British autonomous driving unicorn received $1 billion in financing, Microsoft, Nvidia for its platform

Recently, the British autonomous driving startup Wayve announced that it has raised $1 billion in the latest round of financing, after the financing, Wayve's total financing has been more than $1.3 billion, becoming the largest investment ever for a British artificial intelligence startup.

It is reported that the C round of financing was led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, and AI giants Nvidia and Microsoft also participated.

Founded in 2017, London-based Wayve is one of a number of startups seeking to enable autonomous driving, with its technology allowing cars to drive efficiently without a human at the helm.

Wayve also makes its own cars and licenses its self-driving technology to other companies, including retailers and automakers.

The company, founded by Cambridge PhD students Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, has raised $300 million in previous funding rounds. The company's valuation after the latest wave of venture funding has not been disclosed.

Wayve will use the funding to expand and release its own AI software products - the so-called Embodied AI embedded AI, meaning that such systems will be suitable for any autonomous device that needs to navigate and act in a physical environment. Eventually, these systems will be deployed in the products of the major automotive manufacturing giants. The company says it's a novel approach to autonomous driving that allows vehicles to navigate better in situations where they don't follow strict patterns or rules, such as when other human drivers act unexpectedly, or when pedestrians run into the road without looking, or when a tree is suddenly blown into the road.

Unlike previous generations of self-driving AI, the software model developed by the startup is trained "end-to-end" - which involves receiving camera and sensor data about what is happening around the vehicle and then outputs the best driving actions from that. The company has also trained an AI system to match a large language model with a driving control model, so that the vehicle can explain what it sees, why it is taking certain actions, and can accept natural language commands.

Using AI models to make driving decisions, Wayve has found a bridge between AIGC and autonomous driving

Early self-driving cars relied primarily on multiple small AI models, each of which was responsible for performing a specific action, such as identifying objects in camera data, and then combined these small models with sophisticated rule-based software to make driving decisions.

"This significant funding milestone underscores our team's unwavering belief that Embodied AI will solve the long-term challenges the autonomous driving industry faces in bringing this technology to the world," Wayve co-founder and CEO Kendall said in a statement Tuesday.

In addition, Alex Kendall told Reuters in an interview, "This technology will allow automakers to accelerate the transition from assisted driving to autonomous driving."

It's become more difficult for self-driving car startups to get funding than it has been in years past, which is why Wayve's big round is generating so much attention.

In fact, many current self-driving car developers are having some problems developing cars that can truly drive themselves. The challenge is seen as much more difficult than many thought, so enthusiasm for autonomous driving has waned somewhat.

The self-driving industry has also had some recent setbacks.

In October, a woman in San Francisco was reportedly dragged under a car operated by Cruise, the self-driving car unit of General Motors Co, after being struck by another human-driven vehicle. Cruise was subsequently accused of withholding evidence about the accident, which resulted in it being stripped of its permit to test the vehicle on public roads.

At the end of the day, one of the main challenges of autonomous driving technology is that autonomous vehicle systems lack the ability of humans to instantly predict and assess dangerous situations, which is dangerous in the event of an unexpected incident.

Wayve has been working to solve these headaches with its embedded AI system, which it claims is similar to "GPT for driving," enabling any vehicle to better sense its surroundings and drive safely in different environments. The software is designed to learn driving rules and patterns on its own, without having to program them, so it can respond to new locations and unpredictable scenarios on the road.

Wayve president Erez Dogan told Reuters that his company's AI model is able to generalize its driving knowledge from one scenario to another. He says this is necessary because "it's almost impossible to imagine every situation that a self-driving car would need to handle reliably."

Dogan believes that AI could lead to a paradigm shift in the way machines interact with and learn from human behavior. "By harnessing the raw power of AI, we can build an embedded AI system that learns from both real-world and synthetic data how to handle edge situations at a speed that exceeds human programming," he said.

A number of AI giants for its platform, the British Prime Minister personally praised the next

The investment is also a huge win for the UK. The UK now has twice as many companies working on AI as any other European country, providing more than 50,000 jobs and contributing £3.7 billion ($4.6 billion) to the economy. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been trying to make the country a global AI hub, hoping to be at the forefront of technology development and regulation.

The support expressed in real money by a number of leading companies has also made the UK more confident. In April, Microsoft announced it would set up an office in London dedicated to AI research.

It is worth mentioning that there are a number of industry celebrities for Wayve company, including Microsoft and Meta chief scientist Yann Le Cunn.

Rishi Sunak also praised the news of Wayve's latest funding round, saying it "demonstrates our leadership position in this industry."

"From the first light bulb or the World Wide Web, to artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, the UK has a proud record at the forefront of some of the biggest technological advances in history," Rishi Sunak said in a statement.

"I'm incredibly proud that the UK is home to pioneers like Wayve, who are making breakthroughs in developing the next generation of artificial intelligence models for autonomous vehicles."

According to the UK government, the autonomous vehicle industry brought 475 million pounds ($596 million) in direct investment to the UK between 2018 and 2022. The government says it has also created 1,500 new jobs.

With this round of funding, Wayve has raised more money than Germany's Aleph Alpa, which raised $500 million in November, and France's Mistral, which raised $415 million in December.

Commenting on Wayve's funding, Sunak said: "The fact that a local UK company has set the record for the largest funding by a UK AI company to date is a testament to our leadership in the industry. The news itself will also cement the UK's international standing as an AI superpower."

Asked for comment, Wayve said it had everything to say in its press release.

Obstacles will remain for a long time to come

Major automakers such as Tesla and General Motors have made moves in the field of autonomous driving, but the industry as a whole still faces challenges. Despite the ambitions of global giants to make driverless cars a reality, safety, economic costs and legal gaps remain significant and persistent obstacles.

Last year, GM's self-driving car unit Cruise recalled vehicles for a software update while laying off a quarter of its workforce. The failure of Tesla's "fully autonomous driving (FSD)" technology has led the US Justice Department to open an investigation into the company led by Elon Musk. The latest generation of Tesla's fully autonomous driving system uses an end-to-end approach quite similar to Wayve's.

Apple also recently canceled its self-driving car project, which had been in the works for years.

But things seem to be different at Wayve.

Its technical solution can explain to the driver how the AI "thinks." They use real video and data from partners such as Asda and Ocado to guide the AI system on how to navigate different road scenarios. Kendall said in an interview last September that the company's goal was to make self-driving car technology safer and more trustworthy for the driver community. Overall, he adds, the odds of success continue to improve.

Kendall concluded in an interview at the time, "I think the UK is very suitable for this technology. Based on what we know, the UK government also sees this as a huge growth opportunity and is willing to invest patience and time in it."

Reference link:

https://fortune.com/europe/2024/05/07/wayve-funding-microsoft-self-driving-startup-1-billion-series-c-ai-autonomous/

https://siliconangle.com/2024/05/06/wayve-raises-1-05b-funding-accelerate-autonomous-vehicles-driven-embodied-ai/