Wave, a UK-born startup developing a self-learning, non-rule-based system for autonomous driving, closed $1.05 billion in Series C funding led by SoftBank Group. This is the UK’s largest AI fundraiser ever and is among the top 20 AI fundraisers worldwide to date.
He also participated in the increase Nvidia and existing investor Microsoft. Waye’s early stage investors are included Afterhead of AI, Yann LeCun.
Wayve, which was founded in Cambridge in 2017, raised $200 million in a Series B round in January 2022 led by Eclipse Ventures.
The company plans to use the new capital injection to develop its product for assisted driving “eyes on” and fully automated driving “yes off” and other AI-assisted car applications. It plans to expand its operations worldwide.
San Francisco has become known as the epicenter for self-driving, with Alphabet-owned Waymo and GM-owned Cruise both operating services in the city. Instead, Wayve’s ‘end-to-end’ self-driving system started life on the tiny streets of Cambridge in an electric Renault Twizy.
Since then, it has been training its model on delivery vehicles for companies such as UK grocery delivery company Ocado, which invested $13.6 million in the startup.
Wayve’s approach to autonomous driving is similar to Tesla’s, but Wayve plans to sell the self-driving model to a variety of automotive OEMs. The bottom line, of course, is that Wayve will gather a lot more training data to improve its model, since Tesla has to rely on someone buying its car brand. However, the company is yet to announce any such partners in the automotive sector.
Wayve calls its map-agnostic product “Embedded AI” and plans to distribute its platform not only to car manufacturers but also to robotics companies serving manufacturers of all descriptions, allowing the platform to learn from human behavior in a wide variety of real world environments. The company’s research into multimodal and productive models, known as LINGO and GAIA, will offer “language-responsive interfaces, personalized driving styles and co-piloting,” the company promises.
Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall told TechCrunch: “Seven years ago, we started the company to build an embedded artificial intelligence. We were frustrated in building technology … What happened last year was that everything really started to work.”
He said the key moment was the car industry’s “step change” to having cameras around new cars, from which Wayve can draw data for its autonomous platform: “Now their production vehicles are coming out with GPUs, cameras around from the radar and Of course the appetite to now bring artificial intelligence to and enable, an accelerated journey from assisted to automated driving. So this fundraising is a validation of our technology approach and gives us the capital to turn that technology into a product and bring that product to market.”
He added that Wayve has big plans for robotics as well.
“Pretty soon you’ll be able to buy a new car and it will have Wayve’s AI… Then you’ll be enabling all kinds of embedded AI, not just cars, but other forms of robotics. I think the ultimate thing we want to achieve here is to go way beyond where AI is today with language models and chatbots. But to really enable a future where we can trust smart machines that we can delegate tasks to, and of course they can improve our lives and self-driving will be the first example of that.”
In a move that signals the importance of this fundraising to the UK more broadly, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak issued a supportive statement, saying: “From the first light bulb or the World Wide Web, to artificial intelligence and self-driving cars – the The UK has a proud record of being at the forefront of some of the biggest technological developments in history.”
“I’m incredibly proud that the UK is home to pioneers like Wayve who are breaking ground as they develop the next generation of AI models for self-driving cars. The fact that a homegrown, UK business has secured the largest investment to date in a UK AI company is testament to our leadership in this industry and that our plan for the economy is working,” he said.
“We are leaving no stone unturned to create the economic conditions for businesses to grow and thrive in the UK 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 artificial intelligence superpower,” he added.
Also in a statement, Kentaro Matsui, managing director of SoftBank Investment Advisers and a member of Wayve’s board of directors, said: “Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing mobility… The potential of this type of technology is transformative. could eliminate 99% of road accidents. SoftBank Group is pleased to be at the forefront of this effort with Wayve, as advanced intelligence redefines mobility and connectivity, contributing to a more convenient and safer society.”
