Wayve has appointed Elisa de Martel as its chief financial officer, the company announced on 16 September 2026, adding a finance leader with deep experience in frontier technology as the London-based artificial intelligence firm scales its commercial ambitions. De Martel will oversee the global finance organisation and reports to co-founder and chief executive Alex Kendall.
The appointment supports Wayve as it moves to commercialise its AV2.0 approach, an embodied artificial intelligence system the company calls the AI Driver, across both automotive partnerships and a robotaxi business. De Martel joins in an orderly transition, succeeding Max Warburton, who had served as chief financial officer since 2024 and moves into a strategic advisory role.
De Martel brings a track record built at some of the most closely watched technology companies of the past decade. She was most recently chief financial officer of Waymo, where she led financial strategy and capital planning for the autonomous-driving company. Before that she was chief financial officer of the additive-manufacturing firm Carbon, and she spent more than ten years in senior finance roles at Apple. Earlier in her career she held positions at Citroen in the United Kingdom and at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Wayve has been among the most heavily funded companies in the autonomous-driving field, raising more than one billion United States dollars over the past year, and it has begun offering supervised autonomous rides with Uber in London. Those milestones have moved the company from a research-led profile toward one that must manage the financial demands of commercial deployment, which is the challenge de Martel now inherits.
Although she will help steer a business built on advanced automation, the appointment underlines that scaling a frontier-technology company still rests on experienced human financial leadership. De Martel will be based in Sunnyvale, California, while Wayve maintains its headquarters in London, reflecting the company transatlantic footprint.
The hire also fits a wider pattern among well-funded technology companies, which increasingly recruit finance leaders who have already guided a business through the shift from research to revenue. The path of the new chief financial officer across autonomous driving, advanced manufacturing and consumer technology gives her direct experience of that arc, and it signals the company intent to build the financial and operational machinery required for commercial scale.
For Wayve, the immediate priorities for its new finance chief include disciplined capital management, support for its automotive and robotaxi commercial lines, and the investor engagement that a company of its scale and ambition requires. Her experience across Waymo, Carbon and Apple gives her a rare vantage point on financing technology through its move from development to deployment.
