Wayve Attracts Fresh Investments From NVIDIA, Microsoft, Uber, & Mercedes

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Wayve, a UK based autonomous driving company, announced on February 25, 2026, that it has raised $1.2 billion in a Series D investment round, bringing its post-money valuation to $8.6 billion. The funding accelerates the company’s shift from AI research leadership to scaled commercial deployment of its end-to-end AI platform, the announcement said.

“Microsoft, NVIDIA and Uber participated in the round, reflecting support for Wayve’s embodied AI as a foundational software layer for deploying autonomy at a global scale. Leading global automotive manufacturers Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis also invested, in support of advancing Wayve’s unified AI platform spanning L2+ ‘hands off’ through L3/L4 ‘eyes off’ driving across vehicles, brands and markets.”

BMW & Mercedes News

The last bit is interesting. As we reported earlier today, Mercedes will no longer offer Level 3 autonomous driving technology on its range-topping S-Class cars. Similarly, BMW announced it also is planning to move forward with the less sophisticated driver assistance package available now on the iX3 for its top-of-the-line 7 Series cars instead of its own Level 3 technology.

BMW intimated that cost was a major issue in its decision, but over green vegetable curry in the CleanTechnica employees lounge this afternoon, executive editor and exalted grand poohbah Zachary Shahan suggested Mercedes may have simply decided to focus on getting help from NVIDIA to develop a true fully self-driving system to compete with Tesla as quickly as possible and just stick with enhanced Level 2 until that is accomplished.

“Tesla FSD can go door to door now. These other automakers surely need to find a pathway to doing the same. In-house isn’t getting it done, but pooling resources and aligning with the right companies can make it happen,” he said.

Stay In Your Lane!

Zachary has a point. Car companies are good at building cars. They are not necessarily good at designing computer systems. At the beginning of the EV revolution, the companies assumed they would manufacture their own batteries the way they produced engine blocks, camshafts, and transmissions. Ten years later, most of them are leaving battery manufacturing to the experts rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

In a press release, Wayve said it “pioneered the application of end-to-end AI to autonomous driving in 2017 and has since industrialized its safety-by-design architecture into a production-ready autonomy platform.

“From 2026, consumers will experience Wayve-powered robotaxis through commercial trials with Uber. From 2027, they will be able to buy passenger vehicles equipped with Wayve’s AI Driver, starting with L2+ “hands-off” capability that allows the vehicle to steer, navigate and respond to traffic under driver supervision.

“Wayve licenses its AI Driver directly to automakers, providing tools to customize driving models for specific vehicles and brands. The system runs entirely on onboard vehicle computers and embedded sensors, and doesn’t rely on high definition maps or location-specific engineering. By partnering with automakers and mobility platforms rather than vertically integrating, Wayve enables autonomy to scale globally with lower capital intensity.

“In the past year, Wayve became the first and only AV developer to drive zero-shot in more than 500 cities across Europe, North America and Japan, meaning without city specific fine tuning before deployment. That performance is enabled by Wayve’s foundation model trained on globally diverse data spanning over 70 countries and a wide range of vehicle platforms, creating unmatched data diversity that allows autonomy to generalize to new markets.”

Zero-Shot

“Zero-shot” raised a few eyebrows among the cognoscenti here at CleanTechnica. Most of us didn’t know what the term meant, so we did what our grandmothers always told us to do — we looked it up. The folks at IBM were happy to help us out with this definition: “Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is a machine learning scenario in which an AI model is trained to recognize and categorize objects or concepts without having seen any examples of those categories or concepts beforehand.” We learn something new every day!

Uber has committed an additional $300,000,000 to support multi-year deployments of Wayve-powered robotaxis on the Uber network, with plans to scale to more than 10 markets globally. The companies plan to launch their first service in London in 2026, with broader international rollout to follow. Under the partnership, Wayve will deploy its AI Driver in L4-capable vehicles from participating automakers, while Uber will own and operate the fleet, creating a scalable model for autonomous ride-hailing using mass-produced vehicles.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, “We are very proud to continue to deepen our partnership with Wayve, with plans to deploy together in more than 10 markets around the world. Wayve’s powerful end-to-end approach is purpose-built for scale, safety, and effectiveness, and we’re excited to work with them across multiple OEMs and geographies, which we’ll share more about soon.”

“End-to-end AI has shifted from a research bet to the industry’s chosen path for scalable autonomy,” Wayve said in a statement. It claims to have spent almost a decade pioneering the technology into a production grade platform that can power any vehicle, anywhere. “As the industry converges on end-to-end AI, Wayve is positioned to lead its global deployment,” it says.

A Total Addressable Market Approach

CNBC reports that Wayve CEO Alex Kendall said in a statement, “We are building for a total addressable market that spans every vehicle that moves. This investment accelerates our path to widespread commercial deployment and positions us to build the autonomy layer that will power any vehicle everywhere.”

The obvious question is, how will this announcement impact Tesla and its pledge to bring Level 3 or higher vehicles to market as soon as humanly possible? Zachary is of the opinion that if this succeeds and Tesla is unable to be the global leader in autonomous driving, that could have a significant negative impact on Tesla’s market valuation.

There seems to be little doubt that somebody is going to crack the code for making truly autonomous vehicles — soon. It is probably no coincidence that Toronto’s Lloyd Alter today wrote on his Carbon Upfront blog on Substack about a question raised recently by Addison Del Mastro, who asked, “what exactly are people in a largely car-dependent country supposed to do with themselves as they age out of driving responsibly?”

According to Alter, there are now 70 million Boomers whose eyesight is failing, whose reflexes are slowing, and who perhaps should no longer be in charge of driving a 2-ton projectile to the Piggly Wiggly for a quart of milk. “It is inevitable,” he says. “Take 70 million aging baby boomers and put them in big SUVs and pickup trucks on North American roads, and you have a whole lot of accidents waiting to happen.”

Can Wayve address that issue effectively? We are about to find out.