British unmanned technology startup Wayve has secured a $1.05 billion investment backed by leading artificial intelligence companies including Nvidia and Microsoft.
According to a report by TechCrunch, the investment led by SoftBank Group is the country's largest AI financing to date and ranks among the top 20 AI investments in the world. The company, founded in Cambridge in 2017, hopes to use the new capital injection to develop driver assistance and autonomous driving capabilities with the potential to expand globally.
The scale of the investment has raised many eyebrows, given the challenges existing big tech companies face in the U.S., such as Waymo and General Motors' Cruise, but so far Wayve's approach has been much more He is cautious and has his eyes on the “end.” '-to-end' self-driving systems are slowly growing from driving around the small streets of Cambridge in a two-seater electric car, the Renault Twizy.
Wayve calls its hardware-agnostic mapless product “embodied AI.” The company plans to distribute the platform not only to automakers, but also to robotics companies serving manufacturers in a variety of industries, allowing them to use the platform in a variety of real-world environments.
Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wayve, told TechCrunch that a “step change” has occurred as automakers standardize more sensors into their products. He further added: “Today, their production vehicles are equipped with GPUs, ambient cameras, radar, and of course there is a growing desire to deploy AI and enable acceleration from driver assistance to autonomous driving. The funding is validation of our technological approach and gives us the funds to turn this technology into a product and bring it to market.”
