Startup Wayve raises $200 million Is self-driving really "fragrant"?

As the future of the recognized automotive industry, there are more and more entrants who are eyeing autonomous driving, and capital is also accelerating. Wayve, a British self-driving startup that relies on machine learning as its core technology, has raised more than $200 million in funding, and behind it, giants such as Microsoft are looming. Although it is the trend of the times, at present, before the real commercial use, from regulations to ethics, autonomous driving still has to face many challenges.

On January 18, local time, Wayve said it had raised $200 million from investors. For the purpose of the financing, Wayve said it will be used to expand its self-driving technology globally and to partner with commercial fleets to launch more pilot projects.

Although it is still a startup, Wayve is quite popular with investors. In October last year, Wayve announced on its official website that it would partner with Ocado, a well-known British shipper, to obtain more than $13 million in investment.

Together with this latest round of funding, the company's current total funding has reached $258 million. Investors include venture capital firms D1 Capital Partners, Moore Strategic Ventures and Linse Capital, as well as larger companies such as Microsoft, Virgin and Baillie Gifford.

While Wayve didn't disclose its new valuation, NBC Business Reported that its new valuation could exceed $1 billion, making it a "unicorn" company.

Wayve has won the favor of many investors, perhaps because of its unique research and development ideas. Wayve CEO Alex Kendall said Wayve's approach was "quite rebellious" compared to existing practices, which use camera sensors mounted on the outside of the vehicle instead of relying on traditional methods such as digital maps and encodings. Kendall calls this approach "the car sees the world for itself through a computational vision platform," and according to him, it allows the car to decide autonomously how to drive in complex road conditions.

"We were impressed with Wayve's self-driving technology, which improves our freight capacity and gives our partners a head start in retail." Alex Harvey, Ocado's head of technology, said in an interview.

Ocado's partnership with Wayve is not just about investment, with official website announcements showing that Wayve's self-driving technology will be used in Ocado's delivery fleet and will be supervised by a human driver.

Although Wayve portrays his R&D theory as omnipotent, even calling this deep learning method a simulation of "neuronal activity in the brain", other practitioners in autonomous driving say that Wayve's theory may be too simplistic.

FiveAI, which is on the self-driving track with Wayve. Stan Boland, CEO of FiveAI, said that autonomous driving technology still requires multiple sensing modes, which cannot be solved by a few cameras. "The crux of the matter is not whether hand coding or deep learning is a better approach. Although both may be able to achieve the success of autonomous driving technology, there are bound to be many challenges. Boland said.

At present, there are not a few companies that are deeply involved in the field of automatic driving. Last October, Google's Waymo and General Motors' Cruise obtained commercial licenses for autonomous vehicles in California. A month before that, Waymo had already opened up self-driving car testing to some residents of San Francisco through a program called Trusted Testers.

Traditional car giants are also eager to move, trying to cut into this field from assisted driving. In December last year, Japanese automakers such as Toyota and Mazda planned to equip major models with autonomous driving functions this year, mainly L2 level and above autonomous driving technology, which will still be mainly controlled by drivers during the driving process.

Intel United Research once released a report that the global self-driving car market size is expected to reach $7 trillion by 2050.

Although enterprises are scrambling to enter the market and have broad market prospects, it seems that it is still far from being truly commercial. Richard Jinks, vice president of commerce at Oxfordshire driverless car software company Oxbotica, also said that autonomous driving will bring new problems in regulation, road regulations, accident liability and so on.

In the face of immature technology, consumers' acceptance of autonomous driving is not high. Ms. Liu, a private car owner in Beijing, told the Beijing Business Daily reporter: "I don't dare to imagine automatic driving. If it does, I don't think it will try. What to do in case something goes wrong is also a problem. Didi driver Master Wang also said that if it is really promoted, it should also be equipped with safety officers with the car, "The previous driver has become a safety officer, is this not a superfluous move?" ”

Challenging, Wayve is already aiming for commercialization. According to Wayve's official website, the autonomous delivery trial with British shippers will officially begin this year, and there is no relevant report on the results of the trial. On the current research and development progress and application prospects, the Beijing Business Daily reporter also tried to contact Wayve, but as of press time has not received a reply.

Beijing Business Daily reporter Yang Yuehan intern reporter Meng Yue