Ocado invests £10m into self-driving tech startup Wayve
Self-driving tech startup Wayve’s total funding raised has hit $60m following an investment from grocer Ocado.
Ocado is investing £10m ($13.6m) in a partnership with Wayve that will develop autonomous grocery deliveries.
An autonomous delivery trial will involve a number of Ocado delivery vans on busy London routes – with a human driver to oversee the tests.
Alex Kendall, CEO of London-based Wayve, said: “This is a recognition that we’re uniquely positioned to build a technology that can deliver for the last-mile delivery space as well as adapt and scale globally.”
Ocado’s head of advanced technology Alex Harvey added: “We’ve been impressed with Wayve’s approach to solving this most complex of challenges and are excited to accelerate our capabilities so that our retail partners globally can take advantage of them at the earliest opportunity.”
Some of Ocado’s vehicles will be fitted with data collection devices to understand how human drivers handle traffic. This will enable Wayve to train its own system to deal with the complexities of driving on the road.
Wayve is also teaming up with supermarket chain Asda in a 12-month trial of autonomous delivery vans that will begin in early 2022.