Wayve, a British autonomous car startup, has acquired $200 million in a Series B fundraising round from investors to help it scale its technology and extend its commercial fleet agreements. Wayve aspires to be a key participant in the Robo-delivery and logistics space. It has now raised a total of $258 million for its technology, which is based on inexpensive video cameras around the vehicle that are linked to on-board AI-driven software, allowing it to be highly responsive to its surroundings without relying on 4G or 5G networks.
The round was led Eclipse Ventures, a previous investor. D1 Capital Partners, Baillie Gifford, Moore Strategic Ventures, and Linse Capital, as well as Microsoft and Virgin, and early-stage firms Compound and Balderton Capital, are among the other investors. They join Ocado Group as a strategic investor, as well as Sir Richard Branson, Rosemary Leith, Linda Levinson, David Richter, Pieter Abbeel, and Yann LeCun as angel investors.
Wayve CEO Alex Kendall claims that the company’s test vehicles have successfully navigated not only London but also cities where the vehicles have never before. Given the traditional medieval arrangement of UK streets, this is no small effort. Wayve had already received $13.6 million in funding from Ocado, a UK online grocery technology company, and has participated in an autonomous delivery pilot with the startup, as has British supermarket chain Asda.
Wayve claims that its AV2.0 technology is tailored to fleet operators, combining a camera-first approach with an embedded AI that learns from driving data provided by other Wayve partner fleets. According to the company, this makes it a more scalable AV platform than “AV1, 0,” which requires many data from outside the car, such as traffic reports, street maps, and a complicated array of sensors. “As the industry attempts to solve self-driving using traditional robotics, it is becoming increasingly evident that AV2.0 is the proper approaches to construct a scalable driving intelligence that can assist commercial fleet operators to adopt autonomy faster,” said Seth Winterroth, Partner, Eclipse Ventures.
“I believe this fundraising round is a signal from the market that we are going from proving our core technology to now having earned the right to scale and be commercially implemented,” Kendall told TechCrunch. When we established the company in 2017, autonomous vehicles were at the top of their hype cycle, with billions of dollars already invested. Everyone assumed it would take a year.” “And building a contrarian business to compete against trillion-dollar tech behemoths would have been a touch insane.”
The proof points, on the other hand, have allowed us to progress to the next level of scale. This is the extent to which we can test in multiple cities, The fact that we trained a system in London and expanded it across the United Kingdom, including Manchester, Coventry, Leeds, and Liverpool. “Not to mention all of our commercial partners and the tremendous talent we’ve been able to attract to our team,” he added.
