Wayve’s AI self-driving system is here to drive like a human and take on Waymo and Tesla

When I arrived he was laying out an impressive lunch of salads and carved ham and huge blocks of good cheese. There are now 385 mouths to feed in London alone and almost 450 employees in total, including the new US headquarters and testing base that Wayve just opened in Sunnyvale, California – the first public use of Softbank’s cash. It may have flown under the radar until that hyped funding round in May, but this startup launched in 2017. and like most overnight successes, it takes a long time to build.

This investment is seen as a clear sign that self-driving cars are coming out of “trough of disappointment” so common in tech when an ad needs to become an app. Some of the biggest and best-funded companies have admitted that autonomy is the hardest problem they’re working on. Too hard, in some cases: Among many others, An appleUber and Volkswagen have abandoned AV programs in recent years.

But there is new optimism around autonomy. In addition to the Wayve deal, Alphabet’s Waymo now provides 150,000 driverless rides each week in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and just announced expansion to Austin and Atlanta early next year. Autonomous transport service Aurora will soon make its first driverless trips in Texas. Tesla finally showed Cybercabeven if its half-hour launch event was disappointingly short on detail. Mate Rimac’s autonomous travel service Vernwhich uses beautiful, bespoke two-seater coupes without a steering wheel or pedals, launches in Zagreb next year, with at least a dozen other cities already signed up.

Wayve may have nothing like the scale, budget or mileage of Waymo. But there is Alex Kendall who has the same early…Elon a combination of messianic vision, drive and ability to “get into the weeds” of the problem himself. And Wayve is taking a fundamentally different, purely AI approach to autonomy than Waymo, which could allow it to scale much faster and more widely than its competitors.

“In 2017, when we launched Wayve, we were in the peak advertising cycle for autonomous cars,” Kendall tells me. “Everybody said, ‘Oh, it’s a year from now and it’s going to be magical.’ They thought of self-driving as an infrastructure and hand-coded robotics problem. I thought of it as an AI problem.”