Alex Kendall
@alexgkendall • 17,341 subscribers
CEO at @wayve_ai teaching cars how to drive with machine learning 🇳🇿
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Another major milestone in Wayve's history. Proud to say we’ve secured $1.5 billion Series D investment at $8.6 billion valuation. We started a decade ago with a contrarian technical thesis: that self-driving is an AI problem, and Embodied AI will enable autonomy to scale without rules, HD-maps and using mass-produced hardware. Now we're entering commercialisation, we're taking a contrarian commercial strategy too, selecting the business model with the largest opportunity to scale. We're not selling our own cars, which limits scale to one brand. We're not operating our own fleets, which limits autonomy to city-by-city expansion. We're licensing autonomy to any vehicle, anywhere. This new business model is only possible now because we've built a general purpose AI driver, which is flexible to work with any vehicle architecture and proven to drive all around the world. This unlocks a high margin software licensing model, which we're now excited to be deploying with global partners with the strength of this new funding round. Thank you to our new and returning financial investors for backing our vision all the way: Eclipse, Balderton Capital, SoftBank, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, British Business Bank, Icehouse Ventures and Schroders among other global institutional investors. We're deepening our partnerships with Microsoft and NVIDIA to build and deploy Embodied AI at global scale, and with Uber, who are announcing supervised robotaxi trials in 10 cities around the world, starting with London this year. To top it off, three top-10 global automakers across Europe, Japan and USA are backing and believing in our technology for consumer vehicles and robotaxis: Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis. I’ve always believed that our end-to-end AI approach would lead the way in autonomy. This latest investment and the endorsement that comes with it make me believe that the industry is also now converging on that idea too. What's next? We have a busy next few years of commercial delivery: supervised robotaxi trials around the world in 2026 and consumer vehicle sales from 2027. Thank you to the incredible Wayve team for making this all possible. Check out all details here:
Alex Kendall90,475 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
Today we're announcing #GAIA1: a 9B parameter world model, trained on 4,700 hours of driving data, able to simulate complex and diverse driving scenes from video, text and action inputs. This model is 480x larger than the preview we shared earlier this year and the results are incredible. These videos are entirely synthetically generated by Wayve's generative AI, GAIA-1. But there is more here than just generating videos, GAIA is an entire world model. A world model allows us to simulate the future, conditioned on video, text and action inputs, which can be leveraged for making informed decisions when driving. Why is this game-changing for autonomous driving? 1. Safety. One limitation with AI systems like today's Large Language Models is that they are autoregressive, next-word prediction algorithms, but aren't necessarily aware of the implications of their decisions. A world model allows us to give our AI the capability to be aware of its decisions, by simulating the future, which is important for self-driving safety. 2. Synthetic training data. I believe synthetic training data is the future for AI, because it is safer, cheaper, and infinitely scalable. GAIA-1 unlocks unprecedented realism and diversity of synthetic data for self-driving. 3. Long-tail robustness. One of the biggest challenges for self-driving is long-tail robustness: dealing with the enormous magnitude of edge cases we see on the road. An advantage of generative AI is its incredible ability to recombine experiences in new ways. This is exciting for self-driving as it means we can learn from two edge case scenarios, and combine them to become a corner case. For example, we can experience driving in fog, and experience of jay-walking pedestrians, and GAIA can learn from these experiences to understand how to generate a fog+jay walking scenario. Check out many more videos in our blog or further technical details in our paper: Or come chat with our team who are at the International Conference on Computer Vision (#ICCV2023) this week in Paris in Booth 32 Jamie Shotton
Alex Kendall631,833 просмотров • 2 лет назад
Day 4, video #4. This hour-long, zero-shot autonomy video is a route I've done many times: from our London HQ to Heathrow 🇬🇧 Starting in London forced us to build autonomy that could scale. Compared to SF, London has 10x more cyclists, 15x more pedestrians and 20x more roadworks. This is what we've built at Wayve. Check it out!
