Alex Kendall, 29, is the co-founder and CEO of autonomous driving startup Wayve.
Supply: Wayve
British startup Wayve on Tuesday mentioned it had raised $1.05 billion in an funding spherical led by Japan’s SoftBank to speed up the expansion of its self-driving automotive expertise.
The Collection C funding spherical included new investor U.S. chipmaker Nvidia and present investor, software program large Microsoft, which is a significant backer of AI companies.
The financing marks a significant vote of confidence for the Cambridge-based agency. It additionally builds on the heaps of money at present being deployed within the AI house.
“At Wayve, our imaginative and prescient is to develop autonomous expertise that not solely turns into a actuality in thousands and thousands of autos but in addition earns individuals’s belief by seamlessly integrating into their on a regular basis lives to unlock extraordinary worth,” Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wayve, mentioned in an announcement.
“This vital funding milestone highlights our group’s unwavering conviction that Embodied AI will handle the long-standing challenges the business has confronted in scaling this expertise to everybody, all over the place.”
Based in 2017, Wayve is one among a large number of startups trying to allow autonomous driving — expertise that allows vehicles to successfully drive with out people on the helm.
Not like Tesla, which manufactures its personal vehicles, Wayve licenses its self-driving expertise to different companies, together with retailers and automakers.
