Wayve hires former Waymo CFO Elisa de Martel as supervised robotaxis enter service

Why it matters

Kendall has recruited a finance chief who helped Waymo cross into paid robotaxi service. Wayve now faces the harder task of funding fleet deployments and automaker programs at the same time.

Wayve founder and CEO Alex Kendall (@alexgkendall) has hired Elisa de Martel, the former chief financial officer of Waymo, to run Wayve's finances as his autonomous-driving research bet moves into public rides and production vehicle programs.

Wayve's announcement on September 16th confirmed the appointment and said Max Warburton, Wayve's CFO since November 2024, is moving into a strategic advisory role. TechCrunch reported the same day that de Martel will work from Sunnyvale, California. She will oversee financial planning, capital allocation, reporting, governance, treasury and tax, along with investor relations, partnerships and commercial transactions.

Kendall built Wayve around a technical argument he developed during his computer-vision and robotics research at the University of Cambridge: autonomous vehicles could learn driving behavior through end-to-end neural networks rather than depend primarily on hand-coded rules and detailed maps. He co-founded Wayve in 2017, the same year he became a fellow at Trinity College. His doctoral work later received the BMVA Prize and ELLIS PhD Prize, according to Wayve's biography of Kendall.

De Martel's appointment puts an executive with direct autonomy commercialization experience beside that founder-led technical thesis. She served as Waymo's CFO from 2022 until January 2026, following an earlier CFO post at industrial 3D-printing developer Carbon and 11 years in Apple finance. Waymo said when it hired her in 2022 that she had ended her Apple tenure as director of manufacturing finance.

Her Waymo term covered the expansion of paid robotaxi operations and a $5.6 billion financing led by Alphabet that valued Waymo at more than $45 billion. That experience gives Kendall a finance chief familiar with the gap between demonstrating an autonomous system and financing its operation across multiple markets.

A finance hire for two routes to market

Wayve is trying to commercialize the same underlying AI Driver platform through two channels. One puts supervised and eventually driverless vehicles onto ride-hailing networks. The other licenses driving software to automakers for passenger vehicles, beginning with driver-assistance features and moving toward higher levels of automation.

The first channel is already visible, with an important qualification. On September 3rd, Wayve and Uber opened supervised autonomous rides in London. Riders requesting several Uber products may be matched with a Wayve-equipped Ford Mustang Mach-E, but a trained, licensed driver remains in the vehicle. Wayve and Uber said the initial fleet would be small.

Wayve also plans a Tokyo pilot with Uber and Nissan in late 2026. The announced first phase will likewise use a safety operator, with Nissan supplying Leaf vehicles and Uber handling rider demand. Wayve's role is to provide the driving system rather than own and operate the fleet.

The automaker channel runs on a longer clock. Nissan has agreed to integrate Wayve technology into its next-generation ProPILOT systems, with the first model planned for Japan in fiscal 2027. Stellantis plans to integrate Wayve's software into its STLA AutoDrive platform, targeting an initial North American vehicle program in 2028 under a partnership announced in May.

Those programs make the CFO role unusually broad. Wayve must fund model development and safety work while negotiating long automotive integration cycles, supporting robotaxi deployments and allocating capital across several hardware partners and countries. De Martel will also have to give investors a coherent view of businesses that reach customers on different timelines and carry different costs.

Wayve's official AV2.0 materials describe a foundation-model-based system designed to generalize across vehicle platforms and regions, and present it as a scalable approach to autonomous driving. The claim will be tested by whether one software platform can move across automakers, sensor configurations and cities without recreating much of the engineering work for each deployment.

Wayve's funding math needs a steady hand

Wayve closed a $1.2 billion Series D on February 25th at an $8.6 billion post-money valuation. Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the round. Microsoft, Nvidia and Uber participated alongside Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis, giving Kendall a shareholder list that overlaps heavily with Wayve's intended customers and infrastructure partners.

Wayve described the broader capital package as $1.5 billion because it included additional milestone-based funding from Uber for robotaxi deployments. Wayve later added $60 million from AMD, Arm and Qualcomm. Even so, Wayve's current investor page lists $2.8 billion in total funding, while TechCrunch reports $3.2 billion.

RuntimeWire reported in July that Wayve had opened an $85 million employee tender at an $8.5 billion valuation. That sale gave staff liquidity as Kendall competed for engineers and prepared the London and automaker programs. Hiring de Martel adds an executive who has managed finance inside Apple manufacturing, a venture-backed hardware developer and the autonomy sector's most established commercial operator.

Kendall has spent nearly a decade arguing that a learning-based driving system can scale farther than heavily mapped, city-specific autonomy stacks. London now gives the public a supervised version of that work, while Nissan and Stellantis provide routes into mass-produced vehicles. De Martel's job is to turn those separate programs into a financial operation that can survive automotive timelines and the continuing cost of autonomy development.

The appointment gives Kendall an experienced counterweight for that phase. Wayve's technical thesis brought in billions of dollars and major industrial partners. Its next proof will arrive through deployment volume, repeatable integrations and the economics behind each vehicle carrying the Wayve AI Driver.