LONDON, May 7 (Reuters) - British self-driving

technology startup Wayve said on Tuesday it has raised $1.05

billion in a funding round led by SoftBank Group to

accelerate the development and launch in production-model

vehicles of its Embodied AI technology that can learn from and

adapt to human behavior.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) also contributed in the Series C funding

round as a new investor, as did existing investor Microsoft ( MSFT )

.

The latest funding brings Wayve's total funds raised to just

over $1.3 billion and marks the largest investment yet in a

British startup focused on artificial-intelligence technology.

In a statement, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hailed

the funding round as "a testament to our leadership in this

industry, and that our plan for the (UK) economy is working."

Founded in 2017, Wayve's autonomous driving technology uses

AI that the startup says will enable vehicles to "navigate

situations that do not follow strict patterns or rules, such as

unexpected actions by drivers, pedestrians, or environmental

elements."

"This will enable automakers and fleets to accelerate their

transition from assisted to autonomous driving," Wayve CEO Alex

Kendall told Reuters.

The startup's technology is currently integrated into six

different vehicle platforms including electric vehicles like the

Jaguar I-PACE and Ford Mustang MachE as part of advanced driver

assistance systems (ADAS), Kendall said. As the self-driving

technology advances, Wayve's AI will be upgraded using

over-the-air software updates.

The problem faced by robotaxi startups and other

self-driving companies is that developing vehicles that can

truly drive themselves has proven more difficult than originally

imagined.

Among the main challenges is that self-driving software

systems have simply lacked humans' ability to predict and assess

risk quickly, especially when encountering unexpected incidents

or "edge cases."

As the scale of that challenge has become clear, major

investments in autonomous startups like Wayve are increasingly

rare.

Wayve President Erez Dagan told Reuters the company's

technology is "built to generalize its driving knowledge from

one scenario to another... because it's nearly impossible to

imagine every situation that a self-driving car needs to

reliably handle."

"By leveraging the raw power of AI, we can build an Embodied

AI system that's learned from real-world and synthetic data how

to handle edge cases at a rate that surpasses human

programming," he added.