Alex Kendall grew up on New Zealand's South Island. He finished a PhD in deep learning and computer vision at the University of Cambridge in 2017, and in August that year he and Amar Shah founded Wayve.
Most of the industry relied on detailed maps and hand-written rules. Wayve wanted a car to learn from cameras and data. Kendall has said the approach met about five years of scepticism. The company raised roughly US$3 million in its 2018 seed round.
In 2019 Wayve reported the first drive on roads it had never seen, using end-to-end deep learning and a basic GPS map, and it raised a US$20 million Series A. Shah left in 2020 and Kendall became CEO. A US$200 million Series B followed in January 2022.
In May 2024 SoftBank led a US$1.05 billion Series C. In February 2026 a round of about US$1.5 billion valued Wayve at US$8.6 billion, and Uber robotaxis launched in London in September 2026.