Alex Toshev Joins Wayve Labs to Lead New General Robotics Intelligence Effort

This June, we launched Wayve Labs, our frontier research unit dedicated to advancing intelligence that can safely perceive, reason, and act in the physical world.

Wayve’s mission is to reimagine autonomous mobility with embodied intelligence. We’re starting with vehicle autonomy, but our AI has been intentionally designed to generalize across applications since day one. Today, we’re excited to welcome Alex Toshev to Wayve Labs, where he will lead a new general robotics team building a foundation intelligence layer for physical systems beyond automotive, including robot manipulation and mobility across different embodiments.

Starting with a core founding team in our Sunnyvale office, this effort will combine the freedom to shape a new technical direction with Wayve’s existing foundation-model platform, robust infrastructure, and decade of experience deploying AI in physical environments with some of the largest manufacturers and fleets in the world, like Nissan, Stellantis, and Uber. Its work will span robotics hardware and software, data, model development, training, evaluation, and deployment.

Alex joins from Apple, where he was a research leader in Machine Learning Research working across multimodal foundation models, reinforcement learning and intelligent agents. He co-led the development of MM1, Apple’s early family of multimodal large language models, and subsequently led research on generalist agents capable of interacting with applications through graphical user interfaces and tools. His work spanned model architectures, large-scale data generation, post-training, evaluation, and the infrastructure required to train and deploy these systems.

Previously, Alex spent more than a decade at Google, including six years helping to build Google Robotics. There, he co-led SayCan, which introduced large language models into robotic planning and received the Best Innovation Paper Award at CoRL 2022. Across Google Research and Google Robotics, he also pioneered deep learning approaches to core computer vision problems including human pose estimation, object detection, and vision-language models.

Alex received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation received the Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff Award, and his Diplom in Informatik from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His research has received more than 35,000 citations, and he has served as an area chair or senior area chair at ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, and CVPR.

Jamie Shotton, Chief Scientist at Wayve, said:

“Alex brings an exceptional depth of expertise across computer vision, machine learning, and robotics, shaped by a distinguished research career at Google and Apple. He joins Wayve Labs to build a new effort at the intersection of robotics and foundation models, beginning with robot manipulation. I’m thrilled to welcome Alex to Wayve and excited to see the ideas, breakthroughs, and new possibilities he and the team will spark.”

Alex Toshev, Research Director, Wayve Labs:

“What drew me to Wayve Labs was its true research culture and the freedom to pursue difficult problems at the frontier of machine learning. Although Wayve’s primary product today is autonomous driving, it is fundamentally a foundation-model company, and we have the opportunity to invest in general capabilities rather than optimize for one application. Wayve’s strengths in scalable learning, clean modeling approaches, optimization, data and real-world deployment are precisely the capabilities required to advance general robotics, and the people who join at this early stage will help shape the team’s strategy, technical direction, and culture.” 

Wayve Labs gives scientists the scale, data, compute and freedom to pursue multi-year breakthroughs. We’re hiring researchers and engineers across machine learning and robotics for this new team and many others. If this is the kind of work you want to help define, we’d love to talk.