This UK startup thinks it can win the self-driving car race with better machine learning

A new U.K. self-driving car startup founded by Amar Shah and Alex Kendall, two machine learning PhDs from University of Cambridge, is de-cloaking today. Wayve -- backed by New York-based Compound, Europe's Fly Ventures, and Brent Hoberman's Firstminute Capital -- is building what it describes as "end-to-end machine learning algorithms" to make autonomous vehicles a reality, an approach it claims is different to much of the conventional thinking on self-driving cars. Specifically, as Wayve CEO Shah explained in a call last week, the young company believes that the key to making an autonomous vehicle that is truly just that (i.e. In other words, self-driving cars is an AI problem first and foremost, and one that he and co-founder Kendall argue requires a very specific machine-learning development skill set. "Wayve is building intelligent software to decide how to control a vehicle on all public roads," he tells me.