Wayve, an AI startup for autonomous driving, raises $1 billion
Wayve, a London-based maker of artificial intelligence systems for autonomous vehicles, said Tuesday it had raised $1 billion, an eye-popping sum for a European start-up and an example of investor optimism about AI's ability to reshape industries.SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate that backed Uber and other tech companies, was the lead investor, along with Microsoft and Nvidia. Previous investors in Wayve include Yann LeCun, Meta's chief artificial intelligence scientist.Wayve, which previously raised about $300 million, did not disclose its valuation after the investment.Wayve was co-founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge specializing in computer vision and robotics. Unlike generative AI models, which create human-like text and images and ...