Wayve, a UK leader in embodied AI for autonomous driving, today announced it has raised €1 billion ($1.2 billion) in a Series D investment round, bringing its post-money valuation to €7.2 billion ($8.6 billion) in order to shift from AI research leadership to scaled commercial deployment of its end-to-end AI platform.
The round was led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and brings in new investment from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, British Business Bank, Icehouse Ventures, Schroders Capital and other global institutional investors. Microsoft, NVIDIA and Uber also participated in the round.
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.
This follows their 2024 €1 billion Series C raise, as reported by EU-Startups.
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 a trusted platform that automakers and fleets can 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.”
Recent EU-Startups coverage of the broader AI and automation space in 2025–2026 highlights significantly smaller rounds compared to Wayve’s €1 billion Series D.
For example, UK-based Overmind secured €2.3 million in Seed funding to scale its supervision layer for agentic AI in regulated sectors, while London’s Toyo raised €3.6 million to develop secure AI agents for non-technical founders. In Germany, happyhotel closed a €6.5 million Series A to expand its AI-driven hotel revenue management platform, and Italy’s Equixly raised €10 million to scale its automated API security testing solution.
Altogether, these rounds amount to approximately €22.4 million in disclosed funding across adjacent AI verticals – a fraction of Wayve’s raise. This underscores the relative scale of capital flowing into embodied AI for mobility compared with other European AI applications during the same period.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft: “Wayve is pushing the frontier of embodied AI for autonomous driving, and Azure supports the scale, reliability, and safety needed to bring that innovation into the real world. Through our partnership and investment, we’re helping accelerate the path from breakthrough research to scaled commercial deployment with automakers worldwide.”
Founded in 2017, Wayve has been pioneering the application of end-to-end AI to autonomous driving, industrialising 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 customise driving models for specific vehicles and brands. The system runs entirely on onboard vehicle compute 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 looks to enable autonomy to scale globally with lower capital intensity.
Ivan Espinosa, President and CEO, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd, said: “This investment deepens our partnership with Wayve and supports Nissan’s plans to advance autonomous driving through scalable end‑to‑end AI. By strengthening this collaboration, we are reinforcing our competitiveness in intelligent mobility and our focus on long‑term value creation.”
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.
Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber, says: “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.”
As well as participating in the Series D, Uber has committed additional capital 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.
The company outlines that End-to-end AI has shifted from a research bet to the industry’s chosen path for scalable autonomy. Wayve has spent nearly a decade pioneering this technology into a production-grade platform that can power “any vehicle, anywhere“.
As the industry converges on end-to-end AI, Wayve is well positioned to lead its global deployment.
UK Technology Secretary of State Liz Kendall shares: “Wayve is a powerful example of the strength, ambition and potential of Britain’s innovative firms. This fund raise demonstrates the international confidence in our brilliant AI sector and reaffirms Britain’s position as the leading scale-up ecosystem in Europe. We will continue to create the conditions for world-leading firms like Wayve to start, grow and scale, creating great jobs and opportunities for people in every corner of our country.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/02/wayve-rockets-to-e7-2-billion-valuation-with-e1-billion-series-d-bet-on-ai-driven-autonomy-backing-from-uber-and-microsoft/
