Wayve Raises $1.5B to Scale End-to-End Autonomous Driving Platform

• Wayve closed a $1.2 billion Series D, part of $1.5 billion secured to support the commercial rollout of its autonomy platform.
• The company plans to launch robotaxi trials with Uber in 2026 and deploy supervised autonomy software in consumer vehicles starting in 2027.

Wayve raised $1.2 billion in a Series D, bringing its post-money valuation to $8.6 billion and total capital secured for commercial rollout to $1.5 billion, including additional milestone-based investment from Uber. The round was led by Eclipse, Balderton, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Microsoft, NVIDIA, Uber, and automakers Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis, alongside other global institutional investors.

“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,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft, in a press release.

The raise accelerates Wayve’s shift from AI research leadership to scaled commercial deployment of its end-to-end AI platform. In 2026, the company will launch robotaxi trials with Uber, beginning in London and expanding to more than 10 markets. From 2027, consumers will be able to buy passenger vehicles equipped with Wayve’s AI Driver, starting with L2+ hands-off capability under driver supervision.

Wayve licenses its AI Driver directly to automakers, with a system that runs on onboard vehicle compute and embedded sensors rather than high-definition maps or location-specific engineering. In the past year, the company reported driving zero-shot in more than 500 cities across Europe, North America and Japan, enabled by a foundation model trained on data from over 70 countries.

🌀 Tom’s Take:

This raise reflects alignment across automakers, hyperscalers, chipmakers, and mobility platforms around Wayve’s end-to-end AI approach. With capital tied directly to robotaxi deployment and consumer vehicle integration, the company is moving from research to scaled commercial rollout through production vehicles and global partners.

Source: Wayve