Wayve: This 29 year-old CEO just raised $1.05B to build self-driving cars

(3 minute read)

This 29 year-old CEO just raised $1.05B to build self-driving cars

He’s aiming to reshape the future of autonomous mobility with embodied AI

This will make transportation more safe and sustainable forever.

So who’s this CEO and what’s he building?

Alex Kendall is the co-founder of Wayve, an AI startup building embodied AI for automated driving; in other words, building the tech for self-driving cars. 

Wayve was founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall and Amar Shah. Amar Shah was previously CEO, but stepped down in September 2020.

Alex has a background in Deep Learning and robotics, having done a PhD on the matter at the University of Cambridge. 

Academic research at Cambridge gave Alex the vision for intelligent robots - he was thinking about the idea way before he even started Wayve.

At Cambridge, Alex was surrounded by great supervisors and mentors, which helped him develop contrarian ideas and hold conviction in ideas. He eventually discovered and developed some of the first deep learning algorithms with the university.

Alex went to Silicon Valley to do more research and spent time with a deep-tech startup: Skydio, which focused on autonomous drones. Through that, he understood what a VC-backed startup could build, which he previously thought impossible…

Towards the end of his PhD, Alex was convinced that this tech would enable intelligent robotics that we could trust.

The Opportunity

The opportunity for self-driving technology is massive - there are hundreds of millions of cars in the world + transportation is important and used in every society.

With self-driving there’s a business case and an access to data to make it possible:

- Business case: Self-driving brings huge value to society in transportation - more people and goods can be transported in a more sustainable and effective way.

- Access to data: Tens of millions of vehicles are produced every year that collect data and allow us to train systems that can understand the world.

Post PhD

After his time at Cambridge, Alex started Wayve, while also being a research fellow at the university.

Alex needed funding to start this, so initially pitched the idea of embodied AI for self-driving cars to a ton of self-driving car companies but got a lot of firm “No”s with firms critiquing the idea saying that “it will never be safe”

Eventually, Alex found some early investors and raised a $3M+ seed, rented a house, built a prototype in the garage and started to get this tech off the ground.

His first few hires came from previous relationships and further networking Alex had done with his co-founder.

In the first 4-5 years of the business, Wayve was alone in the market. This allowed them to build a brand and vision, while bringing in global experts to engineer and design the embodied AI systems.

What is embodied AI?

When people think about AI, the majority of people think of applications like ChatGPT, chatbots, or co-pilots. 

Embodied AI gives AI a physical interface to interact and assist us. So instead of just giving us information, it acts on that information.

One of the best examples of this is the tech in self-driving cars. It does everything in a way which is more safe and sustainable.

With self-driving cars you need a pretty general-purpose level of intelligence to be able to drive safely because of the diversity of scenarios and behaviors on the road. A rules-based algorithm or simple logic system would not work.

Self-driving will be the first large-scale example of embodied AI, and the biggest opportunity utilizing this tech.

Operations

Wayve has about 300 employees and has been testing their self-driving tech on UK roads since 2018. 

Wayve has partnered with UK delivery fleets such as Asda and Ocado Group to deliver some of their technology.

Their most recent funding round was a $1.05B series C on May 7th 2024, bringing their total raised to $1.3B. This is the biggest ever funding round for an AI company in Europe…

The round was led by Softbank, as part of their ‘Vision fund’, with other investors including: Nvidia, Balderton Capital and Microsoft.