Waymo acquires Oxford autonomous vehicle start up

Latent Logic, a start-up focused on the development of driverless cars, has announced it has been acquired by Waymo, part of Google parent company Alphabet’s portfolio.

The company was founded by Oxford academic Prof. Shimon Whiteson and robotics expert Dr. Joao Messias.

In a statement posted to Twitter, the company said, “Since the company was founded in 2017, Latent Logic has been developing scalable and efficient testing of autonomous vehicles, using imitation learning to build realistic simulations of human behaviour.”

Joining the Waymo family, Latent Logic said, means it can “accelerate progress towards safe and reliable self-driving vehicles”.

The company has said its team will remain in Oxford, becoming Waymo’s “first European engineering hub”.