Former Waymo CFO Elisa de Martel joins Wayve

Elisa de Martel, who was chief financial officer at Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle company Waymo, has been hired as CFO at self-driving startup Wayve. Outgoing CFO Max Warburton, who has held the role at Wayve since 2024, is moving into a strategic advisory position supporting the company’s leadership team. Her appointment comes as Wayve shifts from development and testing toward deploying its automated driving technology on two fronts: robotaxis and passenger vehicles.

De Martel, who will be based in Sunnyvale, California, previously served as CFO at industrial 3D-printing company Carbon and spent 11 years as a manufacturing finance director at Apple. She was Waymo’s CFO from 2022 to January 2026, a period in which the company began commercial operations in several cities and raised $5.6 billion in a Series C round led by parent company Alphabet, pushing its valuation above $45 billion.

Wayve, founded in 2017 and now valued at about $8.5 billion, has built a software layer using an end-to-end neural network that skips high-definition maps, custom hardware, or hand-coded rules, relying only on data to teach vehicles to drive. That approach underpins two products — an “eyes on” assisted-driving system and an “eyes off” fully automated one — that can apply to robotaxis or to consumer vehicles handling all the driving in certain conditions. Wayve has raised $3.2 billion to date and counts automakers Nissan and Stellantis among its partners, along with Uber, which wants to use its technology for robotaxi deployments.

As CFO, de Martel will oversee financial strategy and planning, capital allocation, reporting, governance, treasury, and tax, while also supporting commercial, investor, and strategic-partnership deals. Wayve recently launched public rides in London, with a human safety operator on board, and expects to follow with Tokyo soon — as the company tries to move past the historically precarious early-deployment stage and into high-volume automotive supply.

Why it matters

Poaching Waymo’s CFO — who oversaw its jump to a more than $45 billion valuation — signals Wayve’s ambition to follow a similar path toward commercial scale and, eventually, a public listing, at a moment when robotaxi economics are under close market scrutiny.