Wayve, a UK-based leader in AI for autonomous driving, has signed a letter of intent with NVIDIA to evaluate a $500 million (£371m) strategic investment in Wayve’s next funding round.
The London-headquartered firm’s foundation model approach, combined with NVIDIA’s computing platforms, equips automakers with advanced ’embodied AI’ and hardware.
Embodied AI represents the next frontier of AI innovation, going beyond generative AI and large language models. Wayve says the integration of embodied AI into vehicles and robots will lead to a paradigm shift in how machines interact with and learn from human behaviour in real-world environments.
This innovation holds tremendous potential to enhance the usability and safety of autonomous driving systems, empowering them with the intelligence to confidently navigate situations that do not follow strict patterns or rules, such as unexpected actions by drivers, pedestrians or environmental elements.
Founded in 2017, Wayve has emerged as a trailblazer in the field of embodied AI for autonomous driving, as the first company to develop and test an end-to-end AI autonomous driving system on public roads.
Wayve has successfully developed foundation models for autonomy, similar to a ‘GPT for driving’, that can empower any vehicle to perceive its surroundings and safely drive through diverse environments.
It has developed hardware-agnostic AI driving models for mapless autonomous driving and a suite of innovative technologies, such as fleet learning, data infrastructure, evaluation, and simulation platforms designed to rapidly enhance their AI models using real-world and simulated data.
The investment builds on NVIDIA’s participation in Wayve’s £850m Series C funding round alongside SoftBank and Microsoft.
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Wayve and NVIDIA have collaborated since 2018, with each generation of Wayve’s robot platforms accelerated by NVIDIA technology. The upcoming Wayve Gen 3 platform will be built on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor.
The firms say the latest platform will push the frontier of embodied AI, advancing the Wayve AI Driver toward eyes-off (Level 3) and driverless (Level 4) capabilities across urban and highway domains.
“Continued support from a global technology leader like NVIDIA underscores confidence in our AV2.0 approach to building embodied AI and its potential to transform the future of mobility,” said Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wayve.
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