Wayve secures $1.5B to further develop driverless cars

Wayve, the British company developing embodied AI for autonomous driving, has raised $1.2 billion in a Series D investment round, bringing its post-money valuation to $8.6 billion. Uber will invest additional milestone-based capital to scale Wayve-powered robotaxi deployments globally. The funding accelerates the company’s shift from research to scaled commercial deployment of its end-to-end AI platform.

The round was led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and brings in new investment from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, British Business Bank, Icehouse Ventures, Schroders Capital and other global institutional investors.

Microsoft, Nvidia and Uber participated in the round, reflecting support for Wayve’s embodied AI as a foundational software layer for deploying autonomy at a global scale. Leading global automotive manufacturers Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis also invested, in support of advancing Wayve’s unified AI platform spanning L2+ ‘hands off’ through L3/L4 ‘eyes off’ driving across vehicles, brands and markets.

From research to commercial deployment

Wayve pioneered the application of end-to-end AI to autonomous driving in 2017 and has since industrialised its safety-by-design architecture into a production-ready autonomy platform.

From 2026, consumers will experience Wayve-powered robotaxis through commercial trials with Uber. From 2027, they will be able to buy passenger vehicles equipped with Wayve’s AI Driver, starting with L2+ ‘hands-off’ capability that allows the vehicle to steer, navigate and respond to traffic under driver supervision.

Wayve licenses its AI Driver directly to automakers, providing tools to customise driving models for specific vehicles and brands. The system runs entirely on onboard vehicle compute and embedded sensors, and doesn’t rely on high-definition maps or location-specific engineering. By partnering with automakers and mobility platforms rather than vertically integrating, Wayve hopes to enable autonomy to scale globally with lower capital intensity.

In the past year, Wayve became the first autonomous vehicle developer to drive in more than 500 cities across Europe, North America and Japan without city-specific fine-tuning before deployment. That performance is enabled by Wayve’s foundation model trained on globally diverse data spanning over 70 countries and a wide range of vehicle platforms, creating data diversity that allows autonomy to generalise to new markets.

Robotaxi deployment with Uber

Uber participated in the Series D and has committed additional capital to support multi-year deployments of Wayve-powered robotaxis on the Uber network, with plans to scale to more than 10 markets globally. The companies plan to launch their first service in London in 2026, with broader international rollout to follow.

Under the partnership, Wayve will deploy its AI Driver in L4-capable vehicles from participating automakers, while Uber will own and operate the fleet, creating a scalable model for autonomous ride-hailing using mass-produced vehicles.

Any vehicle, anywhere

Wayve asserts that end-to-end AI has shifted from research to scalable autonomy. The company has spent nearly a decade pioneering this technology into a production-grade platform that it claims, “Can power any vehicle, anywhere.”

Alex Kendall, Co-Founder and CEO of Wayve said, “With $1.5 billion secured, we are building for a total addressable market that spans every vehicle that moves. Autonomy will not scale through city-by-city robotaxi deployments alone. It will scale through a trusted platform that automakers and fleets can deploy globally and improve continuously. This investment accelerates our path to widespread commercial deployment and positions us to build the autonomy layer that will power any vehicle, anywhere.”