Co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall. Image: Wayve
UK PM Rishi Sunak said the latest funding marks the biggest investment ever made in a UK-based AI company.
UK autonomous driving AI start-up Wayve has raised more than $1bn in a Series C round led by SoftBank and backed by Nvidia and Microsoft.
Founded in 2017, Wayve has built an end-to-end deep learning autonomous driving system for public roads. The London-headquartered start-up is now building AI foundation models for autonomy, what it describes as “GPT for driving”. These models, Wayve claims, can “see, think and drive” through any environment.
The latest investment will help the company launch its first Embodied AI products for production vehicles. As its core AI model advances, Wayve said these products will help manufacturers upgrade cars to higher levels of driving automation.
Co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall said that the idea behind Wayve is to develop autonomous technology that “not only becomes a reality in millions of vehicles but also earns people’s trust by seamlessly integrating into their everyday lives to unlock extraordinary value”.
“This significant funding milestone highlights our team’s unwavering conviction that Embodied AI will address the long-standing challenges the industry has faced in scaling this technology to everyone, everywhere,” he said in an announcement today (7 May).
“Our collaboration with SoftBank, Nvidia and Microsoft will help advance our mission to redefine driving with AI at the core.”
UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, MP said that the latest funding marked the biggest investment ever made into a UK-based AI company. “We already have the third highest number of AI companies and private investment in AI in the world, and this announcement anchors the UK’s position as an AI superpower,” he said.
Since 2018, Wayve has conducted trials on UK public roads, partnering with delivery fleets from Asda and Ocado Group.
Other investors in the company have included Eclipse Ventures and Fly Ventures. Seth Winterroth, partner at Eclipse Ventures and a member of the Wayve board, said that the company has gone from “initially pioneering the once-highly contrarian concept of end-to-end AI to now reshaping the industry.”
“The team’s commitment to challenging the status quo and persistence in seeing it through demonstrate their capacity to make a big, long lasting impact on the world,” he said.
“The application of AI in critical safety tasks like driving goes beyond simply tacking on a large language model to a vehicle – it demands specialised model architectures, extensive fleet learning, diverse driving datasets, access to supercomputing at scale, and smart regulations that both protect consumers and foster innovation.”
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