Recently, the largest financing in the field of autonomous driving in 2024, Wave Technologies (hereinafter referred to as Wave), a British autonomous driving technology startup, received an investment of 1.05 billion US dollars (approximately 7.5 billion yuan).
On May 7th, the official website of Waveve announced that chip giant Nvidia has participated in the company's 7.5 billion yuan C-round investment. According to the company's introduction, this round of financing is led by SoftBank Group, with new investors Nvidia and existing investors Microsoft joining in. Meanwhile, as part of the final transaction, SoftBank will join Wave's board of directors.
Wave stated that this investment will support the comprehensive development and launch of the first embedded artificial intelligence product for mass production vehicles, which can learn and adapt to human behavior. With the advancement of artificial intelligence models, the company's imageless product solutions allow OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to effectively upgrade vehicles to higher levels of driving automation, completing the upgrade from L2+assisted driving to L4 autonomous driving, thereby achieving a non regulatory driving model.
According to the data, Wave was founded in 2017. It is a leading enterprise in the field of automatic driving, and it is also the first company to develop and test end-to-end (e2e) deep learning auto drive system on public roads. At present, the company has revealed that it is building an autonomous basic model, similar to the "driving GPT", which can endow any vehicle with the ability to see, think, and drive in any environment, with the expectation of achieving the effect of data processing that can be completed with only one onboard GPU.
This investment is the latest and largest investment after the initial investment, a Series A investment of $20 million (approximately RMB 144 million) in 2019, and a Series B investment of $200 million (approximately RMB 1.443 billion) in 2022. After this investment, Waveve will receive a cumulative investment of 1.328 billion US dollars (approximately 9.584 billion yuan).
Researcher Gao Chao from the China Autonomous Driving Industry Innovation Alliance believes that Wave's route is very similar to Tesla's FSD (Full Self Driving) route. "The company initially launched the auto drive system AV1.0 with a modular architecture as the core, but the system relying on handwritten rules has strong limitations, which makes Wave not give up the direction of focusing on and developing end-to-end AI algorithms. Until the AV2.0 version is iterated, the system can not only learn by self-monitoring, train driving skills from unmarked data, but also have no requirements for sensor combinations, high-precision maps, and vehicle models. In this way, on the one hand, it saves the company a lot of costs to build and manage tagged data sets, and because of its good generalization, it greatly strengthens the possibility of cooperation with vehicle enterprises to carry."
In fact, the rapid development of AI technology in recent years has directly boosted the autonomous vehicle industry. According to the latest statistics from Securities Daily reporters, in the first quarter of 2024, there were over 40 important investments and financing in the field of autonomous driving both domestically and internationally, with a total disclosed financing amount (including IPO fundraising) of nearly 9.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20%.
"Wave's investment is the largest investment in the field of advanced intelligent driving in recent times, and it is also the largest financing for European artificial intelligence companies to date, with strong symbolic significance." Zhang Fan, partner of Deji Advanced Manufacturing and Transportation Industry, believes that with the further acceleration of the industrialization process of autonomous driving, it will promote the development of the entire vehicle networking and road network infrastructure industry, laying a solid foundation for the early realization of autonomous driving and vehicle road coordination.