If you’ve been in Austin, San Francisco or Atlanta recently, you may have spotted cars at traffic lights with no one behind the wheel. That’s Waymo—the $45 billion (valuation) startup owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company—making autonomous vehicles a reality.
Now, a U.K.-based startup says it can do what Waymo has done, but faster and for a fraction of the cost. Meet Wayve, an 8-year-old company building AI-powered software that acts as a “brain” for cars. Its pitch: Any car can become self-driving using just a camera and software—no need for expensive hardware like Lidar, a laser-based sensor system commonly used by competitors.
Wayve’s approach has already attracted deep-pocketed backers like Microsoft and SoftBank, helping it raise around $1 billion to date. Now the company is reportedly closing another $2 billion round, which could bring its valuation to a reported $8 billion.
Wayve’s strategy is similar to Tesla’s. It uses cameras and computer vision to train AI to drive like a human. Think of it like a 15-year-old learning to drive just by watching their mom, absorbing the rules of the road through observation, rather than being programmed with rigid instructions.
“Robots are told how to behave in a set environment, but they need to have the intelligence and common sense reasoning to be able to do this in a way that we trust,” Alex Kendall, Wayve’s founder and Under 30 alum previously told Forbes. “Everyone is focusing on building more sensors and infrastructure and hardware to make this possible, but for me, it’s an intelligence gap.”
Companies like Waymo rely on detailed maps, which means they can only operate in a limited number of cities. Kendall believes this mapping-heavy approach is a dead end. His vision? A scalable, software-first model that can adapt and drive anywhere, no mapping required.
It’s an idea that was initially met with skepticism. “They laughed,” Kendall recalls of his early pitches to autonomous vehicle makers. “I was told this was not possible.”
Fast forward to today, he’s giving test rides to the likes of Bill Gates, and winning support from tech giants. Forbes sat down with Kendall last year to learn how he got the world’s biggest players on board. (Spoiler: He cornered Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a 2018 conference to pitch him personally.)
See you next week,
Alex and Zoya
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Lister Lowdown
-Last Friday, prediction markets startup Kalshi publicly announced a $300 million round they’d closed in August, bringing the valuation to $5 billion. The company was founded by Under 30 listers Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour in 2018. It allows users to place bets on everything from politics and healthcare outcomes to sports, which is a particularly massive market right now. Kalshi says it’s on track for $50 billion in trading volume annually, according to the New York Times.
–Samphire Neuroscience, a U.K.-based medtech startup founded by Under 30 listers Alex Cook and Dr. Emile Radyte, is expanding to the U.S. The startup builds brain stimulating headbands to help women alleviate PMS and period pain symptoms. The headbands stimulate the prefrontal cortex and help reroute how the brain regulates emotional and pain perception and control. Its flagship product for the U.S. will be called Lutea and is recommended that users wear it for 20 minutes a day in the days leading up to their menstrual cycle.
-Longtime Under 30 alum Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of Reddit, is attempting to turn track athletes into superstars. Last week, he hosted the second annual Athlos track meet, bringing together world record holders and up-and-comers to compete in seven different events—including the 1-mile run, 100-meter hurdles, long jump and more. Prize winnings of $60,000 and a Tiffany crown were on the line for each event winner. Under 30 Sports alum Tara Davis-Woodhall won the long jump (and tied her world-leading mark with 7.13 meters); U30 Europe lister Keeley Hodgkinson won the 800-meter dash; and Masai Russell, who took the stage at the Under 30 summit this month, won the 100-meter hurdles.
On Our Radar
-Big changes are happening at Scale AI. In August, 49% of the company was sold to Meta for a whopping $14.3 billion. And this week, a team of more than a dozen contractors was laid off—and then invited to work on Scale AI’s gig-work platform, Outlier, to help train those AI models. The laid-off contractors were part of a team called the New Projects Organization that had been focused on tasks like improving the writing ability of chatbots. But as these chatbots improve, they’re now requiring input about more niche fields—like medicine, robotics and finance. This follows the layoff of 700 employees and contractors in July, and 12 more contractors in September. (Business Insider)
-Podcasting is on the rise. Streaming is expected to surge. Why not merge the two together? That’s the exact pairing Spotify and Netflix are betting on. They announced this week that come 2026, video podcasts like The Bill Simmons Podcast, The Zach Lowe Show, Conspiracy Theories, The Ringer NFL Show, and more will be available to U.S.-based Netflix subscribers. Providing these podcasts a new video home is in an attempt for Netflix to compete with YouTube, which is currently the most watched video platform. (The Hollywood Reporter)
-If you’re a stan, or even a common fan, of any sort of sports team, film franchise, or musician, you’ve likely seen countless fan edits online. Oftentimes it’s teenagers creating these slo-mo, zoom-in, and quick-cut clips paired with music directly from their phone. And usually it’s just in the hopes of a couple thousand views (a couple million, if they’re lucky). But now, legacy platforms are taking a page out of the Gen Z (and Gen Alpha) playbook. Take Lionsgate’s fan-edit of The Hunger Games cast, or The Summer I Turned Pretty account’s similar style. After all, “A single fan edit can shift public perception faster than a paid campaign,” PR expert Angelique Phipps told Cosmo. “These fan communities generate so much content and conversation that their enthusiasm becomes part of the artist’s brand identity.” Read more about some of the most prolific fan-edit creators. (Cosmopolitan)
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