Nvidia, Softbank, Microsoft back UK AI driving startup Wayve with US$1 billion
Autonomous driving startup Wayve Technologies Ltd. (London, England) has raised US$1.05 billion in a Series C round led by SoftBank Group. Investors included Nvidia Corp. and Microsoft Corp.
As part of the investment deal SoftBank will be represented on the board of directors.
Wayve was founded by New Zealander and Cambridge graduate Alex Kendall in August 2017 with a mission to provide a generalized and transferrable form of AI software for autonomous mobility. The company has been able to integrate its technology into several vehicles, including electric cars such as the Jaguar I-Pace and the Ford Mustang.
Having demonstrated taught and self-learning behaviour for vehicles and robots – rather than rules-based – the company is now building generative AI models for autonomy.
As Wayve’s core AI models advance they could be transferred to upgrade cars to higher levels of driving automation. Wayve’s software is hardware-agnostic and mapless and the claim is that it could allow a vehicle’s capability to be improved from ‘eyes on’ L2+ assisted driving to ‘eyes off’ L4 fully-automated driving.
The company said its research into multimodal and generative models, known as LINGO and GAIA respectively, could enable vehicles that can offer such features as language-responsive interfaces, personalized driving styles, and co-piloting to enhance the automated driving experience.
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