Wayve Labs launches general robotics intelligence effort with Alex Toshev

What’s the deal? On 18 August 2026, Wayve announced that Alex Toshev has joined Wayve Labs to lead a new general robotics intelligence team. The group will focus initially on robot manipulation and on developing foundation intelligence for physical systems beyond automotive, including mobility across different embodiments. It will be based initially in Sunnyvale and will cover robotics hardware and software, data, model development, training, evaluation and deployment.

Why it matters: The appointment expands Wayve’s embodied-AI ambition beyond autonomous driving. The company says the new effort will build on its existing foundation-model platform, infrastructure and experience deploying AI in physical environments with manufacturers and fleets including Nissan, Stellantis and Uber. Toshev joins from Apple, where he was a research leader in Machine Learning Research and co-led work on the MM1 multimodal model family and generalist agents. Previously, he spent more than a decade at Google, including six years helping to build Google Robotics, where he co-led SayCan, a system that introduced large language models into robotic planning. Wayve is hiring researchers and engineers for the new team across machine learning and robotics.