Uber will also use Wayve’s technology to power its first test fleet of robotaxis, which will hit the streets of London shortly (the exact date is under wraps). The trial will expand to 10 cities.
Like the pilot for Elon Musk’s Tesla robotaxis in the US, there will initially be a human minder in the front seat.
Uber’s Wayve-powered robotaxis will also compete against the Google-backed Waymo, which already has a commercial robotaxi service (with no human minders) in multiple US cities.
Speaking to the Herald earlier this week, Kendall said the key difference with his company’s autonomous-driving AI is that it’s made to work with any make or model of new car – and it’s hardware-neutral.
Whether a car “sees” the world around it via camera, radar or LiDAR (Laser Imaging, Detection and Ranging) or other sensors, Wayve’s technology can work with the data so the car can drive itself.
“Everyone wants autonomy, not everyone wants to buy a Tesla,” Kendall said.
It’s also under wraps what brand or brands of car will be used in Uber’s robotaxi trial. (Waymo uses a modified Jaguar I-Pace with extra hardware piled onto its roof.)
But there are now many options, and more are on the way.
In December, Wayve signed a “definitive agreement” with Nissan to integrate Wayve’s AI across “a broad range of Nissan vehicles” for “advanced driver-less assistance systems”. The first model with Wayve technology onboard will appear in 2027, Nissan says.
Kendall says a broad range of car makers will offer a “level two” driverless technology next year, based on Wayve AI.
Level two allows a vehicle to steer, navigate and respond to traffic by itself, as well as a person in the driver’s seat with hover hands (as is the case for the Tesla’s self-drive, now enabled for NZ roads, with a few hairy moments in its early days).
Support for level three and four – where the driver doesn’t need any eyes on the road – is in the works.
“There’s a race to bring this to the market. It won’t be something that just Tesla has,” Kendall says.
His firm – which now boasts more than 1000 staff across six countries – has now tested its driverless technology in more than 500 cities.
Kendall says cars using Wayve AI can deal with whatever conditions happen to be around them. They are not going to get confounded by erratic drivers at roundabouts or roadworks because they’re not trying to match everything to a high-definition map.
Wayve’s system is also fully self-contained on a car, so there should be no incidents like the recent clip out of San Francisco of four Waymos blocking a street during a power cut.
It’s not just about technical breakthroughs, however. Some people have an instinctively hostile reaction to a driverless car. A Waymo stopped at a traffic light can be the target for petty hijinks or worse. A November incident where a Waymo struck and killed a cat led to neighbourhood protests.
Kendall says accident statistics show that AI-driven cars have far fewer accidents compared to those controlled by humans.
Waymo, whose vehicles have now driven more than 100 million miles (see clips of my ride in LA here), says its cars have been in 90% fewer “serious injury or worse” crashes per million miles driven than human-driven vehicles (see its full stats here).
A big majority of crashes on the human side are caused by human error or misdeeds, from drunkenness to distraction to speeding to road rage. AI can make mistakes, but it doesn’t indulge in those bad behaviours.
Kendall is up with the stats in part because Wayve is co-secretary of a United Nations working party that has created global regulations for automated driving systems, to which New Zealand is a party and is “deeply engaged with regulators around the world”. The ex-pat has been a visitor to No 10.
Fewer crashes aren’t the only benefit. Self-driving cars always take the most efficient route, saving on fuel costs and carbon emissions. They’re a boon for older people.
He adds that Wayve AI can be built into any mass market vehicle at low cost, “unlike a solution that requires expensive infrastructure or can only run in affluent cities”.
Christchurch-raised Kendall, a Christ’s College old boy, went to Auckland University, where he graduated with an honours degree in mechatronics engineering after skipping the first year.
He then won a Woolf Fisher Scholarship research fellowship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed a doctorate in deep learning, computer vision and robotics in 2017 – the same year he co-founded Wayve, where today he is chief executive.
As a side gig, he served as a scientific adviser to London-based AI start-up Scape Technologies, a maker of “city-scale localisation with computer vision” 3D mapping technology acquired by Facebook for a reported US$40m in late 2019.
Matthew Scarborough, who became friends with Kendall at the University of Auckland’s engineering school and also moved to London (albeit for a job in investment banking rather than tech), and is still a close mate, told the Herald that Kendall stood out as “a near-genius – always the smartest guy in the class yet understated. It’s remarkable how humble he’s remained”.
Another Auckland University engineering grad, Jeff Hawke, served as Wayve’s VP of technology before leaving in 2023 for a stealth start-up.
Wayve’s US$1.2b Series D round announced today (part of a total US$1.5b including capital chipped in by Uber) was at a US$8.6b valuation.
Auckland venture capital firm Icehouse Ventures put $12.5m into the round, a sizeable punt by local standards.
“Alex Kendall founded Wayve out of his PhD research at Cambridge and has spent nearly a decade turning that work into a production-ready autonomous driving platform now operating on public roads,” Icehouse partner Jo Wickham said.
“What Wayve is building – a generalised AI that learns to navigate the physical world – has implications that extend well beyond the car, and backing a Kiwi founder building at that frontier is the kind of investment Icehouse Ventures was built to make.”
(Icehouse also recently supported a raise by another major self-driving startup headed by a Kiwi – the San Francisco-based Nuro, co-founded by Dave Ferguson, which had a US$203m round at a US$6b valuation.)
Kendall said he was familiar with Icehouse from his early stabs at entrepreneurship while at Auckland University. He kept in touch over the years, including attending a dinner a VC firm hosted in London.
Wayve’s backers over its recent rounds (it also staged a US$1.05b Series C raise in 2024) have included Softbank and a raft of other multinational VC firms, plus AI giants Nvidia (which made a US$500m strategic investment) and Microsoft – who have also been technology partners.
Today, Wayve was able to line up supporting statements from everyone from UK Technology Secretary of State Liz Kendall to the heads of some of the biggest companies on the planet.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said, “Wayve is pushing the frontier of embodied AI for autonomous driving, and Azure supports the scale, reliability, and safety needed to bring that innovation into the real world. Through our partnership and investment, we’re helping accelerate the path from breakthrough research to scaled commercial deployment with automakers worldwide.”
Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said: “We are very proud to continue to deepen our partnership with Wayve, with plans to deploy together in more than 10 markets around the world. Wayve’s powerful end-to-end approach is purpose-built for scale, safety, and effectiveness, and we’re excited to work with them across multiple OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] and geographies, which we’ll share more about soon.”
