Elisa de Martel, who was chief monetary officer at Alphabet’s autonomous car firm Waymo, has been employed to the identical place at buzzy self-driving car startup Wayve. Outgoing CFO Max Warburton, who held the place at Wayve since 2024, is shifting right into a strategic advisory function supporting the corporate’s management staff.
Her appointment as CFO comes as Wayve strikes from improvement and testing to an organization on the verge of deploying its automated driving know-how on two fronts: robotaxis and passenger autos.
De Martel, who can be primarily based out of Sunnyvale, California, has a historical past of working for tech corporations, together with as CFO at industrial-grade 3D printing firm Carbon and an 11-year stint as manufacturing finance director at Apple. She was CFO at Waymo from 2022 to January 2026 — a important interval for the corporate because it started to commercially function in a number of cities and raised $5.6 billion in a Collection C fundraising spherical that was led by its mum or dad firm and pushed its valuation to greater than $45 billion.
Wayve now sits in a equally pivotal second. The startup, which was based in 2017 and is now valued at about $8.5 billion, attracted traders and automotive prospects for its self-learning strategy to its automated driving software program. The corporate developed a software program layer utilizing an end-to-end neural community that doesn’t depend on high-definition maps, customized {hardware}, or hand-coded guidelines and solely makes use of information to show the car tips on how to drive.
The corporate’s tech is the premise of two merchandise, an “eyes on” assisted-driving system and an “eyes off” absolutely automated-driving system, which might be utilized to robotaxis or client autos that may deal with the entire driving in sure environments.
Wayve’s pitch, and the agnostic nature of its know-how, has resonated with automakers already locked into sure {hardware}. It’s additionally attracted traders — Wayve has raised $3.2 billion to this point — and firms like Uber that need to use a extra succesful model of the self-driving tech to deploy robotaxis.
Whereas de Martel has a well-documented profession in prime monetary posts, it was her connection to deep tech that was significantly enticing to Wayve’s management, together with founder and CEO Alex Kendall, in response to insiders who requested to not be named.
As CFO at Wayve, she is going to oversee monetary technique and planning, capital allocation, reporting, governance, treasury and tax. The corporate stated she may even work intently with Wayve’s government staff to help and advise on business, investor, and strategic partnership offers.
Wayve has locked in plenty of partnerships with automakers, together with Nissan and Stellantis. The corporate has additionally made progress on the automated car driving techniques for robotaxis; the corporate just lately launched public rides in London — with a human security operator on board — and Tokyo is predicted to observe quickly.
Now the corporate has to push previous this traditionally precarious level of early and restricted deployment and right into a high-volume provider to automotive.
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