Former Waymo CFO jumps to self-driving startup Wayve

Elisa de Martel, who was chief financial officer at Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle company Waymo, has been hired to the same position at buzzy self-driving vehicle startup Wayve. 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.

Her appointment as CFO comes as Wayve moves from development and testing to a company on the verge of deploying its automated driving technology on two fronts: robotaxis and passenger vehicles.

De Martel, who will be based out of Sunnyvale, California, has a history of working for tech companies, including as CFO at industrial-grade 3D printing company Carbon and an 11-year stint as manufacturing finance director at Apple. She was CFO at Waymo from 2022 to January 2026 — 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 that was led by its parent company and pushed its valuation to more than $45 billion.

Wayve now sits in a similarly pivotal moment. The startup, which was founded in 2017 and is now valued at about $8.5 billion, attracted investors and automotive customers for its self-learning approach to its 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 and 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. It’s also attracted investors — Wayve has raised $3.2 billion to date — and companies like Uber that want to use a more capable version of the self-driving tech to deploy robotaxis.

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, capital allocation, reporting, governance, treasury and tax. The company said she will also work closely with Wayve’s executive team to support and advise on commercial, investor, and strategic partnership deals.

Wayve has locked in a number of partnerships with automakers, including Nissan and Stellantis. The company has also made progress on the automated vehicle driving systems for robotaxis; the company recently launched public rides in London — with a human safety operator on board — and 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.

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Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.

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