Autonomous vehicles technology startup Wayve raises $200m
London-based autonomous mobility startup Wayve has announced a $200 million Series B funding round.
This brings total equity raised to over $258 million.
The new capital will enable Wayve to grow its team, develop a Level 4+ AV prototype for passenger vehicles and delivery vans, scale its deployments on partner fleets to commence last mile delivery pilots, and develop the data infrastructure to improve its core autonomy platform at fleet scale.
Eclipse Ventures, a long time supporter, led the round with participation from new investors.
These include D1 Capital Partners, Baillie Gifford, Moore Strategic Ventures and Linse Capital, as well as additional support from Microsoft and Virgin, and early stage investors Compound and Balderton Capital.
They join strategic investor Ocado Group and angel backers that include Richard Branson, Rosemary Leith, Linda Levinson, David Richter, Pieter Abbeel, and Yann LeCun.
Alex Kendall, Co-founder and CEO, Wayve, says: “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.”
“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.”
Seth Winterroth, Partner, Eclipse Ventures, comments: “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.”
