How This First-Time Founder Got SoftBank, Nvidia And Microsoft To Write Him A Billion-Dollar Check – Wayve’s software can add self-driving powers to your vehicles, and on the cheap.

Kendall pulled it off with no revenue, no customers and no commercially available product.

“Entrepreneurship is about relationships,” he says. “You always have to be pitching.”

In the summer of 2018, 25-year-old Alex Kendall followed Jensen Huang into an elevator after the Nvidia CEO had finished his talk at an AI conference in Salt Lake City. With only 20 seconds alone with Huang, Kendall pitched him Wayve: then a year-old startup in London building AI to let cars drive themselves, claiming it could do it safer and cheaper than anyone else on the road by giving the car “its own brain.”

The literal elevator pitch planted the seeds for what, six years later, would become a $1.05 billion Series C funding round. Closed in May, the raise attracted investment not only from Nvidia, but tech titans SoftBank and Microsoft, a company whose AI bets have propelled it to become one of the world’s most valuable enterprises with a $3 trillion market cap.