Wayve Strengthens Engineering Leadership to Accelerate Global Deployment of End-to-End Driving

SAN FRANCISCO, FEBRUARY 11, 2026 – Wayve today announced the appointments of Girish Venkataramani as Vice President of AI Platform and Brandon Basso as Vice President of AI for Simulation, Data, Evaluation and Validation. The hires strengthen the company’s engineering leadership at a pivotal moment as the company moves from rapid research progress to deploying embodied AI driving systems across automotive and robotaxi applications. These appointments add deep, proven experience building, validating and deploying safety-critical AI systems at scale, trusted by global customers.

Wayve is building a new generation of autonomous driving technology that learns from data and real-world experience, and generalizes across vehicles, geographies and use cases. As the company focuses on shipping end-to-end AI systems into commercial deployments this year, robust platforms, data systems and rigorous evaluation frameworks are critical to turning end-to-end AI into trusted, automotive-grade products.

Girish Venkataramani will lead the scaling of Wayve’s AI platform, spanning training infrastructure, deployment systems and production readiness. He brings nearly two decades of experience building high-performance machine learning systems across enterprise, automotive and AI infrastructure.

Previously, Girish led deep learning compiler teams at NVIDIA, enabling large-scale ML training across NVIDIA’s compute platforms. At Cruise, he built the software ecosystem that supported efficient training and real-time deployment of ML systems for one of the world’s first driverless robotaxi services. Most recently, he served as Head of Software at SambaNova Systems, where he developed high-performance, low-power AI accelerator platforms.

Girish Venkataramani, VP of AI Platform, Wayve, says: 

“Wayve is tackling one of the hardest problems in AI, learning directly from diverse, large-scale real-world data and deploying at scale. Building the platform that turns these AI models into reliable systems running in millions of production vehicles is an ’incredibly compelling challenge.”

Brandon Basso will lead Wayve’s simulation, data, evaluation and validation systems, which are central to measuring performance, ensuring safety and earning trust as the technology scales across partners and markets. 

Brandon brings more than a decade of experience delivering safety-critical AI and robotics systems in commercial environments. He previously held senior leadership roles at Cruise and General Motors, where he supported the commercial deployment of driverless robotaxi services across multiple U.S. cities, completing millions of driverless miles. Earlier in his career, he served as VP of Engineering at 3D Robotics, where he led the development of AI-powered commercial drone platforms.

Brandon Basso, VP of AI for Simulation, Data, Evaluation, and Validation, Wayve says: 

“Trust in autonomous systems is built through rigorous evaluation and validation. , Wayve’s AV2.0 approach creates a powerful path to safe, scalable autonomy, and I’m excited to help bring this technology into everyday use.”

Silvius Rus, SVP of Engineering, Wayve says:  

“This is a defining phase for Wayve as we focus on shipping end-to-end Embodied AI driving systems into real-world, large-scale deployment. Girish and Brandon bring hard-won experience turning advanced AI into production systems, and their leadership strengthens our ability to scale Embodied AI globally”.