Wayve, an autonomous mobility startup, has announced $200 million in funding from backers including Microsoft and Virgin.

The London-based company used ‘embodied intelligence’ to develop autonomous vehicle technology.

The Series B funding round brings total equity raised to over $258 million since the company was founded in 2017.

The round was led by long-time supporter Eclipse Ventures, and new investors including D1 Capital Partners, Baillie Gifford, Moore Strategic Ventures and Linse Capital, as well as additional support from Microsoft and Virgin, and early-stage investors Compound and Balderton Capital.

They join strategic investor Ocado Group and a prominent list of angel investors that include AI and industrial leaders including Sir Richard Branson, Rosemary Leith, Linda Levinson, David Richter, Pieter Abbeel, and Yann LeCun.

Wayve’s AV2.0 technology is designed to offer an adaptable AV system for fleet operators. It combines a camera-first sensing suite with the embodied intelligence of an end-to-end deep learning system that continually learns from petabyte-scale driving data provided by Wayve's partner fleets, including Ocado Group, Asda, and DPD.

The company announced that Microsoft will join as an investor. Wayve is using Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, to scale its machine learning platform. Azure is providing the compute and storage capabilities required to run autonomous driving development and testing workloads and conduct machine learning experimentation to improve autonomy performance.

By using machine learning, Wayve says it is building a more scalable AV platform that can quickly and safely adapt its driving intelligence to new cities, different use-cases and vehicle types.

Wayve said the new capital will enable it to continue to grow its team, develop a Level 4+ AV prototype for passenger vehicles and delivery vans, scale its deployments on partner fleets to commence last-mile delivery pilots, and develop the data infrastructure to improve its core autonomy platform at fleet scale.

Commenting on the raise, Seth Winterroth, partner, Eclipse Ventures said: “As the industry struggles to solve self-driving with traditional robotics, it is becoming increasingly clear that AV2.0 is the right pathway to build a scalable driving intelligence that can help commercial fleet operators deploy autonomy faster.

“Wayve is breaking new ground by building AVs that can adapt to driving in new cities, previously unseen in training. As the leaders in this field, they have assembled an exceptional team of machine learning experts and AV veterans to drive AV2.0 to reality.”

Digital minister at the department for culture, media and sport Chris Philp said: "It's brilliant to see investors around the world backing our innovative homegrown startups with millions in investment. Our tech pioneers are helping keep the UK at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and I recently launched the government's first National AI Strategy to help the industry here go from strength to strength.

“This comes on top of private UK tech firms raising £29.4 billion last year - by far the highest in Europe. The UK will continue to lead Europe for tech and AI in 2022.”

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