Wayve

Wayve Technologies Ltd is a British autonomous driving technology company focused on developing self-driving vehicle systems through end-to-end deep learning. Founded in 2017 by researchers from the University of Cambridge, Wayve’s approach eschews detailed 3D maps and hand-coded rules in favor of a self-learning “AI driver” that learns from camera data and driving experience. The London-headquartered startup has garnered significant attention and funding for its vision-based method, raising over $1.3 billion from investors including SoftBank, Microsoft, Nvidia, and others.

Wayve Technologies Ltd

Industry	Autonomous cars
Founded	2017; 8 years ago (2017)
Founder	Amar Shah Alex Kendall
Headquarters	London , United Kingdom
Key people	Alex Kendall (CEO)
Number of employees	400 (2024)[1]
Website	wayve.ai

History

Wayve was founded in Cambridge, England, in 2017 by Amar Shah and Alex Kendall, two machine learning PhD students at the University of Cambridge. Shah initially served as CEO while Kendall was CTO, and the pair set out to develop an unconventional self-driving car system using machine learning at every layer of the driving task. In May 2018, Wayve emerged from stealth mode with backing from early-stage investors. At this time the company had around 10 employees, and its advisory investors included academics like Professor Zoubin Ghahramani (Uber’s Chief Scientist) who shared Wayve’s vision of a learning-centric driving AI.^[2]

In 2019, Wayve achieved a milestone by training a car to drive autonomously on public roads it had never seen before, using only cameras, a basic GPS map, and end-to-end deep learning control. The company moved its base to London and secured a $20 million Series A funding round in November 2019. This investment enabled Wayve to launch a pilot fleet of autonomous electric vehicles in central London for real-world testing. During these trials, Wayve’s cars (such as retrofitted Jaguar I-Pace SUVs) began navigating the complex, narrow streets of London to prove the system’s ability to adapt to challenging urban scenarios.^[3][4]

In 2020, co-founder Amar Shah departed the company, and Alex Kendall assumed the role of CEO.^[5]

The startup joined the Microsoft for Startups: Autonomous Driving program in 2020, leveraging Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing for training its machine learning models at scale. It also committed to testing exclusively on electric vehicles, reflecting a goal to reduce carbon emissions.^[6]

In 2021, Wayve entered pilot programs with major UK retailers. It launched a 12-month autonomous delivery trial with supermarket chain Asda, and received a £10 million ($13.6 million) investment from online grocer Ocado Group as part of a partnership to develop self-driving grocery delivery vans. Ocado’s backing gave Wayve access to a fleet of delivery vans for data collection and testing on busy London routes (with safety drivers present) to train its AI in urban traffic.^[7]

In 2022, after a large funding round (Series B), the company extended road testing beyond the UK to other regions. By 2023, Wayve was testing its self-driving platform in multiple countries. The company had begun operating in the United States and in continental Europe as it prepared for larger commercial deployments.^[8][9]

In 2023, Wayve announced a collaboration with Nissan: the Japanese automaker will integrate Wayve’s AI-driven software into its next-generation driver-assistance system, slated to launch in fiscal year 2027.^[8][10]

Wayve also attracted a strategic investment from Uber in 2024 to jointly develop autonomous ride-hailing services. The two companies plan to trial a fully driverless robotaxi service in London, supported by a UK government program to accelerate commercial self-driving pilots to as early as 2026. To demonstrate the scalability of its technology, Wayve conducted an “AI-500” roadshow project, driving in dozens of cities across Asia, Europe, and North America using the same AI model. By mid-2025, it had completed autonomous driving demos in 90 cities without prior HD mapping.^[11]

In April 2025, Wayve opened its first Asian research hub in Japan (supported by investor SoftBank) to improve its model’s generalization using local driving data.^[8]

Financing and investors

Wayve has been backed by a mix of venture capital firms, strategic corporate investors, and notable individuals. Its initial seed funding came in 2018 from funds such as Compound (NYC) and Firstminute Capital (London), as well as Cambridge-based angels, providing early support for its research-intensive approach. Several prominent AI/robotics experts as angel investors; for example, Professor Pieter Abbeel and Uber’s Chief Scientist Zoubin Ghahramani were early backers.^[2]

In November 2019, Wayve raised a $20 million Series A led by Eclipse Ventures, with participation from Balderton Capital and other prior investors. The Series A financing was used to fund the company’s first autonomous trials in London and marked the first time a European self-driving car startup secured a U.S. VC as lead investor.^[3]

