Alex Toshev joins Wayve Labs to lead general robotics effort
What’s the deal? On 18 August 2026, Wayve announced that Alex Toshev has joined Wayve Labs as Research Director to lead a new general robotics intelligence team. The team will focus on developing a foundation intelligence layer for physical systems beyond automotive, including robot manipulation and mobility across different embodiments. It will be built initially around a founding team in Sunnyvale and will cover robotics hardware and software, data, model development, training, evaluation and deployment.
Why it matters: Wayve launched Wayve Labs in June 2026 as a frontier research unit for intelligence that can perceive, reason and act in the physical world. The company says its existing foundation-model platform, infrastructure and experience deploying AI in physical environments with manufacturers and fleets including Nissan, Stellantis and Uber will support the new effort. The move broadens Wayve’s stated ambition beyond autonomous driving into general embodied AI and positions robotics research as a new strategic direction alongside its core vehicle-autonomy work.
Toshev joins from Apple, where he was a research leader in Machine Learning Research working on multimodal foundation models, reinforcement learning and intelligent agents. He co-led MM1, an early family of Apple multimodal large language models, and later led research on generalist agents that interact with applications through graphical interfaces and tools. Before Apple, he spent more than a decade at Google, including six years helping to build Google Robotics. He co-led SayCan, which introduced large language models into robotic planning and received the Best Innovation Paper Award at CoRL 2022. His earlier research also covered human pose estimation, object detection and vision-language models. He holds a PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a Diplom in Informatik from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; Wayve says his research has received more than 35,000 citations.
Wayve is hiring researchers and engineers in machine learning and robotics for the new team, with roles listed in Sunnyvale, London and Vancouver.
Read more: Wayve · Alex Kendall on X