Wayve

Alex Kendall is a New Zealand-born machine learning researcher who completed his PhD in deep learning for computer vision and robotics at the University of Cambridge as a Woolf Fisher Scholar, working in Roberto Cipolla's Machine Intelligence group on some of the first end-to-end deep learning methods for semantic segmentation, localization, and scene understanding. Elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 2017, he co-founded Wayve in Cambridge that same year with fellow PhD student Amar Shah on a then-heretical thesis: self-driving should be learned end-to-end from data, not hand-engineered with HD maps and rule-based stacks. Kendall served as CTO before becoming CEO in 2020 after Shah's departure, and has carried the 'AV2.0' embodied-AI argument from fringe position to industry consensus. Under his leadership Wayve moved to London, demonstrated its learned driver on public UK roads, and raised a $1.05 billion Series C led by SoftBank with Nvidia and Microsoft participating in 2024 — the largest AI fundraise in UK history at the time — positioning Wayve to ship its embodied AI driving software to automotive OEMs worldwide.

Amar Shah completed his PhD in machine learning at the University of Cambridge in Zoubin Ghahramani's group, researching Bayesian methods and deep learning. In August 2017 he co-founded Wayve with Alex Kendall, serving as the company's first CEO while Kendall ran technology, and together they raised Wayve's early rounds and proved out its end-to-end learned driving approach on UK roads. Shah departed the company in 2020, with Kendall stepping up from CTO to chief executive.