In October 2021, Ocado Group invested £10 million (approximately $13.6 million) in Wayve as a strategic partner in autonomous grocery delivery. This brought Wayve’s total funding to around $60 million at that time. The Series B round followed in January 2022, when Wayve announced $200 million in new funding led by Eclipse Ventures. The Series B included a roster of high-profile investors: venture firms D1 Capital Partners, Moore Strategic Ventures, Linse Capital, and Balderton joined, along with Microsoft and Virgin Group as strategic backers. Long-term technology investors Baillie Gifford (known for its stake in Tesla) and Compound also participated, and Ocado increased its stake as a strategic investor. Meta AI head Yann LeCun and Richard Branson also became investors.^[12]

Wayve’s largest funding to date came with its Series C in 2024. In May of that year, Wayve closed a $1.05 billion Series C investment led by Japan’s SoftBank Group. The massive round – the biggest ever for a UK AI company – included new investor Nvidia (a leading maker of automotive AI chips) and returning investors Microsoft and Eclipse Ventures, among others. Notably, Uber also joined as a stakeholder around this time, as the ride-hailing giant partnered with Wayve and contributed capital to the Series C funding. This infusion vaulted Wayve’s total funding raised to approximately $1.3 billion since its founding. The raise lifted Wayve’s valuation into “unicorn” status. ^[13][10][14]

Technology

Wayve’s self-driving approach centers on end-to-end deep learning and a vision-based AI system. Unlike conventional autonomous vehicles that depend on high-definition maps, hand-coded rules, and arrays of expensive lidar sensors, Wayve’s platform learns to drive predominantly using camera data and machine learning algorithms. The company refers to its AI-driven driving software as an “Embodied AI” or AI Driver, emphasizing that the system learns from experience (both real and simulated) to handle complex or novel situations rather than following pre-programmed instructions.^[15][8]

The hardware setup of Wayve’s system is relatively simple: a suite of video cameras (and basic automotive sensors) mounted on the vehicle, paired with onboard compute units (powered by GPUs) to run the AI models.^[15] This vision-only philosophy is similar to Tesla’s Autopilot/FSDB approach, but Wayve’s solution is vehicle-agnostic and mapless. Wayve’s strategy is to provide its driving AI as an OEM-ready platform: it plans to license or embed its technology into vehicles made by established automakers rather than build its own cars.^[13] Wayve’s development vehicles currently use Nvidia’s Orin system-on-chip as the onboard computer for running the AI model, but CEO Alex Kendall has noted that the software can run on “whatever GPU [an automaker] already has in their vehicles”^[10] Wayve has built a cloud infrastructure (largely on Microsoft Azure) to process petabytes of this data, and it uses simulation tools (internally, the “Wayve Infinity” simulator) to synthetically generate and practice rare or dangerous scenarios for the AI to learn from.^[6]

As of 2025, Wayve envisions its AI driver being applicable to a range of applications – from Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems in personal cars (as in the Nissan ProPilot integration) to Level 4 robotaxis and delivery vehicles operated by partners like Uber and Ocado, and even other mobile robotics domains beyond cars.^[10]

Corporate affairs

Wayve is a privately held company headquartered in London, England, with its primary research and development office in the Kings Cross area of London. The company was initially incorporated as Wayve Technologies Ltd in the UK. In addition to its London base, Wayve has expanded internationally: it established a presence in the United States (opening an office in Silicon Valley), in Canada (with a research hub in Vancouver), in Japan (office in Yokohama), in Germany (office in Leonberg) and in Israel (office in Herzliya).^[16]

The Leadership team includes research scientists and engineers with backgrounds in computer vision, robotics, and automotive systems, many recruited from leading companies and universities. Wayve has notably hired senior professionals from competitors and big tech firms: for example, its President Erez Dagan (hired in 2024) spent two decades at Mobileye, its Chief Scientist Jamie Shotton came from Microsoft Research, and its hardware and partnerships leaders have experience from Waymo and other self-driving programs. Alex Kendall, originally from New Zealand with a PhD in computer vision from Cambridge, took over as CEO in 2020 after the departure of co-founder Amar Shah. Notable advisors and shareholders in the company include luminaries from the machine learning field (e.g. Yann LeCun and Ilya Sutskever of OpenAI are cited as early supporters) and business figures like Richard Branson.^[5][12]