James Wise
444 posts
@Jameswise
Partner @Balderton. Investing in AI, health and energy. Chair of UK Sovereign AI. Author of Start-Up Century. Mostly Generative.
Today, @RachelReevesMP announced that Sovereign AI will officially launch with @alexgkendall at @wayve_ai on 16 April... Lets get Britmaxxing 🚀 🇬🇧
Big news from Tokyo 🇯🇵 @Uber and @NissanMotor and @wayve_ai have signed an agreement to deploy supervised robotaxis in Tokyo from late 2026, bringing the Nissan Leaf powered by the Wayve AI Driver to riders through Uber. This is what scalable autonomy looks like: • OEM-native integration - no retrofit. Nissan is designing the vehicle for mass production, with hardware sourced from global automotive supply chains. • AI-first autonomy - a single AI Driver designed to generalise anywhere across Tokyo without mapping. • Collaborative and scalable path to autonomy - together, we combine intelligence, engineering and distribution. Tokyo is an exciting city for us to deploy our embodied AI. It’s a city with sophisticated mobility options and high safety standards. I loved testing our autonomy here this week. We’ve been public road testing and working closely with local authorities since early 2025. Looking forward to working alongside great leadership of Ivan Espinosa, Sarfraz Maredia and @dkhos. Big efforts ahead. 🙌
Introducing Sovereign AI, the Government’s new £500m venture fund. Sovereign AI will support founders from day one to start here, scale here and win everywhere. sovereignai.gov.uk
Introducing Sovereign AI, the Government’s new £500m venture fund. Sovereign AI will support founders from day one to start here, scale here and win everywhere. sovereignai.gov.uk
A German startup has just signed an agreement to build the world’s FIRST nuclear fusion plant. @proximafusion has signed an MOU securing €400m from its home state of Bavaria to build the €2bn plant. The rest of the funding is expected to come from the federal government. Proxima Fusion is hoping to get the plant up and running by the early 2030s. It comes at a time when Europe’s energy security is being scrutinised more than ever. Germany in particular has been criticised for closing down all of its nuclear power plants, but this could see the country become a global energy powerhouse. Backed by Wilbe, Cherry Ventures and Balderton, Proxima has become one of Europe’s most exciting companies. If this works Proxima could truly become a trillion dollar company. It is AMAZING to see European founders building the most exciting, and potentially impactful, technologies in the world.
Another major milestone in @wayve_ai's history. Proud to say we’ve secured $1.5 billion Series D investment at $8.6 billion valuation. We started a decade ago with a contrarian technical thesis: that self-driving is an AI problem, and Embodied AI will enable autonomy to scale without rules, HD-maps and using mass-produced hardware. Now we're entering commercialisation, we're taking a contrarian commercial strategy too, selecting the business model with the largest opportunity to scale. We're not selling our own cars, which limits scale to one brand. We're not operating our own fleets, which limits autonomy to city-by-city expansion. We're licensing autonomy to any vehicle, anywhere. This new business model is only possible now because we've built a general purpose AI driver, which is flexible to work with any vehicle architecture and proven to drive all around the world. This unlocks a high margin software licensing model, which we're now excited to be deploying with global partners with the strength of this new funding round. Thank you to our new and returning financial investors for backing our vision all the way: @EclipseVentures, @balderton, @SoftBank, @OTPPinfo, @BaillieGifford, @BritishBBank, @IcehouseVenture and @Schroders among other global institutional investors. We're deepening our partnerships with @Microsoft and @nvidia to build and deploy Embodied AI at global scale, and with @Uber, who are announcing supervised robotaxi trials in 10 cities around the world, starting with London this year. To top it off, three top-10 global automakers across Europe, Japan and USA are backing and believing in our technology for consumer vehicles and robotaxis: @MercedesBenz, @Nissan and @Stellantis. I’ve always believed that our end-to-end AI approach would lead the way in autonomy. This latest investment and the endorsement that comes with it make me believe that the industry is also now converging on that idea too. What's next? We have a busy next few years of commercial delivery: supervised robotaxi trials around the world in 2026 and consumer vehicle sales from 2027. Thank you to the incredible Wayve team for making this all possible. Check out all details here: wayve.ai/press/series-d/
JUNE 2028. The S&P is down 38% from its highs. Unemployment just printed 10.2%. Private credit is unraveling. Prime mortgages are cracking. AI didn’t disappoint. It exceeded every expectation. What happened? citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
