UK self-driving car startup Wayve rides off with $20 mln

UK-based Wayve, a self-driving car startup, has secured $20 million in Series A funding. Eclipse Ventures led the round with participation from Balderton Capital.

PRESS RELEASE

LONDON, ENGLAND – November 18, 2019 – Wayve, a startup dedicated to accelerating autonomous mobility through learning based approaches instead of hand-coded rules, today announced a $20M Series A funding round to launch a pilot fleet of autonomous vehicles in central London. The investment was led by Eclipse Ventures, with participation from Balderton Capital, existing investors and several undisclosed preeminent leaders in machine learning and robotics.

Wayve believes that the complexity of self-driving cars will be solved by better artificial intelligence “brains,” not by more physical sensors and hand-coded rules. Launched in Cambridge, England – arguably the birthplace of modern computing and artificial intelligence – and recently relocated to London, this is the first time a European self-driving car company has attracted premier Silicon Valley venture capital funding to lead a Series A investment. “Wayve’s differentiated approach to autonomy builds on timely advances in the fields of reinforcement learning, simulation and computer vision,” said Seth Winterroth, Partner at Eclipse Ventures. “Furthermore, by locating the company in the UK, the team has access to an extraordinary talent pool and numerous complex testing environments.”

In Spring 2019, Wayve publicized an unprecedented achievement, demonstrating a self-driving car navigating on roads it had never previously driven before. This had been accomplished by using only cameras, a 2D map, and a unique, end-to-end, deep learning driving brain. A good human driver can quickly adapt to navigating a new jurisdiction, however existing autonomous solutions lack the requisite ability to detect and respond appropriately to potential hazards. By contrast, Wayve is committed to building a general and scalable driving brain applicable to any driving environment.

“The average human learns to drive in just 50 hours with visual input primarily. Once we have learned, we are capable at driving on roads around the world despite vastly differing traffic laws and cultural context,” said Suranga Chandratillake, Partner at Balderton Capital. “Wayve’s self-driving technology is the closest to this human approach to learning. The great advantage of solving the problem this way is that it is robust in the face of a global opportunity.” To date, self-driving vehicle testing has been carried out on highly structured and modern roads in USA and China. While these are “live” driving environments, such geographies lack the irregular, diverse and complex streets of most other global cities. Wayve has successfully begun on-road public autonomous driving trials supported by insurance partner, Admiral.

End-to-end machine learning based systems have dominated traditional rule-based approaches in natural language processing, image recognition, speech synthesis and more. “As computational power and data continue to grow, learning-based approaches will become more inevitable, especially for mobile robotics,” said Amar Shah, Wayve Co-Founder and CEO, “the human brain has evolved over millions of years, computers have only had a few decades, but are catching up quickly.”

About Wayve
Wayve is pioneering the intersection of artificial intelligence and mobile robotics using state of the art research in machine learning, computer vision and reinforcement learning. Self-driving vehicles are Wayve’s first commercial application area. Find out more by visiting https://wayve.ai/

About Eclipse Ventures
Eclipse Ventures is a technology-focused investment firm specializing in complex operations and full-stack solutions. Founded in 2015 and based in Palo Alto, CA, Eclipse partners with entrepreneurs boldly transforming the essential industries that define and propel economies. To learn more, visit http://eclipse.vc/

About Balderton Capital
Balderton Capital is a London-based venture firm focused exclusively on backing the best European-founded technology companies. In the two decades since our founding, we have worked with hundreds of extraordinary European founders, and have raised seven funds totalling more than $2.7bn. To learn more, visit https://www.balderton.com/