UK firm Wayve secures £860 million in funding to drive forward AI-Enhanced autonomous mobility

Image credit: Wayve

Wayve, a leader in the integration of Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) for autonomous vehicles, has successfully secured a substantial £860 million ($1.05 billion) in its latest funding round.

This Series C round, led by SoftBank Group with significant contributions from new investor NVIDIA and existing backer Microsoft, aims to help Wayve's mission to revolutionise autonomous mobility through advanced AI technology.

Embodied AI marks a significant leap in AI evolution, surpassing generative AI and extensive language models. This technology, when integrated into autonomous systems, seeks to redefine machine interaction by learning directly from human behaviour and real-world scenarios. Such advancements are poised to considerably enhance the functionality and safety of autonomous driving systems, enabling them to handle unpredictable situations such as sudden pedestrian movements or erratic driving by others.

Since its inception in 2017, Wayve has been at the forefront of Embodied AI application within the autonomous driving sector. The firm boasts a pioneering achievement in its development and real-world testing of an end-to-end AI driving system. Known in industry circles as 'AV2.0', this approach has set the stage for a broader acceptance of AI technologies in enhancing autonomous vehicular technologies.

Alex Kendall, Co-founder and CEO of Wayve, said: “At Wayve, our vision is to develop autonomous technology that not only becomes a reality in millions of vehicles but also earns people’s trust by seamlessly integrating into their everyday lives to unlock extraordinary value. 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.

“Our collaboration with SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Microsoft will help advance our mission to redefine driving with AI at the core. This investment will enable us to develop and launch our first Embodied AI products for the automotive industry, empowering OEMs to provide consumers with trustworthy and beneficial automated driving experiences.”