UK autonomous driving startup Wayve recently announced a $1.05 billion Series C funding round. This significant amount was led by Japan's SoftBank Group, and also attracted deep participation from tech giants such as NVIDIA and Microsoft, marking one of the largest single investments in the AI sector in Europe to date.

Unlike Tesla or Waymo, which rely on high-definition maps and expensive sensors, Wayve follows an "end-to-end" embodied AI technology approach. According to AIbase, the models developed by Wayve can learn and reason in real-time using camera data, similar to human drivers, allowing them to navigate complex urban streets they have never seen before. This "pure vision + large model" approach is considered more scalable and easier to deploy across different cities and vehicle types.

SoftBank's significant investment in this round reflects its strong confidence in the concept of "physical AI." SoftBank executives stated that Wayve's technology is not limited to passenger vehicles but will also extend to more physical entities such as robots. At the same time, NVIDIA's involvement provides strong underlying computing power for Wayve, while Microsoft continues to offer infrastructure for large-scale model training through its Azure cloud platform.

Currently, Wayve has expanded its research center beyond London and plans to use this funding to accelerate the commercialization of its foundational model (AV2.0). Although the autonomous driving industry once faced a cold period, Wayve's successful fundraising undoubtedly injected a strong stimulus into the global autonomous driving market, indicating that driving technology based on generative AI is about to enter a period of rapid growth.

Summary:

  • 💰 The Largest Fundraising in UK History: Wayve completed a $1.05 billion Series C funding round, led by SoftBank with participation from NVIDIA and Microsoft, setting a new record for fundraising by an AI startup in the UK.

  • 🚗 End-to-End Technological Innovation: Abandoning the traditional high-definition map model, it adopts a pure vision, end-to-end AI architecture, enabling vehicles to have stronger generalization capabilities and "brain-like" reasoning abilities.

  • 🌐 Collaboration Across Major Giants: The funding not only brings financial support but also integrates NVIDIA's hardware advantages and Microsoft's cloud computing power, aiming to accelerate the application of "embodied AI" in the real physical world.