British autonomous driving startup Wayve is set to establish a testing and development hub in Germany as it prepares to deploy self-driving vehicles in Europe's largest automotive market. 

Wayve's new hub will be built near Stuttgart, home to big name car brands including Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and Audi. Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wayve, called it the “perfect place” for the company to accelerate the development and testing of AI-powered driving technology.  

“2025 is a year of global expansion for Wayve, and we are incredibly excited to establish operations in Germany,” said Kendall.

Wayve is already testing its technology in the UK and the US. The startup's new testing hub in Baden-Württemberg will focus on refining its Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) features, including lane change assistance, and advancing automated driving technology. The site also offers access to Germany's deep pool of software engineering talent, key to the company's development efforts.

Founded in Cambridge in 2017, Wayve fits a regular car with a range of cameras and sensors that interpret the surrounding environment. This data gets fed to Wayve's so-called “embodied AI” system.

Unlike many other self-driving AI models, which have to be trained on each possible driving scenario and are confined to geofenced limits, Wayve's AI is more free to act and learn on its own. The more the AI “drives,” the better it becomes at responding to hazards.

Wayve's approach to autonomous driving is similar to Tesla's. But unlike Elon Musk's firm, Wayve will sell its technology directly to carmakers. This means you won't have to buy a Tesla to access top spec self-driving tech.

“I look forward to partnering with Germany's world-leading manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers to bring safe, scalable, and production-ready AI software to vehicles worldwide,” said Kendall. 

The news follows Wayve's mega $1bn raise in May — the largest-ever single investment in a European AI startup. SoftBank led the Series C round alongside tech giants Nvidia and Microsoft. 

“Wayve is a singularly important company for Europe,” Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton and an early investor in Wayve, told TNW at the time. 

“Embodied AI will be the next big frontier of artificial intelligence — bringing machine intelligence to the physical world around us and not just the computer screen that large language models are confined to.”  

The approach has also attracted attention in the US. In August, Wayve secured a “strategic investment” from Uber, which is integrating autonomous driving tech into its fleet of taxis.