“We’ll take you safely to parliament,” Alex Kendall reassures Britain’s top transport minister as he navigates Westminster’s crowded streets in a self-driving vehicle from Kendall’s firm Wayve.
The British AI startup had a particular interest in getting the minister, Mark Harper, safely to the House of Commons that November day. He was about to launch the Automated Vehicles Bill, a piece of legislation which Wayve had lobbied hard for — and with good reason. Without the bill, its self-driving technology had no route to market.
Six months later, on May 7, the day before the bill completed its untroubled passage through Britain’s parliament, Wayve announced it had secured the biggest ever investment in a European AI firm, raising $1 billion from backers including SoftBank, NVIDIA and Microsoft.