Wayve, a UK-based self-driving technology startup, is allowing its employees to sell a portion of their vested equity. The $85 million offering — essentially a structured opportunity for employees to sell stock back to investors — is being driven by the company’s existing and new investors at the company’s latest valuation of $8.5 billion.
That valuation was set in February when the nine-year-old company raised a $1.2 billion Series D round led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and included participation from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, Microsoft, Nvidia and Uber.
This is Wayve’s second employee liquidity event. The company previously had an auction along with its $1.05 billion Series C funding round in May 2024.
Wayve’s offering is part of a growing trend of artificial intelligence startups. Instead of waiting years for an exit, companies use promotions as a retention tool, giving employees a reason to stay put instead of jumping to a competitor — or starting their own store — once their options are vested.
Other startups that have recently completed employee offerings include Decagon, which builds AI agents that handle customer service for businesses like Duolingo and Hertz. Eleven Labsthe AI voice generation company behind many of the web’s synthetic speech and dubbing tools. Lineara popular project management platform built for software teams. and Clay, a sales and marketing automation tool that helps companies research and approach prospects. (Clay has had two contests in the past nine months alone.)
These startups are able to provide liquidity to workers mainly because investors are willing to buy more of the equity in these high-growth companies, even at a premium, betting that the businesses will be worth even more down the line.
Wayve uses a self-learning approach to its autonomous driving. Instead of relying on the pre-made high-definition maps that most self-driving programs use, its software is an end-to-end neural network that learns to drive solely from data — closer to how humans perceive driving through experience, its founders argue.
Pursuing a “general purpose” artificial intelligence driver – which could, in theory, work across countries, cars and road conditions – the company has more than doubled its headcount to 1,200 employees in the past year.
Wayve is aiming for robotaxi pilots in partnership with Uber later this year, while it separately plans to integrate its AI software into Nissan’s next-generation driver assistance systems from 2027.
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