Rivian buys Third Dimension to fuel self-driving and robotaxi push

Rivian collects more than 400,000 driving data sequences per day from its customer fleets, and its latest acquisition is designed to squeeze far more out of that firehose.

The electric vehicle maker has acquired Third Dimension, a UK startup founded in 2024 that uses AI to turn images and videos into lifelike 3D worlds. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. James Philbin, who leads Rivian's autonomy and AI team, confirmed the acquisition in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch.

Rivian isn't buying a gaming studio. It wants Third Dimension's technology to build 3D worlds from real-world data — worlds that can speed up development of its advanced driver assistance features and the self-driving system for the robotaxis it plans to supply to Uber.

Who is Third Dimension?

Third Dimension was founded by CEO Tolga Kart and Piotr Sokolski in 2024. Before the acquisition, the startup raised $7 million in seed funding from venture capital firms including Abstract Ventures, MVP, Soma Capital and Solari Capital.

The company's 15-person team — most of them based in the UK — will be absorbed into Rivian's autonomy and AI organization under Philbin. The deal also gives Rivian a chance to expand its AI hub in London, Philbin said.

The technology was originally built to accelerate video game development. But the founders saw wider applications, including defense and autonomous vehicles.

Under Rivian, the team will focus on one thing: automated driving.

"The team is excited to be able to focus on one problem," Kart told TechCrunch. "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."

Why simulation matters for autonomy

Simulation is a critical tool for autonomous vehicle developers, who use it to train and validate self-driving systems. Historically, these simulators ran on rendering or video game engines and leaned on synthetic data.

Those virtual environments might look like the real world, but a gap between the two remains, Kart said. The usual workaround is brute force: developers feed the simulators ever-larger amounts of data hoping to close the quality gap.

Third Dimension takes a different route. Its AI matches the physical world directly. Combined with Rivian's data trove, that could become a valuable simulator.

What data does Rivian bring?

Rivian collects driving data from tens of thousands of vehicles on the road today — R1T pickup trucks, R1S SUVs, delivery vans and R2 SUVs — essentially any vehicle whose owner has enabled external camera sharing. The data is aggregated and anonymized, then used to build training models for driving.

The scale is substantial: Philbin says Rivian receives more than 400,000 uploaded sequences from its customer fleets every day.

Third Dimension's technology will let Rivian simulate complex driving conditions without waiting for rare real-world edge cases to actually happen, Philbin said.

That's the real bet here: turning a daily flood of fleet data into synthetic scenarios a robotaxi system can be tested against before it ever meets a passenger.

This story is developing.