Wayve is an autonomous driving technology company founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, headquartered in London, United Kingdom. The company pioneers an end-to-end, learning-based approach to driving intelligence rather than relying on hand-coded rules and high-definition maps.
Wayve's core product, the Wayve AI Driver, is mapless and vehicle-agnostic software designed to enable multiple levels of driving automation. Its embodied AI learns directly from data, allowing it to generalize across vehicles, geographies, and driving conditions without bespoke per-city engineering.
The company has raised substantial venture funding, including a large Series C led by SoftBank with participation from NVIDIA and Microsoft, making it one of the best-funded autonomous driving startups in Europe. This capital supports global expansion and partnerships with automakers.
Wayve differentiates itself through its foundation-model approach to driving, treating autonomy as a data-driven learning problem similar to large language and vision models. This contrasts with modular AV stacks and is positioned to scale more flexibly across markets.
Wayve targets automotive OEMs and fleet operators seeking embedded assisted and automated driving capability. It competes with both traditional AV developers and other end-to-end learning companies in a sector where commercialization, validation, and safety assurance remain significant challenges.