Rivian has acquired Third Dimension, a 15-person U.K. startup that uses AI to turn images and video into lifelike 3D worlds, and its team is joining Rivian’s autonomy and AI group to help develop driver assistance features and the self-driving system for the robotaxis Rivian plans to supply to Uber.
Third Dimension was founded in 2024 by CEO Tolga Kart and Piotr Sokólski and raised $7 million in seed funding, originally building its tech to speed up video game development. Rivian isn’t getting into gaming, though. The plan is to take the driving data its fleet already collects and turn it into simulated environments for training and validating its systems.
That’s a lot of data to work with. James Philbin, Rivian’s VP of Autonomy and AI, told TechCrunch the company gets more than 400,000 sequences uploaded per day from R1T, R1S, R2, and delivery vans whose owners have enabled external camera sharing, all of it aggregated and anonymized.
Most driving simulators have been built on game engines with synthetic data, and Kart said there’s always been a gap between how those virtual worlds look and how actual roads behave. Third Dimension’s approach builds simulations that match the physical world, which Philbin said lets Rivian recreate complex conditions without waiting for rare edge cases to happen on the road.
Kart also said the team is excited to focus on one problem after a small company spent its early days trying to serve customers across very different industries.
Since most of the team is based in the U.K., the deal gives Rivian room to grow its London AI hub. Terms weren’t disclosed.
Rivian is building toward driverless R2s for Uber, and being able to rehearse rare scenarios at scale is the kind of tooling that has to exist long before those cars carry passengers. For owners, the payoff should show up sooner, in hands-free updates trained on situations our own vehicles almost never run into.
