If you’ve been to Austin, San Francisco, or Atlanta recently, you may have seen cars at traffic lights with no one behind the wheel. That’s Waymo, the $45 billion startup owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, that’s making self-driving vehicles a reality.
Now, a UK startup claims it can do what Waymo has done, but faster and at a much lower cost. Meet Wayve, an 8-year-old company that develops software with artificial intelligence that acts as a “brain” for cars. Their proposal: Any car can be autonomous using just a camera and software, without the need for expensive hardware such as lidar, a laser sensor system commonly used by competitors.
Wayve’s approach has already attracted deep-pocketed investors like Microsoft and SoftBank, allowing it to raise around $1 billion to date. Now the company is reportedly closing another $2 billion funding round, which could raise its valuation to around $8 billion.
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Wayve’s strategy is similar to Tesla’s. It uses cameras and computer vision to train AI to drive like a human. Imagine that a 15-year-old learns to drive simply by watching his mother, assimilating traffic rules through observation, rather than being programmed with rigid instructions.
“Robots are told how to behave in a given environment, but they need the intelligence and common sense to be able to do it in a way that inspires trust,” Wayve founder and Under 30 alum Alex Kendall previously told Forbes. “Everyone is focused on developing more sensors, infrastructure and hardware to make this possible, but to me, there is an intelligence gap.”
Companies like Waymo rely on detailed maps, which means they can only operate in a limited number of cities. Kendall believes this map-based approach is a dead end. Your vision? A scalable model, prioritized by the software, that adapts and reaches anywhere, without the need for maps.
It’s an idea that was initially met with skepticism. “They laughed,” Kendall remembers of his first presentations to autonomous vehicle manufacturers. “They told me it wasn’t possible.”
Today, it is testing vehicles with figures like Bill Gates and enlisting support from tech giants. Forbes caught up with Kendall last year to find out how she gained support from the world’s biggest companies. (Spoiler: He cornered Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a 2018 conference to present his project to him personally.)
This article was originally published by Forbes US
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