Wayve的端到端驾驶豪赌：无地图、无规则——先融10.5亿美元，再融15亿美元，估值86亿

做的是什么生意

London-based embodied-AI company building an end-to-end autonomous driving model ('AI Driver') that automakers and mobility platforms license; the same platform extends to robotics.

启动资金：$200M Series B (Jan 2022, Eclipse-led); $1.05B Series C (May 2024, SoftBank-led); $1.2B Series D (Feb 2026) at $8.6B post-money, with $1.5B secured in the round; $2.8B total raised across 4 rounds

起因

Wayve was founded in Cambridge in 2017 by Alex Kendall and fellow computer-vision researchers. Their thesis: driving is a perception problem, so a single neural network trained end-to-end on real driving data could learn behaviors no engineer can hand-code and generalize without HD maps. The first tests ran on the tiny streets of Cambridge in an electric Renault Twizy.

经过

Eclipse led a $200M Series B in January 2022, with Microsoft and Ocado (which invested $13.6M) among backers, as Wayve trained its model on delivery vehicles. In May 2024 SoftBank led a $1.05B Series C with NVIDIA and Microsoft — the UK's largest AI fundraise ever — and Wayve began pitching its mapless, hardware-agnostic 'AI Driver' to automakers and robotics companies. It started US testing in San Francisco in October 2024. In February 2026 a $1.2B Series D at an $8.6B valuation brought in Uber, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis, with Uber committing additional milestone capital tied to robotaxi rollouts planned to start in London in 2026.

结果

Scaling toward revenue: as of February 2026 Wayve plans commercial robotaxi trials with Uber in 2026 and L2+ 'hands-off' software in consumer vehicles from 2027, having demonstrated zero-shot driving in 500+ cities in a single year.

可借鉴之处

押注扩展瓶颈：竞争对手绘制并规则化每条道路；Wayve的端到端模型无需城市特定工程就能泛化，将逆势押注转变为汽车制造商许可的平台。