Wayve Brand Guidelines: A Cambridge Start, an End-to-End AI Driver & Robotaxi Rides in London

Two PhD students and a learned driver.

Wayve was founded in Cambridge, England, on 21 August 2017 by Amar Shah and Alex Kendall, two machine-learning PhD students at the University of Cambridge, English Wikipedia says. Shah was the first chief executive and Kendall, whose doctorate is in computer vision, the chief technology officer; in 2020 Shah left the company and Kendall became chief executive. Their aim, Wikipedia says, was a self-driving system that used machine learning at every layer of the driving task.

The company came out of stealth in May 2018 with around ten staff, and later moved its base to London. It is incorporated as Wayve Technologies Ltd, is privately held and is headquartered in London, with its main research office in the King’s Cross area, according to Wikipedia, which lists further sites in Silicon Valley, Vancouver, Yokohama, Leonberg in Germany and Herzliya in Israel. When Reuters reported on its first public rides in September 2026, it quoted Kendall, as co-founder and chief executive, calling London “our home city.” Wikipedia adds that Erez Dagan, who spent two decades at Mobileye, joined as president in 2024.

Wayve has been funded in stages by venture investors and, increasingly, by carmakers and technology companies. English Wikipedia says its Series A, in November 2019, was led by the US firm Eclipse Ventures; the online grocer Ocado invested in 2021 as part of a partnership on self-driving delivery vans; a Series B followed in January 2022; and a Series C in May 2024 was led by Japan’s SoftBank, with Nvidia and Microsoft taking part and Uber joining as a partner and shareholder. In February 2026, Wikipedia says, a Series D drew Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis and Nissan alongside existing backers.

End-to-end, mapless, camera-led.

Wayve’s approach is end-to-end deep learning. Instead of detailed 3D maps and hand-coded rules, a single learned system drives using mainly camera data and experience, English Wikipedia says. The company calls this “Embodied AI” and “AV2.0,” and its product the Wayve AI Driver, which it says learns to drive “without HD maps.” Wikipedia describes the stack as hardware-agnostic — video cameras, basic automotive sensors and GPU-based onboard computers — and says development cars use Nvidia’s Orin chip; the cars licensed in London carry surround cameras and radar, Wayve said in August 2026.

The business is software, not cars. Wikipedia says Wayve plans to license or embed its AI Driver in vehicles built by established carmakers rather than build its own, and the company describes the AI Driver as a way for carmakers to offer everything from driver assistance to full self-driving. Its research arm, Wayve Labs, lists projects including GAIA, a generative model that produces realistic driving video from text, and LINGO, which uses natural language to train and explain driving models.

Testing has ranged widely. In 2019, Wikipedia says, Wayve trained a car to drive on public roads it had never seen, using cameras, a basic GPS map and its learned control; it then ran a pilot fleet of electric test cars, including retrofitted Jaguar I-Pace SUVs, in central London. In 2021 it ran a delivery trial with the supermarket chain Asda and worked with Ocado on grocery vans, with safety drivers on board. It later took the same model on an “AI-500” road trip through cities in Asia, Europe and North America, and in April 2025 opened its first Asian research hub, in Japan.

Design and documentation.

Self-driving and lidar companies sell something that is hard to photograph: software that makes decisions. Their public images therefore lean on a small set of recurring pictures. The most familiar is the robotaxi itself — often a white car or van with a sensor housing on the roof and smaller sensors at the corners — shown on a city street, at a kerb or at an airport drop-off.

A second picture is the view from inside the machine. Companies publish point-cloud renderings, in which a street is drawn as thousands of coloured dots, often bright greens, blues and magentas on black, with boxes marking cars, cyclists and pedestrians. Lidar makers add cutaway drawings of their sensors, showing the spinning or solid-state units that send out the laser pulses behind those images, and rows of compact sensor modules photographed like consumer electronics.

The other pictures depend on the business. Ride-hailing services show phone screens: a map, a pick-up pin, an estimated arrival time and a button to start the ride. Self-driving truck developers show tractor-trailers on long, empty highways, frequently in the desert light of the American Southwest. Driver-assist chip makers show circuit boards, dashboards and diagrams of cars wrapped in cones of sensor coverage.

Trade shows are another stage for these images: the CES technology show in Las Vegas and the IAA Mobility show in Munich are among the places where new sensors, concept vehicles and partnerships are put on display. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it operates and what regulators have recorded — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Carmakers, Uber and a London launch.

Carmaker agreements followed. English Wikipedia says Wayve announced a collaboration with Nissan in 2023 to bring its software into Nissan’s ProPilot driver-assistance system, planned for the 2027 fiscal year; that in February 2026 Nissan, Uber and Wayve announced a robotaxi pilot aimed at Tokyo by late 2026; and that in May 2026 Stellantis announced its intention to use Wayve’s technology across its brands from 2028. On 22 September 2026 Wayve said it had signed a definitive production agreement with Mercedes-Benz to put the Wayve AI Driver into future Mercedes-Benz vehicles, offering urban point-to-point driving assistance within the next two years.

The public first rode with the system in London. On 5 August 2026 Wayve and Uber said Transport for London had granted private-hire licences to a number of Wayve’s all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-E cars. On 3 September 2026 Uber launched autonomous rides in London using Wayve’s technology, Reuters reported: riders booking UberX, Uber Comfort or Uber Electric could be matched with a Wayve car at no extra charge, a licensed operator stayed on board to monitor it, fewer than 20 cars were available at launch, and regulatory steps remained before any fully driverless service. Reuters noted that London was the second European city, after Zagreb, where Uber offers robotaxis.

Wayve’s own website now leads with those rides, under the line “Now on Uber,” and runs in English and Japanese.

For a design guide, Wayve shows how a software company with no car of its own can build a name around an idea — a driver that learns — and then carry it onto other companies’ vehicles. Compare Uber, its ride-hailing partner in London, and Nvidia, an investor whose chips run its development cars. For this guide we use a deep violet, a pale fog and a sodium amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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