Those events include a mattress in the fast lane, a police officer waving traffic through a red light, or a child running out between parked cars. Engineers can now recreate those scenes in 3D and change the variables instead of waiting months for the event to happen again.

Other companies are using similar tools. Waymo unveiled its Waymo World Model in February. That model uses Google DeepMind's Genie 3 to generate scenarios its vehicles have not encountered. Tesla has also shown a neural world simulator for its Full Self-Driving software.

Rivian faces a deadline. In March, Uber agreed to invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian to deploy R2 robotaxis. Only $300 million of that is paid up front. The rest depends on autonomy milestones. Those milestones include 10,000 driverless R2 vehicles on Uber's network in San Francisco and Miami starting in 2028. Rivian's point-to-point driving feature is due later this year for a small group of invited Autonomy+ owners. Those testers must sign a nondisclosure agreement. The company originally promised eyes-off driving in 2026. That target is now 2027. Level 4 capability is planned for 2028 on the Gen 3 hardware Rivian showed at its AI & Autonomy Day.