The first boardroom was a bedroom. Alex Kendall has said the larger bedroom of a rented house near Cambridge was where he and Amar Shah held meetings, and the small one held the servers. The car itself was being rebuilt in the garage.
Kendall grew up on New Zealand's mountainous South Island. As a student he built one of the country's first homemade drones from parts he found at the local electronics shop. Nothing about that suggests a billion-dollar company. It suggests a boy who liked to make flying things from whatever was on the shelf.
As a student he built one of the country's first homemade drones from parts he found at the local electronics shop.
He went to Cambridge and finished a PhD in deep learning and computer vision in 2017. Shah, also at Cambridge, had a PhD in machine learning. In August 2017 the two founded Wayve with an idea that most of the self-driving industry thought was wrong. Others were building detailed 3D maps and thousands of rules. Wayve wanted a car to learn to drive the way a person does, from cameras and experience.
What almost nobody saw was how lonely that bet was. For about five years the approach was met with scepticism and the company was largely overlooked, Kendall has said, though he now sees the challenge as a motivator. They had raised roughly US$3 million to start. They fitted an electric Jaguar I-PACE with the software in under six months. The first drive was around the block.
The turn came in 2019. Wayve reported the first successful test of an AI car driving a route it had never seen, using end-to-end deep learning and a basic GPS map. Eclipse led a US$20 million round that year. Microsoft, Virgin and others followed in 2022 with more than US$200 million.
The price was personal as well as financial. In 2020 Shah, the first CEO, left, and Kendall moved from chief technology officer to chief executive. The sources do not say why, and nothing here should be read into it. What is documented is that the founder who had been the quiet engineer became the person who had to sell the company to carmakers.
It worked. In May 2024 SoftBank led a US$1.05 billion round with Nvidia and Microsoft. In February 2026 a round of about US$1.5 billion from Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, Nissan and Uber valued the company at US$8.6 billion, and Uber robotaxis launched in London that September.
For a founder, the picture is simple and slightly funny. The company everyone now wants started in a rented house with servers in a small bedroom. Being early and unfashionable is survivable if the idea is real and the room is cheap.