The U.K.-based startup Wayve has raised $1.05 billion in Series C funding led by SoftBank Group. The money will be used to build a self-learning system for self-driving cars instead of a rule-based system. This is one of the biggest AI fundraises ever in the UK and one of the twenty biggest AI fundraises ever in the world.
Nvidia and Microsoft, which was already a partner, also took part in the raise. Yann LeCun, who is the head of AI at Meta, was one of Wayve’s early backers.
The Cambridge-based business Wayve was started in 2017 and raised $200 million in a Series B round in January 2022. The round was led by Eclipse Ventures, which also led the company’s $20 million Series A round in 2019.
The company proposes to use the extra money to improve its product for “eyes on” assisted driving, “hands off” fully automatic driving, and other AI-assisted functions in cars. It wants to do business all over the world.
San Francisco is known as the center of self-driving car launches, with services from both Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, and Cruise, which is owned by GM. Wayve’s “end-to-end” self-driving system, on the other hand, started out on the narrow streets of Cambridge in an electric Renault Twizy, a small car with only two seats.
So far, it has trained its model on delivery cars for companies like Ocado, a grocery delivery service in the UK that put $13.6 million into the startup.
For self-driving cars, Wayve has a plan that is similar to Tesla’s. However, Wayve wants to sell its plan to many automakers. Naturally, this means that Wayve will get a lot more training data to help it make its model better, since Tesla needs someone to buy their brand of cars. But the company hasn’t said who its car partners are yet.
Wayve calls its hardware-agnostic, mapless product “Embodied AI.” The company wants to sell its platform to robotics companies that work with all kinds of manufacturers, so the platform can learn from how people act in a lot of different real-world situations. Its work on LINGO and GAIA, which are multimodal and generative models, will lead to “language-responsive interfaces, personalized driving styles, and co-piloting,” the company says.
Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wayve, told TechCrunch, “Seven years ago, we started the company to go build an embodied AI.” We’ve been hard at work making technology… “Everything started to work really well last year.”
He said the most important thing was when the auto industry made the “step change” of putting cameras around new cars. Wayve can use this data for its self-driving platform: “Now their production vehicles are coming out with GPUs, surrounding cameras, radar, and of course the appetite to now bring AI onto and enable an accelerated journey from assisted to automated driving.” This fundraiser proves that our technological method is sound, and it gives us the money to turn this technology into a product and sell it.
He Also Said That Wayve Has Big Plans For Robots
“Soon, you’ll be able to buy a new car that has Wayve’s AI built into it…” Then this makes it possible for all kinds of living AI, not just robots but also cars. I believe that the main goal here is to make AI much better than it is now, with language models and robots. But we need to be able to trust smart machines that we can give jobs to. These machines can also make our lives better, and self-driving cars will be the first example of that.
It showed how important this fundraiser was to the whole of the U.K. when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said, “From the first electric light bulb or the World Wide Web to AI and self-driving cars, the U.K. has a proud record of being at the forefront of some of the biggest technological advances in history.”
“I am so proud that the U.K. is home to innovators like Wayve who are making history by creating the next generation of AI models for self-driving cars.” “The fact that a British company has gotten the biggest investment in a U.K. AI company yet shows that we are leaders in this field and that our economic plan is working,” he said.
“We are doing everything we can to make the U.K. economy strong enough for businesses to grow and do well.” As he said, “This announcement solidifies the U.K.’s position as an AI superpower.” We already have the third most AI companies and private investment in AI in the world.
Also Read: Apple is Ending Its Project to Make Self-driving Electric Cars and Letting Some Employees Go
Kentaro Matsui, general partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers and a Wayve board member, also said in a statement: “AI is changing the way people move around… This kind of technology has the power to change everything; it could stop 99% of car crashes. As Wayve leads the way in this effort, SoftBank Group is proud to be at the forefront of how AI is changing mobility and communication, making society safer and easier to use.
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