Wayve employees sell shares at a 10% discount on London's new Pisces exchange

Employees of Wayve Technologies, the British developer of artificial intelligence for self-driving cars, have sold shares on London's new Pisces platform at a 10% discount to the company's last valuation, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter.

What we know about the deal

The exact number of shares sold and the identities of the sellers have not been disclosed. What is known is that the trades took place on Pisces, a new London Stock Exchange tool for periodic trading in shares of private companies.

• The discount to Wayve's last valuation was 10%
• The trades took place on Pisces, London's new mechanism for trading private shares
• The sellers were company employees, not outside investors
• Wayve develops AI systems for autonomous driving

Why the Pisces exchange exists

Pisces (Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System) is a regulatory initiative from the London Stock Exchange. It lets employees and early investors in private companies periodically sell part of their stakes without waiting for an IPO. For tech startups that stay private for years, it offers a way to give option holders access to liquidity without pressuring the company to go public before it is ready. Previously, employees at such companies could wait months or even years for the next funding round or an acquisition to turn their options into cash. Pisces creates a regular window for doing so.

What Wayve does

Wayve is one of Britain's more prominent developers of autonomous driving software. The company is betting on end-to-end deep learning models: instead of relying on hard-coded rules and a large array of LiDAR sensors, its cars learn to drive from real-world driving data. This approach sets Wayve apart from some competitors, which have traditionally relied on detailed maps and multiple lidars.

The market for self-driving car AI

Autonomous driving remains one of the most capital-intensive sectors in tech. Developing and training models for autonomous control requires massive compute and years of expensive testing on public roads, and most players are slow to reach commercial payback. Against this backdrop, investors have become more selective, and even prominent startups like Wayve can see their secondary-market valuations come in below what they achieved in their last funding round.

Who backs Wayve

Wayve's investors include major technology and automotive companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, and SoftBank, a sign of the industry's interest in alternative approaches to building autonomous systems. Its bet on cameras and neural networks instead of heavy LiDAR rigs puts Wayve closer to Tesla's approach, although most other major autonomous driving players still rely on a combination of sensors and pre-annotated maps.

What it means

The 10% discount on London's new private-share venue shows how investors currently price the risks of AI startups in autonomous driving. The sector remains expensive and slow to reach commercial scale, so even employees at prominent companies are willing to sell their stakes below the last valuation.