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By Nick Carey
LONDON, Jan 18 (Reuters) - British self-driving technology
startup Wayve said on Tuesday it has raised $200 million from
investors to scale up its autonomous driving technology globally
and launch more pilot projects with commercial fleet partners.
The Series B funding round brings the startup's total
fundraising to $258 million and includes new investments from
venture capital firms D1 Capital Partners, Moore Strategic
Ventures and Linse Capital, plus fresh capital from investors
including Microsoft.
Making taxis autonomous has proved more difficult and
expensive to develop than expected, but investors have been
pumping money into self-driving technology for trucks and other
commercial vehicles where automation could be viable sooner.
London-based Wayve's technology relies on machine learning
that uses camera sensors fitted on the outside of the vehicle,
instead of the conventional method of relying on detailed
digital maps and coding to tell vehicles how to operate.
"Instead of telling a car how to drive we've built a system
that learns to drive and can learn to do intelligent things,"
Wayve CEO Alex Kendall told Reuters.
He said that, for instance, the company's test vehicles have
learned how to correctly navigate "very robustly" through
traffic lights in London - knowing how traffic lights function,
which lane to be in and how to interact with other vehicles even
if they are breaking the rules. Last year Wayve took vehicles to
five other UK cities and drove through traffic lights without
ever having operated in those cities before.
"Our system was able to take the concept of traffic lights
from London and apply it everywhere," Kendall said. "That's why
we'll be the first company to deploy in a hundred cities
(worldwide)," he said, without giving a timeframe.
UK online grocery technology company Ocado has
invested in Wayve and has announced an autonomous delivery trial
with the startup.
Wayve is also running an autonomous delivery trial with
British supermarket chain Asda in London.
(Reporting by Nick Carey; Editing by Susan Fenton)
