Driving the next wave of autonomous mobility, Wayve waves in $200 million

London-based startup Wayve has raised $200 million in a Series B funding round. Aiming to move the needle on autonomous driving, Wayve is using deep learning techniques to train and develop artificial intelligence capable of complex driving situations. The new investment capital will be used to get more of the company’s technology in partner fleets, advance last-mile delivery pilot programmes, continue to develop and improve the company’s core technologies, and last but not least, develop a Level 4+ autonomous vehicle prototype for passenger vehicles and delivery vans. To date, Wayve has raised $258 million.

Whereas Berlin’s Vay is gathering data and feeding the machine through tele-driven cars, London’s Wayve, who has a two-year jump on the Germans, Wayve is moving us one step closer to better self-driving cars via delivery vehicles. The company has active partnerships with Ocado Group, Asda, and DPD, continually feeding its AV2.0 technology petabyte-scale driving data.

In other words, more data = better AI = better self-driving vehicles.

“We were the first team to develop the scientific breakthroughs in deep learning to build autonomous driving technology that can easily scale to new markets using a data-learned approach. Today, we have all of the pieces in place to take what we have pioneered and drive AV2.0 forward,” commented co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall. “We have brought together world-class strategic partners in transportation, grocery delivery and compute, along with the best capital resources to scale our core autonomy platform, trial products with our commercial fleet partners, and build the infrastructure to scale AV2.0 globally.”

Wayve’s $200 million Series B round Was led by return investor Eclipse Ventures, and saw participation from new supporters D1 Capital Partners, Baillie Gifford, Moore Strategic Ventures, and Linse Capital. Likewise, additional support was provided by Microsoft, Virgin, Compound, and Balderton Capital. They join strategic investor Ocado Group and angel investors including Sir Richard Branson, Rosemary Leith, Linda Levinson, David Richter, Pieter Abbeel, and Yann LeCun.

“As the industry struggles to solve self-driving with traditional robotics, it is becoming increasingly clear that AV2.0 is the right pathway to build a scalable driving intelligence that can help commercial fleet operators deploy autonomy faster. Wayve is breaking new ground by building AVs that can adapt to driving in new cities, previously unseen in training. As the leaders in this field, they have assembled an exceptional team of machine learning experts and AV veterans to drive AV2.0 to reality,” commented Eclispe Ventures’ Seth Winterroth.