Rivian Absorbs UK Team to Turn Fleet Footage Into Driving Simulations

Rivian now owns the small UK outfit that converts customer camera footage into video-game-style streets.

The acquisition puts Third Dimension's 15 employees inside Rivian's autonomy and AI group, run by James Philbin. Rivian did not say what it paid. Third Dimension launched in 2024 after a $7 million seed round led by Felicis, with game studios, film, the US military and vehicle makers listed as potential buyers.

The company's two founders come from the driving-simulation business. CEO Tolga Kart spent over two years at Tesla on Autopilot simulation, after five years as a senior director on Call of Duty at Activision, then led engineering at synthetic data firm Parallel Domain. Cofounder Piotr Sokólski spent four years at Wayve building photorealistic neural simulators for self-driving cars. Most of the staff work in the UK, so the deal also widens Rivian's London base.

The pitch rests on a data volume Rivian already collects. Owners of the R1S, R1T, R2 and commercial vans who share camera data feed the system more than 400,000 driving sequences a day, according to Philbin. Most of those clips are ordinary driving. The moments that break autonomous software are rare: a mattress in the fast lane, a police officer waving traffic through a red light, a child darting from between parked cars. Engineers can rebuild such a scene in 3D and change the conditions on demand instead of waiting for it to happen again.

"Simulation is central to how we train and validate our autonomous driving systems," Philbin told TechCrunch.

Rivian is one of several companies chasing generated test scenarios. Waymo introduced its Waymo World Model in February, built on Google DeepMind's Genie 3, to produce situations its cars have not driven. Tesla has demonstrated a neural world simulator for Full Self-Driving.

The work sits against a schedule Rivian has already moved. In March, Uber agreed to invest as much as $1.25 billion in Rivian to put R2 robotaxis on the road; $300 million arrives up front, and the rest depends on autonomy milestones, starting with 10,000 driverless R2 vehicles on Uber's network in San Francisco and Miami from 2028. Rivian's point-to-point driving feature reaches a small invited group of Autonomy+ owners later this year under a nondisclosure agreement. The "eyes-off" driving RJ Scaringe set for 2026 in January 2025 now points to 2027, and Level 4 capability is planned for 2028 on the Gen 3 hardware shown at Rivian's AI & Autonomy Day.

Third Dimension's tool produces 3D environments for game engines, and its seed round listed game studios, film, the US military and autonomous vehicle companies as buyers.