Wayve Technologies becomes first to use the London Stock Exchange's new private market

Wayve Technologies Ltd., a British developer of autonomous driving software, filed an application on 1 July 2026 to sell shares on the London Stock Exchange's new Private Securities Market. It is the first large company to test this pilot venue.

What is the LSE Private Securities Market

The London Stock Exchange launched the Private Securities Market as an intermediate mechanism between closed venture rounds and a full public IPO. The venue lets mature private companies sell shares to professional and institutional investors without going through a mandatory listing, with its full financial disclosure and the strict requirements placed on public issuers.

The tool aims to give late-stage technology companies access to liquidity and a broader investor base while they keep their non-public status. That matters most in capital-intensive sectors such as autonomous transport or AI infrastructure, where funding needs run into the billions and the IPO window can close because of market conditions.

• Wayve Technologies is the first large company to file an application on the Private Securities Market
• Filing date: 1 July 2026
• The venue is positioned as an alternative to an IPO with a lighter regulatory burden

Who Wayve is and why it needs capital

Wayve Technologies was founded in 2017 in Cambridge. The company develops autonomous driving software based on deep learning methods. Unlike a number of competitors, its approach does not require detailed road maps drawn up in advance: the algorithm learns to drive through observation and adaptation, which in theory speeds up scaling to new regions.

In 2024, Wayve raised $1.05 billion in a Series C round with participation from Microsoft, NVIDIA and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, one of the largest rounds in the history of British AI startups. Still, developing and deploying autonomous driving technology demands constant, large-scale investment in compute, training data, test fleets and partnerships with carmakers.

Why the LSE needs Wayve, and vice versa

The London Stock Exchange has been losing tech listings in recent years: major British companies, from ARM to CRH, increasingly choose US markets for higher valuations and deeper liquidity. The Private Securities Market is one of the tools the LSE has developed to keep promising companies within the British ecosystem.

Picking Wayve as the venue's first participant is no accident: the company is well known enough to draw media attention to the new system, and mature enough to make the test meaningful. The entire European tech market will be watching the outcome of the deal closely.

What this means

Wayve's filing tests two propositions at once: that a British AI startup can raise significant capital in London, and that the LSE's new infrastructure works in practice. If both hold up, the Private Securities Market could become a serious funding tool for European AI companies that are not yet ready for an IPO.