Nvidia to Invest in Autonomous Vehicle Company

­American tech giant Nvidia is investing heavily in a London AI startup that could chart the course forward for autonomous driving.

That startup is Wayve Technologies (and no, for the unfamiliar, that’s not a misspelling of Google self-driving vehicle company, Waymo), which was founded in Cambridge in 2017 and is already making waves in the self-driving vehicle space.

The company calls their next-gen, AI-driven approach to autonomous driving AV2.0, and in their own words, it forgoes traditional AV stack, HD maps and hand-coded rules and instead is focused on building “a data-driven learned driver that can scale, adapt and generalise its driving intelligence to places it has never seen before.”

So AV2.0 allows the system to learn-on-the-fly and it’s also apparently flexible regarding sensor selection and vehicle agnostic, able to adapt to a wide variety of vehicles, from passenger vehicles to delivery vans.

The latter also means that Wayve is focused exclusively on the software and won’t be building its own vehicles. To that end, they’ve already landed some big-name clients like Nissan and Uber. And of course, Wayve has collaborated with Nvidia, in some fashion, as far back as 2018.

In 2024, Wayve apparently raised over $1 billion in a funding round, and Nvidia is poised to invest an additional $500 million, continuing their long-running relationship.

Alex Kendall, Co-founder and CEO of Wayve, noted that “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.”