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London-based self-driving car startup has raised $1.05 billion in a -led round, marking one of the largest funding deals on record for a British startup and signaling continued investor fervor for all things artificial intelligence.

and existing investor , both active investors in the AI space, also joined in the Series C funding. Wayve has now raised $1.3 billion, . It did not disclose a valuation for the latest funding.

The company was founded by PhD students at the in 2017 and has been testing its technology on British roads since 2018. It employs approximately 300 people, .

Its self-driving car technology works through , or a system in which a real-world object such as a robot 鈥� or, in this case, a vehicle 鈥� powered by artificial intelligence software interacts with and continuously learns about the world as it travels through that environment. That approach differs from systems developed by companies such as -owned , which rely heavily on technology such as lidar, radar, cameras and high-definition 3D maps.

Wayve鈥檚 business model is to sell its technology to other car manufacturers and robotics companies, .

鈥淲e want to enable all the auto manufacturers around the world to work with our AI, of course, across a wide variety of sources,鈥� CEO and co-founder told TechCrunch. 鈥淢ore importantly, we鈥檒l get diverse data from different cars and markets, and that鈥檚 going to produce the most intelligent and capable embodied AI.鈥�

Despite few billion-dollar funding deals on the scale of the Wayve raise, venture funding to AI-related startups increased slightly in Q1 2024 compared to Q4 2023, shows. All told, around $12.2 billion was invested in venture-backed AI startups in 1,166 deals in Q1 鈥斅� a 4% uptick in dollar terms from last year鈥檚 final quarter, which saw $11.7 billion go to similar startups in 1,072 deals.

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