Bill Gates recently had the opportunity to take a ride in downtown London inside a Wayve autonomous vehicle (AV).

Instead of relying on a traditional autonomous driving stack, HD maps and hand-coded rules, Wayve said it is building a data-driven learned driver that can scale, adapt and generalise its driving intelligence to new places.

Wayve, a UK startup founded in 2017, raised a $20 million Series A round to launch a pilot fleet of self-driving Jaguar I-Pace electric SUVs in central London. Wayve believes the engineering challenges of self-driving cars will be solved by better artificial intelligence, not by more sensors and hand-coded rules. Wayve trains its autonomous driving…