Self-driving startup Wayve raises $1 billion in Softbank-led funding round

Announced Tuesday, the series C round, led by Japanese conglomerate Softbank, also included AI giants Nvidia and Microsoft.

London-based Wayve, founded in 2017, makes software for autonomous driving which allows vehicles to learn as they drive and make on-the-road decisions on their own. 

Wayve counts Microsoft and Meta’s chief scientist Yann Le Cunn among its high-profile backers. The company, founded by University of Cambridge PhD students Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, had raised $300 million in previous funding rounds. The company’s valuation following the latest venture capital investment has not been disclosed.

Wayve will use the funds to expand and launch its AI software products—which it refers to as “Embodied AI” because similar systems could be used for any autonomous device that has to navigate and act in the physical world—eventually deploying those systems in vehicles built by major automotive manufacturers.

The startup’s software is different from previous generations of self-driving AI because its models are trained “end-to-end”—taking in camera and sensor data about what is happening around the vehicle and outputing the best driving action to take. The company has also trained an AI system that pairs a large language model with a driving model, so that a vehicle can explain what it is seeing and why it is taking certain actions, and also take instruction in natural language.

Earlier self-driving cars relied on multiple small AI models, each of which did one particular thing, such as identify objects in camera data, and then fused these small models together with complicated rules-based software to arrive at driving decisions.

“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,” Wayve’s co-founder and CEO Kendall said in a statement Tuesday.

The investment is a big win for Britain, which already has twice as many AI-focused companies as any other European country, employing over 50,000 people and contributing £3.7 billion ($4.6 billion) to the economy. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has tried to position the country as a global AI hub, at the forefront of both…