London-based autonomous vehicle company Wayve has raised $60m from a group of global chipmakers as it continues its rapid global expansion.
The money comes from AMD, Arm and Qualcomm Ventures, and extends the $1.2bn Series D Wayve raised in February from the likes of Nvidia, SoftBank and Microsoft.
Wayve, which was founded in 2017, develops self-driving software for carmakers and recently signed a deal with ride-hailing giant Uber and Japanese automaker Nissan to develop a fleet of robotaxis. A pilot deployment for that is expected in Tokyo later this year.
Alex Kendall, cofounder and CEO of Wayve, said: “For embodied AI to scale, automakers need design choice and supply chain flexibility.
“We’re building an AI Driver that works across the full automotive compute ecosystem, from architectures already used in millions of vehicles today to the platforms powering the next generation of automated vehicles.”
“Expanding our relationships with leading silicon companies helps bring that into production at a global scale, and we’re delighted to have these partners actively working with us on integration and deployment.”
The race to develop and deploy self-driving vehicles around the world has been heating up, with competition from Google's Waymo in the US and Estonian unicorn Bolt, which partnered with Chinese AI startup Pony AI last year to develop its own autonomous fleet.
Wayve, which was valued at $8.6bn in its February raise, is also backed by US VC firm Eclipse, Balderton, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, the British Business Bank and Schroders Capital.
The company is well stocked to take on its competitors. It also raised $1bn from Nvidia, Microsoft and SoftBank in 2024.
