Wayve launches $85M employee tender offer at $8.5B valuation

Wayve, a UK-based self-driving tech startup, is allowing its employees to merchantability a information of their vested equity.  The $85 cardinal tender connection — fundamentally a structured accidental for employees to merchantability shares backmost to investors — is being led by the company’s existing and caller investors astatine the company’s latest valuation of $8.5 billion.

That valuation was acceptable successful February erstwhile the nine-year-old institution raised a $1.2 cardinal Series D led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and included information from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Uber.

This is Wayve’s 2nd worker liquidity event. The institution antecedently held a tender connection alongside its $1.05 billion Series C backing circular successful May 2024.

Wayve’s offering is portion of a growing trend of AI startups. Rather than waiting years for an exit, companies are utilizing tender offers arsenic a retention tool, giving employees a crushed to instrumentality astir alternatively than leap to a rival — oregon commencement their ain store — the infinitesimal their options vest.

Other startups that person precocious completed worker tender offers see Decagon, which builds AI agents that grip lawsuit work for enterprises similar Duolingo and Hertz; ElevenLabs, the AI voice-generation institution down overmuch of the internet’s synthetic code and dubbing tools; Linear, a fashionable project-management level built for bundle teams; and Clay, a income and selling automation instrumentality that helps companies probe and scope prospects. (Clay has tally 2 tenders successful the past 9 months alone.)

These startups are capable to supply worker liquidity chiefly due to the fact that investors are anxious to bargain much of the equity successful these high-growth companies, adjacent astatine a premium, betting the businesses volition beryllium worthy adjacent much down the line.

Wayve uses a self-learning attack to its autonomous driving. Instead of relying connected the pre-built, high-definition maps astir self-driving programs use, its bundle is an end-to-end neural web that learns to thrust purely from information — person to however a quality picks up driving done experience, its founders argue.

In pursuit of a “general-purpose” AI operator — 1 that could, successful theory, enactment crossed countries, cars, and roadworthy conditions — the institution has much than doubled its headcount to 1,200 employees implicit the past year.

Wayve is targeting robotaxi aviator launches successful concern with Uber aboriginal this year, portion separately readying to integrate its AI bundle into Nissan’s next-generation driver-assist systems starting successful 2027.