Wayve hires former Waymo CFO Elisa de Martel ahead of robotaxi and passenger vehicle deployment
Wayve has hired Elisa de Martel, former CFO of Alphabet's Waymo, as its chief financial officer. She joins as the self-driving startup prepares to deploy assisted and fully automated driving systems for robotaxis and passenger vehicles.
De Martel will be based in Sunnyvale, California. Max Warburton, the outgoing CFO who held the position at Wayve since 2024, is moving into a strategic advisory role supporting the company's leadership team, according to TechCrunch.
De Martel's resume includes senior finance roles at technology companies. She was CFO at industrial-grade 3D printing company Carbon and spent 11 years as manufacturing finance director at Apple. She served as Waymo's CFO from 2022 to January 2026, a period when Waymo began commercial operations in several cities and raised $5.6 billion in a Series C round led by its parent company. That round pushed Waymo's valuation above $45 billion.
Wayve is at a similar stage. Founded in 2017, the company is now valued at about $8.5 billion and has raised $3.2 billion to date, TechCrunch reported. It has drawn investors and automotive customers with a self-learning approach to automated driving software. Wayve developed a software layer that uses an end-to-end neural network and does not rely on high-definition maps, custom hardware or hand-coded rules, using data to teach vehicles how to drive.
The technology is the basis of two products: an "eyes on" assisted-driving system and an "eyes off" fully automated-driving system. Those systems could be applied to robotaxis or consumer vehicles capable of handling all driving in certain environments. Wayve's approach is hardware-agnostic, which has appealed to automakers already committed to certain hardware and to companies such as Uber that want a more capable version of self-driving technology for robotaxis.
Wayve has partnerships with automakers including Nissan and Stellantis. It recently began public rides in London with a human safety operator on board, and Tokyo is expected to follow soon, according to TechCrunch. The company must now move beyond early and limited deployment to become a high-volume supplier to the automotive industry.
As CFO, de Martel will oversee financial strategy and planning, capital allocation, reporting, governance, treasury and tax. Wayve said she will work closely with its executive team to support and advise on commercial, investor and strategic partnership deals. People familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named, told TechCrunch that de Martel's connection to deep tech was particularly attractive to Wayve's leadership, including founder and CEO Alex Kendall.