Alex Kendall

Alex Kendall has spent nearly a decade arguing that autonomous driving should be learned end to end rather than mapped city by city. Wayve’s signed Nissan programme, global testing and 2026 financing now place that thesis on a production path—still supervised, pre-launch and safety-critical.

Born in New Zealand, Alex Kendall completed a doctorate in computer vision at Cambridge and co-founded Wayve with Amar Shah in 2017. As chief executive, he has made end-to-end learning the company’s central engineering proposition: one model should learn perception and driving policy from diverse data, without depending on high-definition maps or city-specific rule stacks. Wayve’s recent record moves that thesis closer to automotive production. In 2025, its software was integrated into a Nissan Ariya development prototype and demonstrated on Tokyo and Yokohama streets. In December, the companies signed definitive agreements covering the next-generation ProPILOT series across a broad vehicle range, with initial commercial introduction targeted for Nissan’s 2027 fiscal year. That is a contracted development pathway, not a completed consumer launch. In 2025, Wayve also reported testing a single model in more than 500 cities. A February 2026 financing closed at US$1.2 billion within US$1.5 billion of total capital commitments and an US$8.6 billion post-money valuation. An independent reporter later rode in a London test vehicle that completed a five-kilometre route with a human backup driver. None of these milestones establishes unsupervised commercial safety at scale.