UK-based self-driving technology startup Wayve is allowing its employees to sell some of their vested interests. The $85 million tender offer is essentially a structured opportunity for employees to sell stock back to investors, led by existing and new investors based on the company’s latest valuation of $8.5 billion.
The valuation was set in February when the nine-year-old company raised $1.2 billion in a Series D led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, Microsoft, Nvidia and Uber.
This is Wayve’s second employee mobility event. The company previously conducted a tender offer in parallel with a $1.05 billion Series C funding round in May 2024.
Wayve’s service is part of a growing trend of AI startups. Rather than waiting years for an exit, companies are using tender offers as a retention tool, giving employees a reason to stay or start their own shop rather than jumping to a competitor the moment they vest.
Other startups that have recently completed tender offers for their employees include Decagon, which builds AI agents to handle customer service for companies like Duolingo and Hertz. ElevenLab is the AI voice generation company behind many of the internet’s synthetic voice and dubbing tools. Linear is a popular project management platform built for software teams. Clay is a sales and marketing automation tool that helps companies research and reach prospects. (Mr. Clay has made two bids in the past nine months alone.)
These startups are able to provide liquidity to employees primarily because investors are willing to buy more shares in these high-growth companies, even at a premium, betting that the businesses will become even more valuable in the future.
Wayve takes a self-learning approach to autonomous driving. The software is an end-to-end neural network that learns to drive purely from data, rather than relying on the pre-built high-resolution maps that most self-driving programs use, the founders argue, closer to how humans learn to drive through experience.
The company has more than doubled its headcount to 1,200 people over the past year as it pursues a “universal” AI driver (one that theoretically works across countries, vehicles, and road conditions).
Wayve aims to partner with Uber to begin robotaxi trials later this year, but it also plans to integrate its AI software into Nissan’s next-generation driver assistance system starting in 2027.
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