About Alex Kendall
Alex Kendall is the Co-founder and CEO of Wayve, a company pioneering the development of next-generation autonomous vehicles using Embodied AI and end-to-end deep learning. A proud Kiwi, he co-founded Wayve in 2017 with a vision to replace traditional autonomous vehicle stacks with a data-driven solution. He is also a highly cited researcher in Deep Learning and Computer Vision, with over 50,000 citations for his academic work.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) - Deep Learning
BE(Hons.)
BE(Hons.) - Mechatronics Engineering
Work Experience
Co-Founder & CEO
Wayve is building AV2.0—a next generation autonomous driving system that can quickly and safely adapt to new driving domains anywhere in the world. I firmly believe that large scale deployment of autonomy will only be possible with an intelligent, data-driven solution using a lean sensor and compute stack. We've raised $1.3b and are assembling a team of exceptional people to build exactly this.
We're hiring across our offices in London, Silicon Valley and Vancouver! If you have a passion for building AI and seeing the impact of it embodied in the physical world, I'd love to chat.
https://wayve.ai/join-us/
Research Fellow at Trinity College
An academic research fellowship that I was awarded in the third year of my PhD, elected by a board of Royal Society Fellows and Nobel Laureates.
Scientific Advisor
Scape (acquired by Facebook in 2020) built one of the first APIs for city-scale localisation with computer vision.
Research Engineer
Skydio launched the world’s first autonomous consumer drone. I designed the deep learning algorithm which progressed the drone from being able to track only people wearing a specific coloured t-shirt, to being able to track humans in general. I had a lot of fun testing the drone's ability to autonomously follow me while mountain biking in California.
Software Engineer
A wonderful half year working as a consultant on enterprise software, analytics and AR/VR between my undergraduate and postgraduate studies.
Key Highlights
Co-founder & CEO of Wayve, pioneering Embodied AI for autonomous driving.
Wayve has raised $1.3B to develop AV2.0, a next-generation autonomous driving system.
Expert in Deep Learning, Computer Vision, and Robotics from the University of Cambridge.
Awarded the 2025 Eurostar for Innovation by Automotive News.
Professional Profile
Alex Kendall is a co-founder and CEO of Wayve, a leading UK-based autonomous driving company. His work focuses on bringing Embodied AI into the physical world, leveraging deep learning to create scalable and adaptable self-driving systems.
Autonomous Vehicles
Embodied AI
Deep Learning
Computer Vision
Robotics
CEO
Co-founder
Entrepreneurship
Startup Leadership
University of Cambridge
University of Auckland
Research Fellow
PhD in Deep Learning
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