Alex Toshev

Wayve has appointed Alex Toshev as Research Director at Wayve Labs to lead a new Wayve Labs robotics team developing foundation intelligence for robot manipulation beyond automotive. Toshev joins from Apple, where he led multimodal foundation model research, and previously spent more than a decade at Google including six years in Google Robotics.

The new team, starting with a founding group in Wayve’s Sunnyvale office, will combine Wayve’s foundation-model platform and infrastructure with a new robotics technical direction. The work will span robotics hardware and software, data collection, model development, training, evaluation and deployment across different physical embodiments.

At Apple, Toshev co-led MM1, the company’s multimodal large language model family, and subsequently led research on generalist agents that interact with applications through graphical interfaces. At Google Robotics, he co-led SayCan, which introduced large language models into robotic planning and won the Best Innovation Paper at CoRL 2022.

Chief Scientist Jamie Shotton said Toshev brought exceptional expertise across computer vision, machine learning and robotics to build a new effort at the intersection of robotics and foundation models. Wayve Labs was launched in June 2026 as Wayve’s frontier research unit, with Nissan, Stellantis and Uber among its automotive deployment partners.

Why this matters:

• A robotics hire signals Wayve sees autonomous driving as one application of broader physical AI.Framing the company as fundamentally a foundation-model business rather than a driving specialist suggests Wayve intends its underlying technology to extend into robot manipulation and other embodiments over time, positioning autonomous vehicles as an early proving ground rather than the end goal.
• Recruiting from Apple and Google’s robotics programmes brings validated large-scale deployment experience.Toshev’s work on SayCan and generalist agents at Google Robotics gives Wayve access to research already proven at major technology companies, potentially accelerating a robotics effort that would otherwise take longer to build from scratch.
• Building a separate team for general robotics keeps this distinct from Wayve’s automotive commercial priorities.Establishing a dedicated Sunnyvale-based effort, rather than folding robotics work into existing driving research, suggests Wayve wants room to pursue longer-term foundational research without it competing directly against near-term deployment pressures from partners like Nissan and Uber.