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Wayve CEO shares his key ingredients for scaling autonomous driving tech  | TechCrunch

Mar 21, 2025 - techcrunch.com
Wayve, an autonomous vehicle startup co-founded by CEO Alex Kendall, is focusing on bringing its technology to market by ensuring its software is cost-effective, hardware agnostic, and applicable to various systems like advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), robotaxis, and robotics. The company employs an end-to-end data-driven learning approach that allows its system to operate without relying on HD maps or rules-based software. Wayve plans to license its self-driving software to automotive and fleet partners, with ongoing discussions with multiple OEMs. The startup emphasizes that its software can work with existing vehicle sensors and is "silicon-agnostic," although its current development fleet uses Nvidia’s Orin system-on-a-chip.

Wayve aims to commercialize its system at an ADAS level first, similar to Tesla's approach, by leveraging a widespread rollout to collect data for achieving full autonomy. Unlike Tesla, Wayve is open to incorporating lidar for near-term full autonomy. Kendall introduced GAIA-2, a generative world model that enhances the AI driver's adaptability and human-like driving behavior by processing video, text, and actions together. Wayve shares a philosophy with autonomous trucking startup Waabi, focusing on scaling data-driven AI models that generalize across different environments and using generative AI simulators for testing and training.

Key takeaways:

  • Wayve's strategy focuses on creating autonomous driving software that is cheap to run, hardware agnostic, and applicable to various systems, including ADAS and robotaxis.
  • The company plans to license its self-driving software to automotive and fleet partners, emphasizing its ability to work with existing sensors and GPUs in vehicles.
  • Wayve's approach to autonomy is similar to Tesla's, using an end-to-end deep learning model, but it is open to incorporating lidar for full autonomy.
  • Wayve's GAIA-2 model uses generative AI to train its driver on real-world and synthetic data, aiming for adaptive and human-like driving behavior without hand-coded instructions.
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