Wayve Hires Former Waymo CFO Elisa de Martel to Lead Scale-Up
Wayve has hired Elisa de Martel as chief financial officer. She previously served as chief financial officer of Waymo. TechCrunch
De Martel will be based in Sunnyvale, California. She succeeds Max Warburton, who has held the Wayve CFO role since 2024. Warburton will move into a strategic advisory role supporting the leadership team.
At Wayve, de Martel will oversee financial strategy and planning, capital allocation, reporting, governance, treasury and tax. The remit covers the full finance stack, from fundraising and deployment of capital to controls and compliance.
De Martel served as Waymo CFO from 2022 to January 2026. Waymo announced her appointment in September 2022. Waymo Waymo has since named Google executive Steve Fieler as its CFO. CFO Dive Before Waymo, de Martel was chief financial officer of Carbon. Earlier, she spent 11 years as manufacturing finance director at Apple.
During her tenure at Waymo, the company began commercially operating in several cities and raised $5.6 billion in a Series C round led by its parent company at a valuation over $45 billion.
Wayve was founded in 2017. The company is valued at about $8.5 billion and has raised $3.2 billion to date.
Its technical approach centers on a software layer built around an end-to-end neural network, essentially one large AI system that learns driving directly from data. It does not rely on high-definition maps, meaning detailed prebuilt road maps, custom hardware, or hand-coded rules, meaning manually written driving instructions.
That software underpins two products: an 'eyes on' assisted-driving system, where the driver still supervises, and an 'eyes off' fully automated-driving system for robotaxis or consumer vehicles. Founder and CEO Alex Kendall leads the company, which lists partnerships with automakers including Nissan and Stellantis. Wayve recently launched public rides in London with a human safety operator on board.
The broader context here is a familiar shift in the work involved. Building a neural-network driver is an R&D problem. Deploying it through automaker product lines and paid rides is a capital-allocation and manufacturing-scale problem. De Martel has worked on both sides of that divide, from Apple manufacturing finance to Carbon to a commercially operating Waymo that closed a multi-billion-dollar parent-led round.
In my view, that mix matters more than the logo on the resume. Wayve has $3.2 billion raised, automaker partners with their own product cycles and cost structures, and two distinct product paths to fund. Managing cash across assisted driving, which can ship in consumer vehicles on shorter timelines, and fully automated driving, which carries longer validation and liability tails, requires strict prioritization. What is worth noting for technologists is that finance leadership often determines whether an autonomy stack stays platform-agnostic or gets pulled toward the partner or geography willing to pay for deployment first.
The longer-term picture still favors more capable driving software reaching more drivers. My kids learned to drive in a world of lane-keep nudges and automatic braking. Their kids may treat human-only driving as the edge case. Getting there will depend less on demo videos than on disciplined execution on costs, governance, and automaker integration. That is the work de Martel was hired to oversee.
