Rivian buys world model startup to accelerate self-driving ambitions

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.

“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. 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.

Rivian collects driving data from tens of thousands of R1S 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.

This story is developing and will be updated.