London (6 October, 2021) – Ocado Group today announces a partnership and £10 million investment with autonomous mobility start-up Wayve to accelerate the development of autonomous grocery deliveries for complex urban environments. 

Wayve’s advanced deep learning and camera-first technology has the ability to adapt to new, unstructured, highly complex environments, without the need for pre-programming, human-designed rules, or high definition mapping.

The collaboration includes an autonomous delivery trial that will see Wayve’s technology fitted onto a selection of Ocado delivery vans and trialed on urban delivery routes. This trial will help Ocado explore first-hand how Wayve can handle the congested streets and challenging manoeuvres that last-mile delivery technology must be equipped to navigate. A portion of Ocado’s existing delivery fleet will also be outfitted with Wayve’s data collection devices to provide data for training and validating Wayve’s technology. 

Alex Harvey, Chief of Advanced Technology, Ocado Group commented:

“Ocado is on a journey to develop highly intelligent autonomous mobility systems to further transform the operational economics, and proposition, of the Ocado Smart Platform for our OSP retail partners. We’ve been impressed with Wayve’s approach to solving this most complex of challenges and are excited to accelerate our capabilities so that our retail partners globally can take advantage of them at the earliest opportunity.” 

Alex Kendall, CEO of Wayve says: 

“Ocado Group has been driving innovation in global grocery logistics for decades. Their cutting-edge approach to grocery operations and international reach aligns strongly with Wayve’s culture and global ambitions. 

I am incredibly excited to collaborate with Ocado Group and learn from their vast expertise. Globally, there is huge momentum to transform mobility in grocery operations right now. We are focused on delivering an autonomous last mile solution to support the needs of grocery retailers everywhere. Through this partnership with Ocado Group we aim to unlock autonomous delivery faster in more places worldwide.”

Media contact: 

Tilly Pielichaty 

PR and Communications Manager Wayve 

[email protected] 

07505462340 

About Wayve 

Wayve is on a mission to reimagine autonomous mobility through embodied intelligence. We are the first to deploy autonomous vehicles on public roads with end-to-end deep learning. We are pioneering the AI software, lean hardware and fleet learning platform for AV 2.0: a next generation autonomous driving system that can quickly and safely adapt to new driving domains anywhere in the world. Founded in 2017, Wayve is made up of a global team of experts in machine learning and robotics from top organisations around the world. Wayve has raised over $58M and is backed by Eclipse Ventures, Balderton Capital and prominent technology leaders such as Sir Richard Branson, Rosemary Leith and Yann LeCun. The team is headquartered in London with their fleet of vehicles testing in cities across the UK. Wayve aims to be the first to deploy autonomy in 100 cities. To learn more, visit www.wayve.ai. 

About Ocado Group 

Ocado Group is a UK based technology company admitted to trading on the London Stock Exchange (Ticker OCDO). It provides end-to-end online grocery fulfilment solutions to some of the world’s largest grocery retailers and holds a 50% share of Ocado Retail Ltd in the UK in a Joint Venture with Marks & Spencer. Ocado has spent two decades innovating for grocery online, investing in a wide technology estate that includes robotics, AI & machine learning, simulation, forecasting, and edge intelligence.