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British startup Wayve has begun testing self-driving cars with Nissan in Japan ahead of a 2027 launch to consumers, as the company said it was in talks for a $500m investment from the chip-maker Nvidia.
Wayve, based in London, said it had installed its self-driving technology on Nissan’s electric Ariya vehicles and tested them on Tokyo’s streets, after first agreeing a deal with the Japanese carmaker in April.
The British company is racing against rivals – such as Tesla, Google’s Waymo, and China’s Baidu – to prove that its technology can work for carmakers, after rising rapidly to become one of the country’s best-funded startups and a rare UK artificial intelligence pioneer. Nissan was the first carmaker to say publicly that it was using Wayve’s technology, although the founder of Wayve, Alex Kendall, said the company was working with large manufacturers in Europe, North America and Japan.
Wayve on Friday said Nvidia, the world’s most valuable listed company, thanks to the AI boom, had signed a letter of intent for a possible $500m investment in Wayve’s next funding round. The startup has already raised $1.3bn from investors including Japan’s SoftBank to fund its expansion in the US, Germany and Japan, as well as in London.
Nvidia provides one or two chips in each car using Wayve technology, and many more in the datacentres used to train Wayve’s foundation model on huge amounts of driving data, including video of drivers encountering real-world models.
Kendall, 33, a New Zealander, founded Wayve in 2017 after studying deep learning for computer vision and robotics at the University of Cambridge.
“We want to build a trillion-dollar company,” Kendall said. He added that the company had reached “a real inflection point in the capabilities of this technology” that allowed it to learn rapidly how to deal with Tokyo’s crowded streets.
Wayve uses artificial intelligence models that learn how to drive by ingesting huge amounts of video and driving data and spotting patterns that it can then replicate. The approach contrasts with some other driverless technology companies that tried to programme explicit rules into their systems.
Nissan was already developing its own autonomous driving technology, including in London trials, but the decision to use Wayve technology as well provided a major seal of approval for the British company. The technology in Nissan vehicles will be an “eyes on, hands off” system – known as “level 2” within the industry – with drivers expected to be able to take control at any point.
However, Kendall said that “eyes off” technologies, whereby the car takes full control, are “very similar from an AI perspective”. So-called “robotaxis” controlled by rival software are already operating in some American and Chinese cities, although companies have faced problems with cars sometimes unable to navigate unusual obstacles.
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“I expect level 2 will come at the greatest scale first. I do believe it will be incremental,” he said. Robotaxis in London will also have a safety driver at first when they start trials in the spring under a deal with taxi app company Uber.
Kendall said that he regarded Wayve as an “international company”, but added that “our biggest office and our headquarters is here in London, and that will remain”
“The UK should be comfortable and confident to use the UK as a platform for international expansion.”
Wayve cars use a combination of cameras and radar. The Nissan cars also use a more expensive lidar laser sensor, which Kendall said would provide “a level of redundancy”, while also being affordable.
“This is a stack that is affordable to put on mass-market vehicles,” he said. “We need to be able to work with lean, low-cost hardware.”
