Wayve are in talks with Microsoft and SoftBank to raise up to $2bn of new funding. The deal could value Wayve at roughly $8bn, although sources suggest that no valuation had been set and that talks were still at ‘early stages’, the Financial Times reports.
Founded in 2017, London-based Wayve has emerged as one of the UK’s most prominent artificial intelligence start-ups, focused on building the technology behind self-driving cars. It raised $1bn last year in a round led by Japan’s SoftBank, with its previous backer Microsoft also participating in the deal.
Those existing investors are in talks with Wayve about new investment in which the group could raise between $1bn and $2bn, according to people familiar with the discussions. That transaction would come as the world’s biggest tech investors rush to back fast-growing AI companies.
Frenzied dealmaking has led to a series of huge funding rounds this year, particularly in the US, with AI model makers such as OpenAI and Anthropic among those to raise billions of dollars this year. Wayve’s investment discussions come a few weeks after Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang announced plans to invest $500mn in the company, without providing further details.
Wayve has been building its navigation systems using Nvidia’s specialised robotics systems since it constructed its first car in 2018. The start-up believes that its AI systems can work using lower-cost sensors and computing equipment deployed in regular production cars, rather than requiring the specialised hardware used by rival autonomous vehicle companies such as Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox.
Nvidia Nvidia in talks for $500mn investment in UK self-driving start-up Wayve Waymo and Zoox have to map any new city in detail before their cars can start driving there. Wayve says its system is “generalisable”, meaning it can adapt to drive autonomously even in cities or other environments that the vehicle or company has not previously visited.
“I’ve spent a decade building this company and working on this technology, and for most of that decade, this [approach] has been very contrarian,” Wayve co-founder and chief executive Alex Kendall said in an interview last month. But he has seen “a complete U-turn” in investor appetite in the last year.
“The interest is nothing I’ve experienced before.” That developed into it deciding to take on new investment, even though the company was “very well capitalised today already”, Kendall said. “The investment required to build these foundation models comes ahead of deployment,” he said.
“The automotive industry requires patience. I think we are working as hard as we can with our partners to integrate and deploy this technology.”
Wayve signed its first partnership to deploy its technology with a major carmaker, Nissan, in April. The agreement means Wayve will install its software in vehicles made by Japan’s Nissan from 2027. Wayve, SoftBank and Microsoft declined to comment.
(Pic: Wayve)
