Wayve, a London-based start up which designs artificial intelligence software for self-driving vehicles, has announced a $20m series A funding round to launch a pilot fleet of vehicles in central London.

The investment was led by Eclipse Ventures, with participation from Balderton Capital and existing investors Compound, Fly Ventures and firstminute capital.

End-to-end machine learning based systems have dominated traditional rule-based approaches in natural language processing, image recognition, speech synthesis and more.

“As computational power and data continue to grow, learning-based approaches will become more inevitable, especially for mobile robotics,” said Amar Shah, Wayve Co-Founder and CEO, “the human brain has evolved over millions of years, computers have only had a few decades, but are catching up quickly.”

“Furthermore, by locating the company in the UK, the team has access to an extraordinary talent pool and numerous complex testing environments.” In Spring 2019, Wayve demonstrated a self-driving car navigating on roads it had never previously driven before.

This was accomplished with cameras, a 2D map, and Wayve’s “deep learning driving brain”. A good human driver can quickly adapt to navigating a new jurisdiction, however existing autonomous solutions lack the requisite ability to detect and respond appropriately to potential hazards. Wayve’s aim is to build 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,” said Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton Capital.

“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.”

Wayve says most self-driving vehicle testing thus far has been carried out on highly structured, modern roads in USA and China. While they are live driving environments, such geographies lack the “irregular, diverse and complex” streets of other global cities. The company has begun on-road public autonomous driving trials supported by insurance partner, Admiral.

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