Wayve has hired Elisa de Martel as chief financial officer, bringing in the former Waymo finance chief as the self-driving startup approaches deployments in robotaxis and passenger vehicles. Max Warburton, who served as Wayve’s CFO since 2024, will become a strategic adviser to the leadership team. De Martel will be based in Sunnyvale, California, and will oversee financial strategy, planning, capital allocation, reporting, governance, treasury and tax. She will also advise on commercial, investor and strategic partnership deals. Her background includes CFO roles at Waymo and Carbon, an industrial-grade 3D-printing company, as well as 11 years as manufacturing finance director at Apple. At Waymo, she served as CFO from 2022 through January 2026, during a period when the company began commercial operations in several cities and raised $5.6 billion in a Series C round led by its parent company, lifting Waymo’s valuation above $45 billion. Founded in 2017 and valued at about $8.5 billion, Wayve has raised $3.2 billion and built an automated-driving software layer around an end-to-end neural network that does not depend on high-definition maps, custom hardware or hand-coded rules. Its technology supports an eyes-on assisted-driving product and an eyes-off fully automated-driving system for potential use in robotaxis and consumer vehicles. Wayve has partnerships with Nissan and Stellantis, while Uber is interested in using a more capable version of the technology for robotaxi deployments. The company recently began public robotaxi rides in London with a human safety operator aboard, and Tokyo is expected to follow soon. Wayve now faces the challenge of moving beyond early, limited deployments toward becoming a high-volume automotive supplier.