Elisa de Martel, who served as chief financial officer at Alphabet's autonomous vehicle unit Waymo from 2022 to January 2026, has joined British self-driving startup Wayve in the same role1. Outgoing CFO Max Warburton, who held the position since 2024, is moving into a strategic advisory role supporting Wayve's leadership team.
De Martel will be based out of Sunnyvale, California, and will oversee financial strategy and planning, capital allocation, reporting, governance, treasury, and tax. Wayve said she will also work closely with its executive team to support and advise on commercial, investor, and strategic partnership deals.
A CFO shaped by deep-tech scaling
De Martel's tenure at Waymo coincided with a period in which the company began commercial operations in several cities and raised $5.6 billion in a Series C round led by its parent company, pushing Waymo's valuation to more than $45 billion. Before Waymo, she served as CFO at industrial-grade 3D printing company Carbon and spent 11 years as manufacturing finance director at Apple. Wayve's leadership, including founder and CEO Alex Kendall, was attracted to de Martel's connection to deep tech, according to TechCrunch.
Wayve's commercial inflection point
The hire arrives as Wayve transitions from development and testing toward deploying its automated driving technology across two fronts: robotaxis and passenger vehicles. Founded in 2017, Wayve is now valued at about $8.5 billion. The company has developed a software layer built on an end-to-end neural network that does not rely on high-definition maps, custom hardware, or hand-coded rules, instead using data to teach vehicles how to drive.
That technology underpins both an "eyes on" assisted-driving system and an "eyes off" fully automated-driving system, the latter of which could be applied to robotaxis or consumer vehicles capable of handling all driving in certain environments. Wayve has partnerships with automakers including Nissan and Stellantis and recently launched public rides in London with a human safety operator on board, with Tokyo expected to follow.
ANALYSIS Recruiting a CFO who oversaw a $5.6 billion fundraise and commercial launch at Waymo positions Wayve to manage the financial complexity of its own scaling phase, particularly as it coordinates deployment across OEM partnerships and its own robotaxi operations simultaneously.