With a focus on accelerating autonomous mobility through learning based approaches instead of hand-coded rules, startup company Wayve has announced a $20 million Series A funding round to launch a pilot fleet of autonomous vehicles in central London.

Wayve is of the belief that more physical sensors and hand-coded rules aren't the key to solving the complexity of self-driving cars. Instead, the company believes that better artificial intelligence “brains” are the key to solving the complexity of self-driving cars. 

“Wayve’s differentiated approach to autonomy builds on timely advances in the fields of reinforcement learning, simulation and computer vision,” says Seth Winterroth, partner at Eclipse Ventures, which led the funding round.

“Furthermore, by locating the company in the UK, the team has access to an extraordinary talent pool and numerous complex testing environments.”

Earlier this year, using only cameras, a 2D map, and a “unique, end-to-end, deep learning driving brain,” Wayve demonstrated a self-driving car navigating on roads it had never previously driven before.  

Wayve notes that while a good human driver can adapt quickly when navigating a new jurisdiction, existing autonomous technologies don’t have the requisite ability to detect and respond appropriately to potential hazards. With this in mind, Wayve is building a general and scalable driving brain applicable to any driving environment.

“The average human learns to drive in just 50 hours with visual input primarily. Once we have learned, we are capable at driving on roads around the world despite vastly differing traffic laws and cultural context,” explains Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton Capital, one of the participants in this funding round.

“Wayve's self-driving technology is the closest to this human approach to learning. The great advantage of solving the problem this way is that it is robust in the face of a global opportunity.”