This British AI company has raised $1 billion to reimagine autonomous mobility using AI
The company is now building foundation models for autonomy (think GPT for driving) that can empower any vehicle to see, think, and drive through any environment.
You've likely heard about self-driving cars, aka autonomous cars, driverless cars, robotaxis, robotic cars or robo-cars. Most, if not all, can operate with reduced or no human input.
But imagine a car that is fully automated and can easily navigate situations that do not follow strict patterns or rules, such as unexpected actions by drivers, pedestrians, or environmental elements.
Thanks to the integration of Embodied AI into vehicles and robots, British AI company Wayve is reimagining how machines interact with and learn from human behavior in real-world environments.
Founded in 2017, the company is going beyond Generative AI and large language models to pioneer Embodied AI for autonomous driving. This new AI model integrates advanced AI into vehicles and robots to transform how machines interact with, comprehend, and learn from human behavior in real-world environments.
The company initially developed and tested an end-to-end (e2e) deep learning autonomous driving system on public roads. The company is now building foundation models for autonomy (think GPT for driving) that can empower any vehicle to see, think, and drive through any environment.
Now armed with a $1.05 billion Series C funding round led by SoftBank, with participation from new investor NVIDIA and existing investor Microsoft, Wayve wants to develop and launch the first Embodied AI products for production vehicle. The goal is for OEMs to efficiently upgrade cars to higher levels of driving automation in the future.
What this means is that we would soon start seeing self-driving cars that are fully-automated, which is a huge step from what we currently have – driverless cars with some assisted driving.
That's dope.
