Former Waymo CFO jumps to self-driving startup Wayve

Former Waymo CFO Jumps to Self-Driving Startup Wayve

Elisa de Martel, who left her position as chief financial officer at Alphabet's autonomous vehicle company Waymo in January, has been hired to the same position at self-driving vehicle startup Wayve. She will be based out of Sunnyvale, California.

Outgoing CFO Max Warburton, who held the position at Wayve since 2024, is moving into a strategic advisory role supporting the company's leadership team.

Background on Elisa de Martel

De Martel has a history of working for tech companies, including:

• CFO at industrial-grade 3D printing company Carbon
• 11-year stint as manufacturing finance director at Apple
• CFO at Waymo from 2022 to January 2026

Her tenure at Waymo was a critical period for the company as it began to commercially operate in several cities and raised $5.6 billion in a Series C fundraising round led by its parent company, pushing its valuation to more than $45 billion.

Wayve's Pivotal Moment

Wayve, founded in 2017 and now valued at about $8.5 billion, has attracted investors and automotive customers for its self-learning approach to automated driving software. The company developed a software layer using an end-to-end neural network that doesn't rely on high-definition maps, custom hardware, or hand-coded rules, and only uses data to teach the vehicle how to drive.

The company's tech is the basis of two products:

• An "eyes on" assisted-driving system
• An "eyes off" fully automated-driving system, which could be applied to robotaxis or consumer vehicles that can handle all of the driving in certain environments

Wayve's pitch - and the agnostic nature of its technology - has resonated with automakers already locked into certain hardware. The company has raised $3.2 billion to date and attracted companies like Uber that want to use a more capable version of the self-driving tech to deploy robotaxis.

Role and Responsibilities

While de Martel has a well-documented career in top financial posts, it was her connection to deep tech that was particularly attractive to Wayve's leadership, including founder and CEO Alex Kendall, according to insiders who asked not to be named.

As CFO at Wayve, she will:

• Oversee financial strategy and planning
• Manage capital allocation, reporting, governance, treasury, and tax
• Work closely with Wayve's executive team to support and advise on commercial, investor, and strategic partnership deals

Partnerships and Deployment Progress

Wayve has locked in a number of partnerships with automakers, including Nissan and Stellantis. The company has also made progress on automated vehicle driving systems for robotaxis:

• Public rides have been launched in London (with a human safety operator on board)
• Tokyo is expected to follow soon

Now the company has to push past this historically precarious point of early and limited deployment and into a high-volume supplier to automotive.