Wayve

Wayve extended its Series D by $60m on 15 April 2026, with AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm joining as co-investors, bringing the post-money valuation to $8.6bn . The following day, DSIT named Wayve as one of seven firms in the inaugural Sovereign AI Unit (SAIU) cohort, granting access to GPU compute via the AI Research Resource, an endorsement that goes beyond capital: DSIT staged the SAIU launch inside Wayve's own London HQ .

Wayve was founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall (CEO) and Amar Shah in London. Its core product, AI Driver, is an end-to-end neural network that learns to drive from human demonstration rather than hard-coded rules, a chip-agnostic approach that attracted Nvidia and Microsoft in the $1.2bn Series D in 2024. The April 2026 extension brings total Series D funding to roughly $1.26bn and adds AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm to a cap table previously dominated by US hyperscalers.

The chip-agnostic architecture is the strategic thread running through both the investor list and the SAIU selection. AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm are the same three silicon families underpinning Nscale's $2bn compute build-out; Wayve's AI Driver running natively on all three turns the investor syndicate into a distribution channel. The SAIU placement compounds that: state compute access at up to one million GPU hours is worth roughly £3-5m in private-cloud equivalents, and the selection signal reaches every founder watching the UK autonomy sector.