British self-driving technology startup Wayve has announced a significant milestone in its journey towards developing autonomous vehicles with human-like adaptability. The company has raised $1.05 billion in a funding round led by SoftBank Group, with participation from new investor Nvidia and existing backer Microsoft.
This latest funding round brings Wayve’s total funds raised to over $1.3 billion, marking a major investment in a British AI startup. Wayve’s Embodied AI technology aims to revolutionize autonomous driving by enabling vehicles to learn from and adapt to human behavior, paving the way for a smoother transition from assisted to fully autonomous driving.
In a statement, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak praised the funding round as a testament to the UK’s leadership in the AI industry, highlighting the success of the country’s economic plan.
Wayve, founded in 2017, has already integrated its technology into six different vehicle platforms, including electric vehicles like the Jaguar I-PACE and Ford Mustang Mach-E. CEO Alex Kendall emphasized that as the self-driving technology progresses, Wayve’s AI will continue to evolve through over-the-air software updates.
One of the key challenges faced by self-driving technology is the ability to predict and assess risk quickly, especially in unexpected scenarios or “edge cases.” Wayve President Erez Dagan explained that the company’s technology is designed to generalize its driving knowledge, learning from a variety of scenarios to handle edge cases at a level that surpasses human programming.
Dagan added, “By leveraging the raw power of AI, we can build an Embodied AI system that’s learned from real-world and synthetic data how to handle edge cases at a rate that surpasses human programming.”
