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British Business Bank invests £25m in Wayve

Press release 25 February 2026

The British Business Bank has invested £25 million into Wayve, the UK autonomous driving company, as part of a $1.2 billion Series D investment round.

The round was led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and brings in new investment from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, Icehouse Ventures, Schroders Capital and other global institutional investors.

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. 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.

Wayve specialises in developing AI foundation models for autonomous driving. Their technology equips vehicles with a ‘robot brain’ that can learn from and interact with real-world environments. Wayve pioneered the application of AI technology to autonomous driving in 2017 and has since industrialised its architecture into a production-ready autonomy platform.

The Bank’s investment into Wayve is one of its largest direct equity investments to date. This follows an increase in the Bank’s financial capacity to £25.6bn last year and reforms to its investment capabilities, allowing it to increase the number and size of investments into scale ups at the forefront of innovation and growth.

The British Business Bank first had exposure to Wayve through its investment into Balderton’s Fund VI in 2019. The Bank started its co-investment activity in 2021 and has since built a portfolio of 45 companies, making it the most active late-stage investor in UK deeptech and life sciences.

We are making larger investments in high growth companies like Wayve to support the UK’s most promising businesses to start, scale, and stay in the UK.

Companies like Wavye deserve deeper domestic backing, but too often UK institutional capital is absent from later stage funding rounds. Alongside looking to support larger growth funds, the Bank is stepping up and investing in these companies, both to encourage UK institutions to invest alongside us and to give the UK taxpayer exposure to the country’s highest-potential tech champions

Business Secretary Peter Kyle said,

Today’s investment is a big vote of confidence in the growth potential of Wayve, a great British business that is scaling here and expanding across the world. This funding round will cement the future for the firm, securing jobs, boosting growth and the economy

George Mills, Investment Director at British Business Bank, said, 

“It’s difficult to imagine a future without self-driving cars. Wayve has emerged as a global leader in this race and is at the forefront of innovation with its AI licencing model. This new funding round will support Wayve in developing its technology, allowing it to go toe-to-toe with others in the autonomous driving market

Alex Kendall, Co-Founder and CEO of Wayve, said,

With $1.5 billion secured, we are building for a total addressable market that spans every vehicle that moves. Autonomy will not scale through city-by-city robotaxi deployments alone. It will scale through platforms that automakers can trust, deploy globally and improve continuously. This investment accelerates our path to widespread commercial deployment and positions us to build the autonomy layer that will power any vehicle everywhere

The funding for Wayve will accelerate the company’s shift from AI research leadership to scaled commercial deployment of its end-to-end AI 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.

Further Information

If you are a journalist and have a media enquiry, please contact mediaenquiries@british-business-bank.co.uk.

Notes to editors

About the British Business Bank

The British Business Bank is the UK government’s economic development bank. Established in November 2014, its mission is to drive economic growth by helping smaller businesses get the finance they need to start, scale and stay in the UK. In doing so, we help capture the economic value of innovation for the UK and create jobs and prosperity for people across the country.

The British Business Bank’s core programmes support £23bn 1  of finance to almost 64,000 2  smaller businesses.

British Business Bank plc is a public limited company registered in England and Wales, registration number 08616013, registered office at Steel City House, West Street, Sheffield, S1 2GQ. It is a development bank wholly owned by HM Government. British Business Bank plc and its subsidiaries are not banking institutions and do not operate as such. With the exception of BBB Investment Services Limited they are not authorised or regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority or the Financial Conduct Authority. BBB Investment Services Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. A complete legal structure chart for the group can be found at british-business-bank.co.uk. 

The transaction described above does not constitute or imply any endorsement, warranty or recommendation by the UK government, the British Business Bank plc, its subsidiaries or any other party in respect of Wayve or its products or services. 

About Wayve

Founded in 2017, Wayve is a UK self-driving company pioneering embodied AI for autonomous driving. The company develops end-to-end AI software that enables vehicles to learn, perceive, understand, and navigate complex real-world environments.

Wayve's AV2.0 approach centers on a unified foundation model trained on large-scale, globally diverse data. Unlike traditional rule-based and map-dependent systems, Wayve's AI Driver is designed to generalize across markets and vehicle platforms without location-specific engineering.

Technology and Platform

Wayve builds and licenses its AI Driver as a vehicle-agnostic software platform that runs entirely on onboard vehicle compute and native sensors.

The same foundation model powers capabilities spanning from L2+ advanced driver assistance through L3 “eyes-off” and L4 driverless applications. Automakers can customize and continuously improve their driving models using Wayve's toolchains for fleet learning, data infrastructure, evaluation and simulation.

AI-500 Roadshow and Zero-shot performance

In 2025, Wayve conducted its AI-500 Roadshow, becoming the first and only AV company to test a single global AI Driver model across more than 500 cities in Europe, North America and Japan.

In machine learning, “zero-shot” refers to a model performing a task in a new domain without being retrained or fine-tuned on data from that specific domain. Using this definition, Wayve deployed its AI Driver zero-shot across all cities visited, with no city-specific fine-tuning prior to testing.

The AI Driver is distilled from Wayve’s foundation model, trained on large-scale, globally diverse driving data. In 219 cities, the system had no prior local data. In 260 cities, it had fewer than 10 kilometres of local driving data, and in a further 81 cities, less than 100 kilometres.

Commercial Deployment

In 2025, Wayve signed a definitive production partnership with Nissan Motor Co. to integrate its AI Driver into Nissan’s next-generation ProPILOT driver-assistance systems, with the first mass-produced vehicles expected to launch in Japan and other global markets from fiscal year 2027.

In 2025, Wayve and Uber announced plans to launch public robotaxi trials starting in London in 2026.

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