You’ll see Alex Kendall, the CEO and co-founder of Wayve, on the main stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. Today, he’s primed to announce major breakthroughs in autonomous vehicles. The NOW Conference takes place October 27-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. It will bring together more than 10,000 startup and VC leaders from across the world.
With a PhD in Computer Vision and Robotics, Kendall has become recognized as a pioneer in the industry. His award-winning academic research prepared him for his current role at Wayve. There, he directs and catalyzes work to reimagine smart. This innovative thinking is at the heart of Kendall’s mission to create new technologies that are map agnostic and code free. Rather, his team’s work is on teaching machines to understand the world around them and develop real-time context-appropriate driving responses.
Under Kendall’s leadership, Wayve achieved that exciting milestone. With it, the nonprofit became the first to demonstrate that a machine can autonomously understand its environment. This landmark innovation has thrust Wayve to the cutting edge of the self-driving vehicle sector.
Kendall’s passion for pushing boundaries shows with his advocacy of AV2.0, a completely new, radical architecture for autonomous vehicles. This cutting-edge framework has scalability from the ground up, with a focus to help the worldwide deployment of autonomous driving technologies. His forward-thinking vision is on the cutting edge of an ever-increasing movement in the industry towards more dynamic, multi-faceted, and smarter systems.
Honors and recognition for Kendall’s innovative advances in technology can be seen with his addition to the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 list. This esteemed recognition highlights his instrumental impact on the tech industry. It illustrates his ability to lead the charge on future breakthroughs for autonomous systems.
During TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Kendall will join leaders like him on one of the two new, AI-focused stages. He aims to share insights into the future of autonomous vehicles and the transformative impact of AI technologies on transportation. As everyone converges on Salt Lake City for this landmark gathering, they’ll learn and be inspired by the experiences of trailblazers such as Kendall.