British self-driving giant on track for $9bn valuation

Matthew Field

Tue, February 10, 2026 at 7:00 PM GMT+9 2 min read

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Wayve is among the tech groups racing to launch self-driving taxi pilots on UK roads - Tim Andrew/Tim Andrew

A British self-driving car pioneer launching autonomous taxis on UK roads is set to be valued at $9bn (£6.6bn).

Wayve, founded in Cambridge in 2017, is in talks to raise more than $1bn in one of the largest funding rounds ever for a British AI start-up.

The company, which develops a kind of robot brain for driverless cars, is one of a group of tech businesses racing to launch self-driving taxi pilots on UK roads in the coming months. It has a deal with Uber to launch a trial of its technology in the ride-hailing company’s vehicles later this year.

Nvidia, the US AI chip giant, announced last year that it was in talks about a potential $500m investment in Wayve as part of its upcoming funding round. A source said Wayve was expected to raise more than $1bn at a valuation of nearly $9bn. Another source said talks were still at an early stage.

Wayve, which is led by New Zealand-born entrepreneur Alex Kendall, is already one of the UK’s best-funded technology businesses. In 2024, the company secured $1bn in funding from Japan’s SoftBank and Microsoft for its driverless software.

Since then, the UK business has started expanding its technology globally, launching testing in San Francisco and Germany and signing a deal with Nissan to expand into Japan.

Wayve has secured a deal with Uber to launch a trial of its technology later this year - Tim Andrew/Tim Andrew

However, the company’s rivals have been expanding aggressively and planning their own driverless trials in Britain.

Waymo, which is controlled by Google’s parent company Alphabet, raised $16bn in new funding last week to expand its robotaxi services. The AI ride-hailing business already serves a cluster of cities in the US and is planning to expand to the UK later this year.

US ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft, meanwhile, have also been working on launching UK trials with Apollo Go, a self-driving business owned by Chinese tech giant Baidu. Tesla is also testing its self-driving technology on Britain’s streets.

Unlike rivals, Wayve’s technology has been designed so it does not rely on detailed maps of new cities before its cars are ready to hit the road. Instead, its software learns to adapt to new roads that it has not previously visited.

The Financial Times previously reported that Microsoft and SoftBank were in talks to join Wayve’s upcoming funding round.

A Wayve spokesman said the company did not comment on speculation.

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