Alex Kendall54,491 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
We had an unbelievable demo at CES. Wayve drove autonomously in Las Vegas zero-shot — no prior training on the city, no disengagements all week. We brought three vehicles from our Silicon Valley fleet to Vegas. Despite driving in 500 cities last year, our AI had never seen Las Vegas before. Guests chose their own routes across urban streets and highways, and the system performed flawlessly. I was there for 24 hours and saw: * Confident lane changes to overtake slower traffic * Correct handling of a blinking yellow left turn (not used in California) * Robust navigation through frequent roadworks * Seamless compliance with traffic marshals' hand signals directing vehicles leaving the convention center — my favourite moment in the video below! More evidence our AI can drive any vehicle, anywhere.
Alex Kendall80,004 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
I was impressed when my team showed me this example of intelligence and behavioural generalisation. Watch this — seeing a person bow to welcome our car to move forward is definitely not something I've seen outside of Japan. Yet in this clip you can see our AI Driver recognise that this person is asking us to stop. We have the intelligence to understand the context that we shouldn't nudge around them, rather hold in place, despite no signage or red light. Then, if you keep watching, you'll see we recognise the bow and a wave as permission to drive through the road works. Less than 1% of our training data is from Japan. Our AI is trained end-to-end. There are no explicit rules or labelling, no explicit gesture or body pose recognition, this is all learned capability that is scalable and data-driven. This is how Wayve will scale autonomous driving to the world and address the long-tail of edge cases.
Alex Kendall67,997 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
Here's my favourite scenario from autonomous driving in Tokyo last week! 🇯🇵
Alex Kendall87,399 просмотров • 1 год назад
Video #2. Every day this week we are posting an hour long video of zero shot AI Driving in a different country all around the world. This time we're in Germany, driving around the rolling hills and into Stuttgart. 🇩🇪 Check it out! What matters now is scaled autonomy performance. We built our first world model in 2018. First VLA reasoning model in 2022. First generative simulator in 2023. Today we have integrated these into safe and compliant product ready for global scale. We're delighted to be partnering with the German ecosystem to bring autonomy to the rich heritage of brands. Together, we will build market-leading products for both consumer vehicles and robotaxis.
Alex Kendall23,998 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Exciting to see how far the industry has come since we gave our first end-to-end AI driving demo a decade ago. But what matters now is scaled deployment. Every day this week we are releasing a new hour long video of zero shot driving all around the world 🌏 To start #1 this video is in San Jose, California. We're here for NVIDIA GTC and offering demo drives all week through the city and surrounding freeways. Book a ride here: This week we're also unveiling more details about our Nissan Motor Leaf robotaxi we're building on NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion platform. We'll launch supervised trials in Tokyo with Uber later this year. It has already been a busy week - today I was live on the main stream right before Jensen's keynote. Join me tomorrow for my keynote at 9am PT in person or live streamed here: 📢
Alex Kendall22,878 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Day 3, video #3. Every day this week we are releasing a new hour-long, zero-shot autonomous drive from a new country around the world. Do you recognise this location? It is Japan! 🇯🇵 Yokohama in wet conditions from highways to tight, bustling urban roads. Check it out!
Alex Kendall12,944 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Today we're announcing our new office and autonomous fleet in Japan! 🙌 This has been a year in the making — here's the story behind Wayve's journey to Japan 🇯🇵 Just over one year ago I was looking over the Tokyo skyline as we were completing our Series C fundraise, wondering how our AI would navigate the narrow winding streets. At that point it was a dream, but in the last year, it has become reality. The right team at the right time: 6 months ago we made our first hire in Japan. I'm grateful for Masa Kameyama taking a bet on Wayve and for his partnership leading our presence in Japan (we have a lot of great people around Wayve called Masa 😄). I'm excited about the opportunity to welcome world-class and diverse experience to Wayve's team. We're hiring and building an awesome team in Japan! The right product at the right time: for a long time I've been impressed by Japanese automaker's scale and leadership in safety and lean manufacturing. Now I'm witnessing bold and brave decisions from automotive executives to lean into AV2.0. There is an opportunity for Japanese automakers to leap-frog other markets to be the first to bring AV2.0 to global scale. We are delighted to be partnering with Nissan Motor to make this a reality in 2027 and to be working with partners like Uber, タクシーアプリ S.RIDE(エスライド) 公式アカウント and SoftBank. Fast forward to yesterday, I landed in Tokyo and was treated by being picked up by one of our autonomous vehicles! Today, I’ve just got off stage at our press conference, launching our brand new Testing and Development Centre in Yokohama and autonomous vehicle fleet in Japan. Our fleet of autonomous vehicles are now testing around the world in UK 🇬🇧, Germany 🇩🇪, Canada 🇨🇦, US 🇺🇸 and now Japan 🇯🇵. This is an important proof point showing Wayve is capable of being a global company and delivering the benefits of Embodied AI to consumers around the world.
