Self-driving cars, meet your nemesis: the London roundabout. This strange piece of geometry, with tentacles shooting off at odd angles and cars nudging into impossible spaces, is one of the many headaches that will plague computer brains as the city's autonomous vehicle (AV) trials accelerate. In the US, Waymo and others boast fleets of self-driving cars that have racked up millions of miles of public road trials, across more than 25 cities. Billions of dollars of investment is flowing into AV units run by Uber and General Motors. Tesla is making bold promises about "robo taxis", and Ford plans to start building AVs in 2021. If you believe the latest McKinsey report, China will see mass deployment of fully autonomous vehicles within a decade.

FiveAI has raised $41 million in venture capital as the startup seeks to turn the self-driving research it has conducted into commercial products and services. The U.K.-based startup has created a technology stack to power autonomous vehicles. The company uses AI and machine learning that would let cars use simpler maps to navigate their surroundings. By reducing the complexity of the technological challenges, the company hopes to accelerate the deployment of autonomous vehicles. "This funding round is validation of the work we are doing and the role our technology is set to contribute to developing and assuring self-driving," said Stan Boland, FiveAI's CEO, in a statement. "We're excited to be able to accelerate development and engagements with partners."

Driverless cars are being tested in the south of London by a company which won't reveal where they will be. FiveAI is today beginning road tests of its self-driving technology in the boroughs of Bromley and Croydon. The company says its cars will be ferrying commuters around the boroughs for the next two months, but hasn't released any details of the 12-mile loop they'll use. They will be making more than three journeys per day on'multiple' days per week, the company told MailOnline, but it wouldn't give any more specifics. At least two people will be in the car at all times – a back-up driver, a technician and sometimes a volunteer commuter – in case something goes wrong.

After raising $35 million to develop driverless car technology and a strategy to build a fleet of shared vehicles, UK startup FiveAI is announcing its first on-street trial: a service aimed at commuters in the London outer boroughs of Bromley and Croydon. Projected to begin in late 2019, it will kick off first with a 10-month "data gathering" exercise, which will see five FiveAI vehicles, with drivers, collect information about road conditions, the movement of pedestrians and various vehicles, and other variables to help train its AI platform. The new trial will be the first on-street effort from the UK startup, which has up to now been testing its technology primarily in Bedfordshire, at automotive testing centre Milbrook Proving Ground, according to Ben Peters, FiveAI's VP of product who is also a co-founder of the company (alongside Stan Boland, Steve Allpress, John Redford and Simon Walker). The news of the London trial comes as TechCrunch has learned that FiveAI is also in the process of raising a new round of funding. While the $35 million FiveAI has raised to date is considered the highest amount of funding for an autonomous car company in Europe, it is a very modest figure when compared to startups in the US and China. Indeed, although transportation across Europe is estimated to be a $400 billion market, Peters estimates that no more than $100 million has been raised by autonomous driving startups in the region, versus around $8 billion by autonomous car startups the US, home to startups like Zoox and Nutonomy (which, like FiveAI, are building platforms that they plan to use in their own fleets), transportation providers like Uber, and car makers (which themselves are acquiring startup talent to kickstart their efforts), and tech giants like Google that approach cars like the next big hardware challenge.

Uber plans to map the world, freeing itself from reliance on Google Maps and paving the way for its own fleet of driverless cars. Uber's mapping vehicles hit American roads last year, were introduced in Mexico earlier this summer, and will eventually extend to the other 76 countries where the ride-hailing service operates, gathering precise data on pickup and drop-off locations and traffic patterns. Following an influx of $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, Uber says it will invest $500 million in developing its in-house maps, the Financial Times reported. "With autonomous vehicles, maps are going to be fundamental," Brian McClendon, a vice president at Uber, told The Atlantic. "And the maps that are needed for autonomous vehicles are beyond anything that's being created today by any third party." An expert in geospatial data visualization, Mr. McClendon led Google Maps for more than a decade before jumping to Uber to lead its mapping projects last June.

A UK start-up developing artificial intelligence and machine learning for fully autonomous vehicles has received 2.7m in equity funding. The funding, led by Amadeus Capital Partners with Spring Partners and Notion Capital, will enable Bristol-based FiveAI to grow its team, step-up its development and begin simulator and road testing of its software. According to FiveAI, early approaches to autonomous vehicles have required accurate, 3D maps built using point cloud technology. In use, each vehicle then correlates against that map to work out where it is and establish a track to follow. The company is now planning a system using much stronger AI and ML to ensure that autonomous vehicles can safely and accurately navigate all environments, including complex urban ones, with simpler maps.

FiveAI is a rather ambitious U.K. startup that's building AI-driven software to help accelerate the development of autonomous vehicles. The young company wants to apply the latest developments in computer vision and AI/machine learning to enable self-driving cars to do more of the heavy-lifting in regards to understanding and navigating their immediate environment. To enable FiveAI to continue building out its autonomous vehicle software stack and grow its team of AI/machine learning and other software engineers, the startup has raised 2.7 million in funding. The round was led by Amadeus Capital Partners with participation from Spring Partners and Notion Capital. Specifically, FiveAI wants to use AI/machine learning and computer vision to remove the need for highly detailed "prior 3D mapping" of environments, which I'm told is the predominant method used in autonomous vehicle navigation.