- Wayve employees may sell $85 million in vested shares to investors.
- This is the company’s second liquidity event since its 2024 Series C tender.
- The $8.5 billion valuation matches the February Series D, which was later revised to $8.6 billion.
Wayve is giving employees the chance to sell some of their shares in the company.
The London-based self-driving startup is running an $85 million tender offer, allowing staff to cash out vested shares at an $8.5 billion valuation, reports TechCrunch. This gives employees access to cash without waiting for an IPO, which is not expected soon for most AI companies.
Both current and new investors are buying the shares, not the company itself. This setup lets employees turn their equity into cash without changing the company’s ownership. Wayve held its first event like this during its $1.05 billion Series C round in May 2024.
Why startups are doing this now
Tender offers used to be rare and usually happened when companies were close to going public. That has changed.
ElevenLabs, an AI voice company, held an employee tender after its $180 million Series C at a $3.3 billion valuation in January 2025. Project-management platform Linear and sales automation startup Clay, which is backed by Sequoia, have also done similar deals recently.
The reason is simple: engineers and researchers with valuable AI skills have strong bargaining power, and other companies are eager to hire them with attractive offers. Tender offers help startups keep their talent without diluting ownership or needing an IPO before they are ready. Investors are often willing to pay extra for shares, believing the company will grow in value.
What Wayve builds
Founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, Wayve develops software instead of manufacturing vehicles. The company licenses its self-driving system to automakers, rather than building and operating its own vehicles, as Waymo does.
Tech Funding News compared this model to Qualcomm’s role in mobile technology rather than to that of a vertically integrated automaker. Wayve’s approach relies on cameras and existing vehicle sensors, rather than the high-definition maps and lidar arrays used by most competitors, including Mobileye.
The company trains a single neural network model on driving data from hundreds of cities instead of hand-coding rules for each market. It has demonstrated its system in over 500 cities across Europe, North America, and Japan without local adjustments.
This licensing approach has led to partnerships with Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, and Nissan, as well as with Uber, which joined in 2024. Robotaxi trials are set to start in London this year, and cars with Wayve’s software are expected to launch for consumers between 2027 and 2028.
The valuation, and a parallel listing
The $8.5 billion valuation matches Wayve’s Series D, a $1.2 billion round closed in February 2026 led by Eclipse, Balderton, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Uber.
The round later increased to $1.5 billion as Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Nissan joined as strategic investors. This is why some sources now cite an $8.6 billion valuation. Wayve has raised about $2.6 billion since its founding, including an $8 million investment from a new UK pension-backed venture capital vehicle in April.
The tender is happening alongside another update: Wayve has filed for a closed auction on the London Stock Exchange’s new private market, scheduled for July 8, according to Bloomberg. This gives the company two ways for shareholders to get liquidity.
Tender offers help retain employees, but they do not answer the bigger question of whether Wayve’s software licensing model will outperform the vertically integrated approach used by Waymo and Tesla. Employees now have access to cash regardless, but the company still needs to prove which model works best.
