Alex Kendall’s Wayve takes to the streets

London is not an easy place to teach a machine to drive. Buses, bicycles and black cabs jostle for space. Pedestrians step onto the road. Centuries-old streets demand countless small negotiations that experienced drivers make almost without thinking. 

Which is precisely what makes London such an important test ground for University of Auckland alumnus Alex Kendall.

This month, Wayve, the autonomous driving company he co-founded in 2017, began carrying Uber passengers across Greater London. The rides are supervised, with a licensed driver ready to intervene, but they mark a turning point for a company that has spent almost a decade developing artificial intelligence for autonomous driving.

On launch day, Wayve completed more than 100 trips with Uber. Kendall described the public response as “phenomenal” and the event as “a first glimpse of the consumer product world after a decade of deep tech development”.

He spent the first two hours of that day in an engineering programme review, focused on the next challenge: driverless operations.

From Auckland to Cambridge

Kendall grew up in Christchurch and came to the University of Auckland to study mechatronics engineering, graduating first in his class. He has traced some of Wayve’s beginnings to engineering projects on his family farm and his time at the University, where he built drones and robots.

He also took part in Velocity, the entrepreneurship development programme run by the University’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). He has particularly fond memories of one demonstration in the Owen G Glenn Building - although it didn’t quite go to plan.

“I remember very fondly going through Velocity,” Kendall has said, recalling “flying a demo drone and it tumbling into a thousand pieces”.

“It was a good lesson on how to not get a pitch right, and also how to recover from that kind of event.” 

The intellectual foundations of Wayve took shape at the University of Cambridge, where Kendall went as a Woolf Fisher Scholar. His PhD spanned deep learning, computer vision and robotics, and his award-winning research helped lay the foundations for a different approach to autonomous driving.

At the time, much of the industry relied on highly detailed maps and complex systems of rules. Kendall pursued another possibility: could a vehicle learn to drive from data and apply what it learned to situations it had never encountered?  

It was a contrarian idea, and even Elon Musk was sceptical, telling Kendall his end-to-end approach would not work. 

“There’s no such thing as eureka moments,” Kendall told the University’s Ingenio magazine in 2024. “It’s sort of a sustained effort over many, many years that allows you to solve hard problems.”

That sustained effort became Wayve.  

AI meets the physical world

Wayve’s technology sits within the emerging field of embodied, or physical, AI: intelligence capable of perceiving, reasoning and acting in an unpredictable physical environment.

Driving is an unforgiving test.

Wayve’s AI Driver is designed to learn from driving data and generalise across different vehicles, cities and road conditions. Rather than simply building its own fleet of robotaxis, Wayve wants its technology to be used by vehicle manufacturers and mobility companies around the world.

That ambition has attracted investment and partnerships from NVIDIA, Microsoft, Uber, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis, and helped propel Wayve to a valuation of US$8.6 billion.

Recognition has followed Kendall personally, too. Earlier this year, the gates of Buckingham Palace opened for a Wayve vehicle carrying Kendall and his family. Inside, Princess Anne presented him with an OBE for services to artificial intelligence.

It was quite a change of scenery from a drone tumbling to pieces in the Owen G Glenn Building.

But London’s streets may prove the more consequential test. Wayve’s Uber vehicles remain supervised, and moving to fully driverless services will require further technical validation and regulatory approval. There are bigger questions, too, about safety, public trust, employment and how autonomous vehicles could reshape cities.

Kendall’s ambitions extend beyond cars. He sees autonomous driving as part of a much larger shift towards physical AI, with intelligent machines eventually operating in factories, homes and other parts of everyday life.

“Physical AI is about to have its moment,” he recently said. “I feel privileged to be able to play a role in that.”

For now, that future is navigating London traffic. Almost a decade after Wayve’s underlying research began taking shape at Cambridge, the ideas behind it are moving from research into everyday life.

The research question has become a very real journey.