Wayve raises $200m in Series B funding led by Eclipse Ventures to accelerate autonomous vehicle development.
The Series B round was led by Eclipse Ventures with participation from a broad group of global financial and strategic backers.
≈ £147M at $1 = £0.7352 on 18 Jan 2022
Wayve develops end-to-end artificial intelligence software for autonomous vehicles. The company provides a scalable driving platform designed for automotive manufacturers.
London-based Wayve has secured $200m in a Series B funding round led by Eclipse Ventures to accelerate the development of its autonomous vehicle technology. The financing drew participation from new global financial investors including D1 Capital Partners, Baillie Gifford, Moore Strategic Ventures and Linse Capital, alongside Microsoft, Virgin, Compound and Balderton Capital. Strategic partner Ocado Group and several prominent angel investors also contributed to the raise.
The capital will be deployed to expand the company team, create a Level 4 plus autonomous prototype for passenger vehicles and delivery vans, scale deployments with commercial fleet partners for last-mile delivery pilots, and build out data infrastructure. Wayve applies end-to-end deep learning to camera-first hardware, allowing its software to learn continuously from extensive driving data gathered by commercial partners.
From the founder
"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."
Alex Kendall
CEO at Wayve
Investor perspective
"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."
Seth Winterroth
Partner and Board Member at Wayve, Eclipse
Use of funds
- 01Grow the team
- 02Continue product development
- 03Build out infrastructure
Investors
Seth Winterroth
Eclipse
Jeff Lerman
D1 Capital
Baillie Gifford
Moore Strategic Ventures
Linse Capital
Microsoft
Virgin
Compound
Balderton
Ocado