Wayve

Wayve was founded in 2017 in London by Alex Kendall and Amar Shah to pursue an end-to-end, learning-first approach to autonomous driving — a single AI model that maps sensor inputs directly to driving actions without HD maps or hand-coded rules. The company licenses its "AI Driver" to automakers to upgrade vehicles from L2+ assisted driving toward L4 automation, and says it has driven zero-shot in more than 500 cities without city-specific tuning. In May 2024 Wayve raised a $1.05 billion Series C led by SoftBank with Nvidia and Microsoft, then in February 2026 announced a $1.2 billion Series D (with total commitments reaching about $1.5 billion including milestone-based funding from Uber) at a roughly $8.6 billion valuation, led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2.