Alex Kendall: the road less travelled

Dr Alex Kendall has had a marvellous year. He’s closed a $1.7 billion funding round for his autonomous vehicle startup Wayve and been welcomed at 10 Downing Street as one of the UK’s rising stars of artificial intelligence (AI).

But for Christchurch-raised Alex, who went straight from high school into the second year of a mechatronics engineering degree at the University of Auckland in 2011 (later graduating first in his class), it all feels like “crossing the start line”.

“It represents a special moment where we are transferring from being a research and development focused company into a product company,” he tells Ingenio from his London flat, where friends visiting from New Zealand have been sleeping on his couch.

“We’ve got a lot to do ahead of us and we’re excited to get stuck in.”

The goal of Wayve, which Alex founded in 2017 after completing his doctorate at the University of Cambridge as a Woolf Fisher Scholar, is to finally make the promise of driverless vehicles a reality.

A handful of companies – Tesla and Waymo most prominent among them – have been testing driverless cars for years. But they are tackling a particularly tricky technical problem: how to allow vehicles to safely navigate the real world on our behalf, dodging all the hazards that go with driving, like road conditions, weather, wayward pedestrians and other drivers.

Alex admits it’s a complex challenge. But 2017 marked a watershed moment in the field of AI that allowed new machine learning methods and use of neural networks to supercharge how AI systems are trained.

“We don’t program rules that say ‘red light, stop’ or ‘green light, go’; rather, we just feed the system a lot of data and let it learn those patterns in the data,” explains Alex. “We don’t need armies of engineers that program the exact rules the robot or self-driving car needs to follow.”

Alex has set out with Wayve not just to create self-driving cars that rapidly learn from the world around them rather than respond to pre-defined instructions; his approach harnesses embodied AI – intelligent systems capable of performing tasks in the physical world. It’s technology that could help power manufacturing or domestic robots, as well as vehicles.

In May, Japanese venture capital firm SoftBank Group led Wayve’s massive fundraising round, with tech giants Microsoft and NVIDIA also participating. The funds will allow Alex and his 300-strong team to accelerate R&D, and also move into production in collaboration with automobile makers. Alex says his approach to using AI to control driverless vehicles was largely rejected back in 2017.

“Even a year ago, we couldn’t even get a meeting with car executives,” he says. “Now we have CEOs of all the major car companies around the world lining up to come experience this technology.”

Alex traces the genesis of Wayve back to those early University days and to his homegrown engineering projects on the family farm in Canterbury.

“I ended up doing mechatronics, because it was the intersection of pretty much everything electrical, mechanical and software related.

“I spent most of my time in the mechatronics lab, 3D printing robots and building drones and all these kinds of things, and some late nights sleeping under the desks there. It was just a lot of fun, and the friends and memories I made were invaluable.”

There were plenty of setbacks along the way. Entering the University’s Velocity Challenge in his final year of mechatronics study, Alex’s ambition to win the competition with a drone capable of measuring pasture growth on farms came crashing down – literally.

“I flew the drone up and I must have had a few too many sleepless nights because one of the rotors fell off mid-flight. It spiralled and crashed in front of that whole crowd.”

He credits his role as a resident adviser at O’Rorke Hall and involvement in the University’s hockey teams with helping him develop early leadership skills. They’re skills he says he’s had to refine as Wayve has grown, and for which he was recognised with a 40 Under 40 award from the University in 2020.

Alex credits his success so far to having a “problem-driven mindset”, one that saw him take a contrarian approach to driverless cars seven years ago.

“There’s no such thing as eureka moments. It’s sort of a sustained effort over many, many years that allows you to solve hard problems,” he says.

That effort now looks set to pay off, with massive implications for the world of transport.

“Very soon you’ll be able to buy a new car, and it will have Wayve’s AI on it,” says Alex.

“The awesome thing that will do is improve safety. It’ll mean that the vehicle will anticipate and prevent a number of collisions that might have happened otherwise.

“Everyone was telling me this was crazy; this would never work. And I had the resilience and belief to stick with it.”

Peter Griffin