UK autonomous vehicle company Wave is now valued at $8.6 billion after a new round of funding, making it one of Europe’s most valuable AI startups.
London based salesmanHas emerged as a leading advocate of embedded ai As for autonomous driving, it closed a $1.2 billion Series D round this week as it plans to accelerate the rollout of its technology over the next few years.
this round It was led by a trio of established investment organizations, Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, with supporting participants including automakers Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis (owner of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler and several European car brands).
They were joined by major big tech names like Microsoft and Nvidia, as well as Uber, which is set to contribute an additional $300 million based on milestone performance, bringing the new funding to $1.5 billion.
According to a statement from Wave, the investment will help the company accelerate “the transition from AI research leadership to large-scale commercial deployment of its end-to-end platform.”
In the field of robotaxis, Wave is set to begin commercial trials later this year, including in London in partnership with Uber, according to an originally unveiled roadmap.
According to Wave, more international markets will be coming, more than ten of which have already been targeted. Robotaxis will deliver Level 4 AutomationAs defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers, it means that the vehicle is in control while driving under specific circumstances.
The second element of Wave’s program is the introduction of its autonomous technology into consumer vehicles – cars that private individuals can own or lease.
Wave has promised this from 2027, starting with Level 2 ‘hands-off’ assisted automation and eventually progressing to Levels 3 and 4.
Because Wave’s foundation model has been trained on globally diverse data from more than 70 countries and many different vehicle platforms, it has created what the company claims is “unmatched diversity”, allowing automated functionality to be applied to all types of cars from different brands in different locations.
Nissan is going to become the first automobile manufacturer to use technology, to be signed an agreement Wave’s technology was integrated in December last year, following successful trials in Tokyo.
Since 2017, Wave has been a leading advocate for providing autonomous functionality using an end-to-end deep learning approach, with models trained on massive amounts of data and video that the vendor says enables cars to drive like humans.
Wave’s AI driver system is licensed directly to vehicle manufacturers, the system runs on onboard compute and embedded sensors, and does not rely on high-definition maps or location-specific engineering (as is the case with most leading robotaxi operators). Wave argues that this approach allows for cost-effective global scaling.
Wave CEO Alex Kendall praised the latest funding in a release, saying: “With $1.5 billion secured, we are building a total addressable market that spans every vehicle in motion.
“Autonomy won’t just grow through city-to-city deployment of robotaxi. It will grow through a reliable platform that automakers and fleets can deploy globally and continually improve,” he said.
Wave, whose AI systems use Nvidia chips running on the Azure cloud, is “pushing the limits of embodied AI for autonomous driving,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the release.
