UK-based self-driving technology startup Wayve is giving employees the chance to sell a portion of their vested equity through an $85 million tender offer. The structured program lets staff sell shares back to investors and is being led by the company's existing and new investors at the latest valuation of $8.5 billion.
That valuation was established in February, when the nine-year-old company closed a $1.2 billion Series D round led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Participants in that financing included Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Uber.
This is Wayve's second employee liquidity event: the company previously ran a tender offer alongside its $1.05 billion Series C funding round in May 2024.
Wayve's offering is part of a broader trend among AI startups that use tender offers to provide employee liquidity. Rather than forcing staff to wait years for an exit, startups are increasingly letting employees sell shares when options vest, which can help retain talent and reduce immediate departures to competitors or new startups.
Other startups that have recently completed employee tender offers include Decagon, which builds AI agents for enterprise customer service used by companies like Duolingo and Hertz; ElevenLabs, an AI voice-generation firm behind much of today’s synthetic speech and dubbing tools; Linear, a project-management platform for software teams; and Clay, a sales and marketing automation tool (Clay has run two tenders in the past nine months).
These companies can provide employee liquidity largely because investors remain eager to buy more equity in high-growth businesses, sometimes paying a premium in the expectation of future higher valuations.
Wayve's autonomous driving approach relies on self-learning. Instead of using pre-built, high-definition maps that many self-driving systems depend on, its software is an end-to-end neural network that learns to drive from data alone — a method the company's founders say is closer to how humans learn to drive through experience.
Aiming for a "general-purpose" AI driver that could operate across countries, vehicle types and road conditions, Wayve has more than doubled its headcount over the past year and now employs about 1,200 people.
The company is targeting robotaxi pilot launches in partnership with Uber later this year, and separately plans to integrate its AI software into Nissan's next-generation driver-assist systems starting in 2027.
