Wayve raises $20million to facilitate driverless car trials in Central London

Wayve, an autonomous car start-up, has raised $20million to launch a pilot fleet of self-driving vehicles in central London.

The driverless car firm is said to focus on a learning-based approach instead of hand-coded rules like other tech companies.

The round was led by Eclipse Ventures, with participation from Balderton, existing investors and several undisclosed preeminent leaders in machine learning and robotics.

Wayve believes that the complexity of self-driving cars will be solved by better artificial intelligence “brains,” not by more physical sensors and hand-coded rules. 

Amar Shah, Wayve Co-Founder and CEO, said: “As computational power and data continue to grow, learning-based approaches will become more inevitable, especially for mobile robotics. The human brain has evolved over millions of years, computers have only had a few decades, but are catching up quickly.”

In Spring 2019, Wayve publicised data from a self-driving car which had navigated roads it had never previously driven. This had been accomplished by using only cameras, a 2D map, and a unique, end-to-end, ‘deep learning’ driving brain.

Image credit: Wayve