00:00Self-driving technology startup Wave has reached a deal with Uber to offer RoboTaxi rides in London with a safety
00:06driver.
00:07It's the latest move in the global race to commercialize autonomous ride hailing.
00:10Wave CEO Alex Kendall is back with us on Bloomberg Tech.
00:14You know, Alex, in covering this industry, I know that this is a source of frustration.
00:19But the first question is always, what's the path for the safety driver coming out of the vehicle?
00:24Take that and explain the London case study to us.
00:29Hey, Ed. Well, firstly, as you know, London is an incredibly difficult place to drive.
00:34It's a 2,000-year-old city. It's full of narrow roads, frequent pedestrians and cyclists.
00:40And so I'm delighted that we've been able to bring our technology here.
00:44We've been learning to drive here for a decade.
00:46And it's, I think, one of the hardest places in the world to learn to drive.
00:50But we're starting with a supervised service this week with safety operators.
00:54And the path to launch a driverless service is really three things.
00:58The first one is to move to a scalable vehicle platform.
01:01You know, our business model works with automakers so that they build the robotaxis.
01:05No retrofits or built-in mass production hardware.
01:09Second, of course, validating the safety metrics we need for a driverless operation.
01:13And third, we've got a permit today for supervised operations.
01:17And we're working with regulators towards a driverless permit.
01:20So those three things, which we're working on very quickly over here in London.
01:25At the same time, you know, you have multiple projects in parallel, right?
01:28There is the driverless platform of Nissan, for example, where there's a future in London.
01:33But other cities come into play in the R&D of that.
01:37Explain that relationship.
01:40Yeah, that's right.
01:41We've looked to build a business where we want to provide intelligence across anyone who wants to build intelligent machines.
01:48And uniquely, we've got an AI that can scale from consumer vehicles to robotaxis.
01:52So we are deploying our AI in consumer vehicles with a number of leading automakers like Nissan and Stellantis.
01:58And, of course, as of today, starting robotaxi services today in London.
02:02And by the end of the year, we'll be scaling this to Tokyo.
02:05And we've agreed with Uber to take it to 10 cities beyond that as well.
02:09It's amazing.
02:10Alex, it's been almost 10 years since I left London and moved to SF.
02:14What's your relationship like with that city, with the mayor?
02:17But also, you know, under a new government with Andy Burnham,
02:21is there a pathway for sort of comprehensive framework regulation for your industry in the UK and other UK cities?
02:30One thing people might not realize is that earlier this year,
02:33the UN published a technical regulation that allows for a global framework for high levels of autonomy and consumer vehicles.
02:40And robotaxis in many countries around the world, UK, Europe, Japan, all sign up to these regulations.
02:47And they also provide a basis for in the US as well.
02:50So this is fantastic.
02:52And then the UK itself has been adopting these.
02:55There was an act passed in 2024, and we've been working with Transport for London and government here to bring
03:01this into fruition.
03:02So, you know, we're pretty happy with how this is growing.
03:04And London is one of Uber's five largest markets by revenue.
03:07So it's a really important market to bring autonomy into.
03:11I think Londoners are going to love this service.
03:13And what we've got is a, you know, is a safe and responsible plan to bring this technology,
03:19introduce it to Londoners and people through the UK with regulators here.
03:23You know, the Uber relationships, key to underscore rights, through the Uber app.
03:27You said a moment ago that there's a plan for 10 cities with Uber going forward.
03:33Are any of those cities in the United States, Alex?
03:36We will be bringing it globally, including to the US.
03:38We haven't announced any other specific cities yet, but stay tuned.
03:42I'll give you a call when we do, Ed.
03:45Real quick, how are you guys doing on the funding side?
03:48There was reports that some Wave staff sold off stock on the Pisces exchange, for example.
03:53Like, is that an employee liquidity thing?
03:55Are you out there doing secondaries?
03:57What's going on?
03:58Yeah, we're well funded.
04:00We've got, we've raised almost $3 billion of cash.
04:03We just did our second employee liquidity round.
04:07We've got a great global team.
04:08And actually, you know, one of the things I think we're well set up to do is, you know,
04:12to really continue with our frontier embodied AI science.
04:15We've been the first team to build vision language action models and world models for robotics.
04:20And now bring this new contrarian approach to the technology to market, as well, of course,
04:25continuing to grow in production applications, like in consumer vehicles all around the world
04:30and for robotaxi services.
04:32So it's full steam ahead.
04:34It's been a phenomenal year for our team so far.
04:36And this is a pretty proud moment for us.
04:39Alex, just very quickly, what you just said, world models, remind the audience what Wave's core competence is.
04:46What we've built is an end-to-end AI driver.
04:49So it's a single neural network that's capable of reasoning and making decisions in real time.
04:53It can generalize across any vehicle.
04:55We work with small, large vehicles all around the world.
04:58We're the first company to have driven this technology in over 500 cities, zero shot.
05:02So no high-definite maps.
05:04It's an AI that's capable of driving any vehicle all the way around the world.
05:07We work.
05:08We're the first money.
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