Wayve launches $85 million employee tender offer at $8.5 billion valuation

Wayve, a UK-based self-driving technology startup, is allowing its employees to sell a portion of their vested shares. The $85 million tender offer — essentially a structured opportunity for employees to sell shares back to investors — is led by the company’s existing and new investors in the company’s latest valuation. $8.5 billion.

That valuation was set in February when the nine-year-old company raised a $1.2 billion Series D led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and included participation from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Uber.

This is Wayve’s second employee liquidity event. The company had previously held a tender offer alongside its offer $1.05 billion Series C funding round in May 2024.

The Wayve offer is part of Growing trend One of the emerging companies in the field of artificial intelligence. Instead of waiting years before exiting, companies use tender offers as a retention tool, giving employees a reason to stay rather than jumping to a competitor – or starting their own shop – the moment their options become available.

Other startups that have recently completed employee bids include: Decagonwhich builds AI agents that handle customer service for organizations like Duolingo and Hertz; Eleven laboratoriesthe AI ​​voice generation company behind many of the online artificial speech and dubbing tools; lineara popular project management platform designed for software teams; and pridea sales and marketing automation tool that helps businesses search and reach potential customers. (Clay has held two tenders in the past nine months alone.)

These startups are able to provide cash to employees primarily because investors are eager to buy more shares in these high-growth companies, even at a premium, betting that the companies will be worth more in the future.

Wayve uses a self-learning approach in its autonomous driving. Instead of relying on the pre-made, high-definition maps that most self-driving software uses, its software is an end-to-end neural network that learns to drive just from data — akin to how humans learn to drive through experience, its founders say.

In its quest to create a “general-purpose” AI driver — one that could, in theory, work across countries, cars, and road conditions — the company has doubled its headcount to 1,200 over the past year.

Wayve is targeting a soft launch of robotaxis in partnership with Uber later this year, while separately planning to integrate its AI software into Nissan’s next-generation driver assistance systems starting in 2027.