Wayve, a provider of embodied artificial intelligence (AI) for self-driving vehicles, is delighted to announce the successful conclusion of a $1.05 billion Series C funding round. This investment round was spearheaded by SoftBank Group, with contributions from new investor NVIDIA and existing investor Microsoft. The investment will accelerate Wayve’s mission to revolutionise autonomous mobility through embodied intelligence.
Embodied AI marks the next frontier of AI advancement, surpassing Generative AI and large language models. Integrating embodied AI into vehicles and robots will trigger a fundamental shift in how machines interact with and learn from human behaviour in real-world settings. This innovation holds immense potential to enhance the usability and safety of autonomous driving systems, equipping them with the intelligence to adeptly navigate unpredictable scenarios, such as unforeseen actions by drivers, pedestrians, or environmental factors.
Established in 2017, Wayve has emerged as a frontrunner in Embodied AI for self-driving vehicles. According to Wayve, the company was the first to develop and trial an end-to-end (e2e) AI autonomous driving system on public roads, catalysing an industry-wide move towards AI, termed ‘AV2.0’. Through their extensive efforts, Wayve has successfully created foundational models for autonomy, akin to a ‘GPT for driving,’ enabling any vehicle to perceive its surroundings and navigate diverse environments safely.
Wayve has devoted years to thorough research and development in AV2.0. They have devised hardware-agnostic AI driving models for mapless autonomous driving and a suite of innovative technologies, including fleet learning, data infrastructure, evaluation, and simulation platforms, engineered to swiftly enhance their AI models using real-world and simulated data.
By harnessing Wayve’s advanced proprietary tools, OEMs and fleet operators can generate valuable data assets bridging the divide between raw data and exceptional driving capabilities. Furthermore, Wayve’s research on multimodal and generative models, known as LINGO and GAIA, is propelling the automotive industry towards a future where AI in vehicles can offer sophisticated features such as intuition, language-responsive interfaces, personalised driving styles, and co-piloting to enhance the automated driving experience.
“At Wayve, our vision is to develop autonomous technology that not only becomes a reality in millions of vehicles but also earns people’s trust by seamlessly integrating into their everyday lives to unlock extraordinary value. This significant funding milestone highlights our team’s unwavering conviction that Embodied AI will address the long-standing challenges the industry has faced in scaling this technology to everyone, everywhere,” said Alex Kendall, Co-Founder and CEO of Wayve. “Our collaboration with SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Microsoft will help advance our mission to redefine driving with AI at the core. This investment will enable us to develop and launch our first Embodied AI products for the automotive industry, empowering OEMs to provide consumers with trustworthy and beneficial automated driving experiences.”
“Wayve is pioneering new AI applications for their next-generation AV2.0 approach, built on NVIDIA DRIVE Orin and DRIVE Thor, which uses the new NVIDIA Blackwell architecture designed for transformer, LLM, and Generative AI workloads. Together, we can help enable self-driving vehicles that deliver the intelligence, dependability, and skill of the best human drivers,” added Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive Business at NVIDIA.
As part of the final transaction, SoftBank has joined Wayve’s Board of Directors.
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