Mishcon de Reya recently advised self-driving car technology startup Wayve on its $1.05 billion Series C investment round. This round was spearheaded by SoftBank Group and saw contributions from new investor NVIDIA, as well as continued support from existing investor Microsoft, and it is the largest known investment in an AI company in Europe to date.
Wayve specialises in developing AI models for autonomous driving, creating a "robot brain" that learns from and interacts with real-world environments. Its Embodied AI technology is designed to prioritise safety, delivering natural and secure driving performance. It addresses the challenge of handling rare, unexpected, or edge-case scenarios that are not frequently encountered during training, by generalising learned driving skills to handle unexpected scenarios without prior training. Wayve’s self-supervised learning approach supports efficient, large-scale learning, enabling the AI to adapt smoothly to new vehicles and environments across different locations.
The funds are earmarked to bolster Wayve's strategic initiative to advance autonomous mobility, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. Mishcon de Reya's Emerging Companies team was led by Chris Keen, with support from Will Rouse, Kunal Sankhla, Geoff Dragon, Charlotte Lomas and Ege Sever.