Here is your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, July 14th.

Today on Forbes, how this first-time founder got SoftBank,

Invidia, and Microsoft to write him a billion dollar check.

In the summer of 2018, 25-year-old Alex Kendall

followed Jensen Huang into an elevator after the Invidious CEO had finished his talk at an AI conference in Salt Lake City.

With only 20 seconds alone with Huang, Kendall pitched him wave,

then a year old startup in London, building AI to let cars drive themselves,

claiming it could do it safer and cheaper than anyone else on the road by giving the car,

quote, its own brain.

The literal elevator pitch planted the seeds for what six years later

would become a 1.05 billion dollar Series C funding round.

Closed in May, the Ray's attracted investment not only from

NVIDIA, but Tech Titans Soft Bank and Microsoft,

a company whose AI bets have propelled it to become one of the world's most valuable enterprises

with a $3 trillion market cap. Neither Kendall nor his investors would disclose Wave's current valuation.

The deal, however, was the largest cash raise for a tech startup in the UK.

And Kendall pulled it off with no revenue, no customers, and no commercially available product.

Investors aren't worried.

Soft Bank investor, Kentaro Matsui, says, quote,

every one or two months I've been in the vehicle, the AI has become cleverer every time.

We're quite confident there will be multiple automakers who will very much be willing to partner with them.

Matsui also likes how Wave is a pure software play,

...