Wayve, a tech company involved in ‘embodied AI for autonomous driving’, has announced it has signed a letter of intent with Nvidia to evaluate a new $500 million strategic investment in Wayve’s next funding round.
This investment builds on Nvidia’s participation in Wayve’s Series C funding round and ‘fuels the company’s continued growth’.
Wayve said it also reflects the companies’ shared vision to bring safe, scalable, and production-ready autonomous driving technology to market.
Wayve maintains that its foundation model approach, combined with Nvidia’s automotive-grade accelerated computing platforms, equips automakers with the advanced AI and hardware needed to deliver next-generation mobility solutions on a global scale.
Wayve's technological approach to driverless vehicles uses AI machine learning alongside vehicle mounted cameras and other sensors to learn from traffic patterns and driver behaviour. The company claims its embodied AI ‘learns to drive anywhere, in any vehicle’.
Wayve says it is developing mapless and hardware-agnostic embodied AI products for automakers and fleet owners, accelerating the path from assisted to automated driving.
Wayve and Uber are planning to start Level 4 autonomous vehicle trials in the UK next year.
Wayve, Uber to start Level 4 autonomous vehicle trials in UK in 2026
Wayve and Nvidia have collaborated since 2018, with each generation of Wayve’s robot platforms accelerated by Nvidia technology.
The upcoming Wayve Gen 3 platform will be built on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor.
NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor is accelerated by Nvidia Blackwell GPU architecture and runs the safety-certified Nvidia DriveOS, leveraging the Nvidia Halos comprehensive safety system.
It is claimed the Wayve Gen 3 platform will ‘push the frontier of embodied AI, advancing the Wayve AI Driver toward eyes-off (Level 3) and driverless (Level 4) capabilities across urban and highway domains’.
Alex Kendall, Co-founder and CEO of Wayve said: “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.”
