Wayve aims to wheel in Microsoft
Wayve, one of the UK’s top artificial intelligence start-ups, is in early discussions with Microsoft and SoftBank to raise up to $2 billion of new funding.
In a sign of the deal-making frenzy around leading AI businesses, the London-based driverless car company would be valued at $8 billion if the investment went ahead, according to a report in the Financial Times.
Wayve was founded in a garage in 2017 by Cambridge University PhD students Alex Kendall and Amar Shah.
The pair, who researched machine learning, computer vision and robotics, wanted to explore a different approach to developing driverless cars.
Rather than feeding rules into computers to account for every driving eventuality, Wayve’s technology “teaches” autonomous vehicles how to drive using videos and data from real life collected by partners including Asda and Ocado. This means vehicles can navigate any environment and are more responsive to unexpected incidents such as another vehicle swerving.
Last year SoftBank, the Japanese investment company, led a $1 billion funding round for Wayve, along with Nvidia and Microsoft, to help develop the start-up’s AI software, which can make any vehicle hands-free.
Nvidia, the American AI company, ploughed in a further $500 million in September as part of a series of investments made by Jensen Huang, its chief executive, in some of London’s most successful AI companies.
Other investors over the years have included Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder, and Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta. Since SoftBank’s 2024 round, Wayve has expanded around the world and employs 800 people, with offices in six countries.
It has signed a deal with Nissan to put its software into the carmaker’s vehicles by 2027, and has partnered with Uber with a view to deploying its tech across its ride-hailing network. They will be trialled in the UK next spring.
It is hoped driverless cars will cut the number of road accidents by removing human error, drunk driving and road rage. Wayve declined to comment.
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