Wayve and Uber team up to accelerate move to driverless cars

A British driverless car company has received a significant vote of confidence in the form of an investment by Uber.
Wayve, one of London’s leading artificial intelligence start-ups, announced the funding, which is understood to be less than $100 million, alongside a “partnership” with the American ride-hailing company that aims to get their technology taken on by car manufacturers.
Uber has several such relationships with self-driving car companies, including Waymo and Cruise, but this is its first outside the United States.
Wayve was founded in a garage in 2017 by Alex Kendall and Amar Shah. The Cambridge University students, who researched machine learning, computer vision and robotics, wanted to explore a different approach to developing driverless cars.
It has steadily raised capital over the past five years, with a series A round of $20 million in 2019 and a series B round in 2022 of $200 million, both led by Eclipse with other investors including Balderton, Ocado, D1 Capital Partners and Virgin.
In May the company raised more than a billion dollars from SoftBank, Nvidia and Microsoft, three of the world’s most powerful technology companies, to commercialise its products.
Rather than feeding computers with rules to account for every driving eventuality, its technology “teaches” autonomous vehicles how to drive, using videos and data from real life. This means that vehicles can navigate any environment they are in and are more responsive to unexpected occurrences that can happen while driving, such as someone running out into a road or another vehicle swerving.
“I’m excited to be teaming up with Uber, the largest mobility network in the world, to massively ramp up our AI’s fleet learning, ensuring our AV technology is safe and ready for global deployment across Uber’s network,” Kendall, 32, Wayve’s chief executive, said.
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The new partnership fires the starting gun for Wayve’s software to be integrated into Uber’s network over the next few years.
Dara Khosrowshahi, 55, the chief executive of Uber, said he wanted to make the company the best network for self-driving vehicles. “Wayve’s advanced Embodied AI approach holds a ton of promise as we work towards a world where modern vehicles are shared, electric and autonomous,” he said.
Uber invested heavily in its own division looking at autonomous driving, which it sold during the pandemic as it focused on profitability and as its strategy changed to working with third parties.
The Wayve funding will be used to accelerate the development of Level 2 and Level 3 driver assistance and automated driving functions with carmakers, “while also working towards the development of globally scalable Level 4 autonomous vehicles for future deployment on Uber.”Level 2 systems are designed to perform basic tasks autonomously, such as staying in lane or maintaining a set distance from other cars, while Level 3 cars are meant to drive themselves, but require the driver to pay attention.
Level 4 autonomous vehicles are designed to drive themselves under most circumstances and take action on their own in dangerous situations.
While manufacturers and autonomous vehicle software companies have had more success with basic driver assistance functions such as lane-keeping systems, developing vehicles that can truly drive themselves has proven more difficult and much more expensive than many had expected.