AMD backs UK self-driving startup Wayve in $60m add-on

Wayve has added US$60 million from AMD, plus Arm and Qualcomm’s venture arm, to extend its US$1.2 billion series D round as the UK self-driving startup adds more silicon investors.

Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Stellantis, Nvidia, Microsoft, Uber, Eclipse, Balderton, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 also joined the round.

Uber has separately committed another US$300 million tied to milestones, contingent on robotaxi deployments in London using Wayve’s technology.

Wayve said its software can run on different sensor and chip setups.

Nissan plans to add it to driver-assistance systems from 2027, while Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis plan future models.

🔗 Source: TechCrunch

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Wayve’s US$8.6 billion valuation has drawn support from UK policy and institutional capital

After its February funding round, Wayve reached a US$8.6 billion valuation, placing it among the UK’s most valuable AI startups 1.
The round brought money from both government-linked and private sources. The British Business Bank, the UK government-owned economic development bank, joined the US$1.2 billion raise. A newly created British Growth Partnership Fund I, backed by pension capital from Aegon UK, Cushon and M&G, set aside its first investment for Wayve 1.
Wayve says its system uses an end-to-end neural network, a type of AI that learns driving behavior straight from data. It does not depend on high-definition maps, which the company and its backers say could make it easier to scale to new environments 2, 1.

This deal reinforces Wayve’s pitch as a hardware-agnostic self-driving software layer

Investment from AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm’s venture arm, Qualcomm Ventures, supports Wayve’s plan to run its software across different automotive compute platforms rather than one fixed hardware stack 2, 1.
CEO Alex Kendall said the approach meets automakers’ demand for “design choice and supply chain flexibility,” since deployments can work with multiple chip suppliers 2.
Wayve has said the software can run on whatever chip its original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners already use in vehicles. That setup supports a modular approach where automakers can combine hardware and software vendors inside existing supply chains 2, 1.