Alex Kendall41,277 просмотров • 1 год назад
🤯 Incredible to see Wayve Embodied AI generalise to new environments. Here's a clip from my autonomous drive last week in Stuttgart, Germany 🇩🇪 2:18 thru a tunnel, 8:45 reading German lane markings for navigation, 12:30 busy traffic, 17:30 overtaking double parked vehicles
Alex Kendall34,164 просмотров • 1 год назад
2025 was a defining year for Wayve. We founded Wayve on the belief that embodied intelligence would unlock autonomy at scale. After eight years of pioneering deep tech research, this year marked a true inflection where Wayve became global and commercial. Wayve went global 🌍 * A year ago we were just driving in central London. In 2025 we drove autonomously in 500+ cities across Europe, Asia, and North America — 43% with zero prior training data, showcasing the generalisation of AV2.0 * Expanded operations across London, Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Vancouver, Tel Aviv, and Stuttgart, welcoming exceptional talent and partnering with the world’s leading automotive manufacturers Wayve went commercial 🚗 * Started work with global fleets and automakers to deploy our AI Driver in applications across all levels L1–L5 autonomy * Announced a landmark deal with Nissan, one of the largest global automakers, to bring our AI Driver to their global consumer vehicles from FY2027 * Partnered with Uber to launch robotaxis on their marketplace in cities around the world, starting in London Grateful to our team, investors, and partners for making this possible. Bring on 2026!
Alex Kendall16,698 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
Simulation provides the ability to unlock autonomy at scale. Our new blog shows how multi-agent reinforcement learning allows us to populate our Wayve Infinity Simulator with the emergent behaviour critical to represent dynamic urban cities in the real world.
Alex Kendall66,919 просмотров • 3 лет назад
Had a total moment of joy today seeing our AI drive me autonomously around a foreign city. 🇩🇪 😆
Alex Kendall23,574 просмотров • 1 год назад
I’m really proud of the results Wayve released today. 📊 For the first time we share quantitative results of our global generalisation journey. What did we learn? 💡 Over our first 8-weeks training in the US, our AI has rapidly adapted to its unique driving environment with just 500 hours worth of incremental US-specific training data, on top of our large scale foundation model's learning. What’s more, we just launched in Germany and first results are already 3x better — generalisation just keeps improving with new data. It is clear to me the future of autonomy will be unlocked by Embodied AI capable of generalising to new countries, vehicles and able to safely navigate challenging edge cases it has never seen before during training. Now we’re excited to kick things up a gear and work with the world’s leading automotive manufacturers to collect the data necessary to validate this technology and deploy it in consumer vehicles worldwide. Embodied AI is a generational opportunity and the pace of progress I'm seeing is incredible. We're building the strongest team in AI for automated driving. If you're excited about this mission, join us!
Alex Kendall21,933 просмотров • 1 год назад
Data is 👑 Our foundation model learns from globally diverse, unlabelled data. Without telling it how to drive or naming different scene elements, our AI learns patterns and behaviours. Our results this week demonstrate how rapidly our AI can learn new behaviours, finding that with hundreds of hours worth of country-specific data, our foundation model learns new skills, like driving on the right in the US! See how our Wayve AI Driver improves driving in the US with data from 0-10-100-250-500 hours worth of additional US-specific data. 👇 By leveraging diverse data, we are building a highly generalizable AI that enables safe, adaptable, and scalable autonomy—we’ve taken it to the US and Germany but stay tuned for where is next 🌎⁉️
Alex Kendall17,178 просмотров • 1 год назад
