companies

Wayve

London-based autonomous driving company building an AI Driver that learns end-to-end from camera data instead of HD maps and hand-coded rules.

Wayve was founded in Cambridge, England in 2017 by Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, two machine-learning PhD researchers, and is now headquartered in London with additional teams in Vancouver and Silicon Valley. Unlike autonomous vehicle developers that rely on high-definition maps, lidar arrays, and hand-coded rules for every driving scenario, Wayve's approach is end-to-end deep learning: a single AI model trained on camera video learns to drive directly, aiming to generalize to new roads and cities without needing them pre-mapped. The company has raised roughly $2.6 billion across more than a decade of rounds, including a Series D of over $1 billion in early 2026 backed by Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, Nissan, Uber, Microsoft, and Nvidia, pushing its valuation to about $8.6 billion. Wayve licenses its self-driving software, branded as an AI Driver, to automakers rather than operating its own robotaxi fleet, positioning itself as an AI supplier to car companies rather than a ride-hailing operator. Alongside its driving stack, Wayve publishes GAIA, a family of generative world models used to simulate realistic driving scenarios for testing and validation. The latest version, GAIA-3, is built specifically to evaluate and stress-test end-to-end driving systems in simulation, and Wayve has partnered with the UK government and the University of Warwick on safety validation research using it.

Founded

2017

Headquarters

London, United Kingdom

Sector

robotics