U.K. autonomous vehicle company Wayve is now valued at $8.6 billion after a fresh round of funding, making it one of Europe’s valuable AI startups.
The London-base vendor, which has emerged as the leading advocate of embodied AI for autonomous driving, closed a Series D round of $1.2 billion this week as it plans to accelerate the rollout of its tech over the next couple of years.
This round was led by a trio of established investment outfits, Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, with a supporting cast of participants that includes automakers Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis (owner of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler and a host of European car brands).
Alongside them were major big tech names such as Microsoft and Nvidia, plus Uber, which is ready to commit a further $300 million based on milestone performance, bringing the new funding to $1.5 billion.
According to a statement from Wayve, the investment will help to accelerate the company’s “shift from AI research leadership to scaled commercial deployment of its end-to-end platform.”
In the field of robotaxis, Wayve is on course to launch commercial trials later this year, including in London in partnership with Uber, as per a roadmap originally unveiled.
More international markets will follow, according to Wayve, with more than ten already targeted. The robotaxis will deliver Level 4 automation, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers, meaning the vehicle is in control of driving under specific conditions.
The second element of Wayve’s program is the introduction of its automated tech into consumer vehicles — cars that private individuals can own or lease.
Wayve promised this from 2027 onwards, starting with Level 2 ‘hands-off’ assisted automation and ultimately progressing to levels 3 and 4.
Because Wayve’s foundation model is trained on globally diverse data from more than 70 countries and a host of different vehicle platforms, it has created what the company claims is “unmatched diversity”, allowing automated functionality to be applied to all sorts of cars from different brands in different locations.
Nissan is set to be the first automaker to use the technology, having signed an agreement to integrate Wayve’s tech in December of last year, following successful trials in Tokyo.
Since 2017, Wayve has been a leading advocate for delivering autonomous functionality using an end-to-end deep learning approach, with models trained on large amounts of data and video that the vendor says enables cars to drive like a human.
Wayve’s AI Driver system is licensed directly to automakers, with the system running on onboard compute and embedded sensors, and not reliant on high-definition maps or location-specific engineering (as is the case with most leading robotaxi operators). This approach, Wayve argues, allows for cost-effective global scaling.
Wayve CEO Alex Kendall, in a release, hailed the latest funding, saying: “With $1.5 billion secured, we are building for a total addressable market that spans every vehicle that moves.
“Autonomy will not scale through city-by-city robotaxi deployments alone. It will scale through a trusted platform that automakers and fleets can deploy globally and improve continuously,” he said.
Wayve, whose AI systems use Nvidia chips running on the Azure cloud, was “pushing the frontier of embodied AI for autonomous driving,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said in the release.