Wayve is one of the UK’s most valuable deep tech startups, backed by more than $1 billion in funding. Alex Kendall co-founded the company in 2017 following his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he pioneered a contrarian approach to self-driving cars.
At a time when the industry relied heavily on rule-based systems, maps and multiple sensors, he proposed a different vision powered by deep learning—where a single neural network could learn to drive from raw data without human intervention.
Wayve’s approach creates a general-purpose driving intelligence that can adapt to new environments. Its models are trained on tens of petabytes of real-world data from its team of safety drivers. Wayve tests its models in both real-world driving settings and in simulation. Real-world testing exposes AI to diverse conditions, while simulation enables efficient, large-scale validation.
Synthetic data on rare or unseen scenarios are used to train their technology to safely navigate the real world. Wayve tests these safety-critical scenarios, such as near collisions or unpredictable pedestrian behaviour, using a cutting-edge generative world model.
Wayve’s autonomous cars have been navigating the complex streets of London since 2019, overseen by legally required safety drivers. Last year they expanded to San Francisco and have also been testing these cars in Stuttgart, and Japan. The company plans to license its technology to car manufacturers, with Nissan set to integrate Wayve’s AI to support driver assistance into its vehicles by 2027.
The engineering team have also built the first language-driving model tested on public roads. LINGO opens up communication with the robot and can narrate its driving and answer questions. That means Wayve’s engineers (and eventually passengers) can communicate with the AI and ask it to explain decisions or drive in a certain way.
He sees autonomous driving as a launchpad for a broader revolution in embodied AI, with applications in robotics, manufacturing, and healthcare. “Bringing AI into the physical world in a way that it can interact with us, is real – is tangible,” explains Kendall, “I think it’s going to be the biggest transformation we go through in our lifetimes.”
Adapted from a Royal Academy of Engineering press release:
Alex Kendall, CEO and Co-Founder of Wayve, a billion-dollar UK company that uses deep learning to solve the challenges of self-driving cars, has been presented with the Princess Royal Silver Medal, one of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s most prestigious individual awards.
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