Employees of AI Startup Wayve Sold Shares on New London Exchange Pisces at 10% Discount

Employees of British artificial intelligence developer Wayve Technologies, which creates AI for autonomous vehicles, sold their shares on the new London trading platform Pisces at a 10% discount to the company's latest valuation — Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the situation.

What Is Known About the Deal

The exact volume of shares sold and the names of sellers are not disclosed. It is known that the deals took place on the Pisces platform — a new London Stock Exchange mechanism for periodic trading of shares in non-public companies.

• The discount to Wayve's latest valuation was 10%
• The trading platform for the deal was Pisces, a new mechanism for trading private shares in London
• The sellers were company employees, not external investors
• Wayve develops AI systems for autonomous driving

Why Pisces Exchange Exists

Pisces (Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System) is a regulatory initiative of the London Stock Exchange that gives employees and early investors of non-public companies the opportunity to periodically sell part of their holdings without waiting for an IPO. For technology startups that remain private for years, this is a way to give option holders access to liquidity without putting pressure on the company to go public earlier. Previously, employees of such companies could wait months and years for the next funding round or acquisition to exchange options for money — Pisces creates a regular window for this.

What Wayve Does

Wayve is one of the notable British developers of autonomous driving software. The company bets on end-to-end deep learning models: instead of hard-coded rules and a large set of LiDAR sensors, the vehicle learns to drive based on data from real trips. This approach distinguishes Wayve from some competitors who traditionally rely on detailed maps and multiple lidars.

The Market for AI in Autonomous Vehicles

The autonomous driving sector remains one of the most capital-intensive in the technology industry: developing and training models for autonomous driving requires enormous computing power and years of expensive testing on real roads, and for most players commercial profitability comes slowly. Against this backdrop, investors have become more selective, and even at notable startups like Wayve, valuations on the secondary market can turn out to be lower than what the company received in its last funding round.

Who Backs Wayve

Among Wayve's investors are major technology and automotive companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, and SoftBank, which reflects industry interest in alternative approaches to autonomous driving system development. The focus on cameras and neural networks instead of heavy LiDAR packages brings Wayve closer to Tesla's approach, although most other major autonomous driving players still bet on a combination of sensors and pre-mapped maps.

What This Means

The 10% discount on the new London platform for private shares shows how investors currently assess the risks of AI startups in autonomous driving: the sector remains expensive and is slowly reaching commercial scale, so even employees of notable companies agree to sell stakes at lower valuations than previous rounds.