China AV Newsletter - Jul. 2022

After two years of AI chip scarcity it seems that everyone are heading towards building their own chips in order to secure their own supply for the next years. Following Xpeng and others, this month BYD announced their new team targeted to build their AI chip architecture. In addition, Siengine closed a billion yuan funding in their A round! This is the largest single funding round in the domestic automotive chip design sector in the first half of 2022. Yuntu also completed an investment round for their own AI chip backed by Xiaomi and BAIC. On top of all the chip built and expected cost reduction, Baidu has launched their new RoboTaxi which will cost only 37,000$ including the full autonomous stack with the latest computing and sensors.

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China AV Newsletter - July 2022

July.1st: Pateo announced round C financing of 1 billion RMB, of which round C strategic investor is Shanghai Guosheng Capital, and round C+ strategic investors are Ping An Capital and Jing Gang Shan Fund. So far the company raised over 2.5 billion yuan total financing. Pateo has developed core technologies in operating system, intelligent voice recognition, mapping and cloud platform, in order to provide intelligent vehicle information services, R&D, manufacturing and support services to its customers. Based on SOA (software-defined vehicles) it provides software application development and operation for users in the cockpit domain, autonomous driving domain and vehicle control domain. Customers cover nearly 100 models of 30 car brands.

July.4th: China's NEV brand NETA auto (哪吒汽车) formed comprehensive strategic cooperation with major auto parts supplier Dessay SV Automotive. The agreement covers a variety of aspects including smart cockpit, intelligent driving, vehicle body, software and operating services.

July.6th: According to NIO’s statement, its users swap batteries over 10 million times in their battery swap station. NIO’s Battery swap stations provide over 30 thousand swaps per day. As the deployment of battery swap stations accelerate, swapping has become one of NIO users' favorite methods to power their cars. It took 29 months for users to swap batteries from 0 to 1 million times, and from 1 million to 10 million times it only took 21 months.

July.11th: Autowise.ai announced the completion of RMB 200 million Series B2 financing. This round of financing was invested by ShanShan Ventures, Opple Capital, Tianqi Capital and founder Huang Chao. The financing will be mainly used for R&D and commercialization of autonomous driving technology, as well as expansion of domestic and overseas market activity.

July.11th: Daimler China Investment, a subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz Group, and Tencent Cloud signed a memorandum of cooperation, in which the two companies will launch a strategic cooperation in the field of high-level autonomous driving to accelerate the development of autonomous driving technology by Mercedes-Benz in China. The two companies will establish a joint laboratory for autonomous driving and leverage Tencent's technical expertise in cloud computing, big data and AI to accelerate Daimler’s simulation, testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles.

July.15th: BYD is planning to independently develop a dedicated chip for autonomous driving, a project led by BYD's semiconductor team, which has issued a request to the design company and started rapidly recruiting its own BSP (board support package) engineers.

July.19th: Siengine, a provider of 7nm automotive-grade high-end processors, announced the completion of nearly one billion RMB Series A financing. According to Siengine, this round of financing is planned to be used for the bulk supply of existing products as well as next stage of development and deployment of automotive-grade, high-caliber automotive cores. This is the largest single funding round in the domestic automotive chip design sector in the first half of 2022.

July.20th: The Beijing Intelligent Networked Vehicle Policy Pilot Zone has announced the opening of the first domestic pilot commercialization of Robotaxi services, with Baidu and Pony.ai becoming the first licensed companies to put 30 autonomous vehicles in the core area of the Economic Development Zone within 60 square kilometers for regular taxi pricing service. The charge for Pony.ai's Robotaxi service is RMB 3/km during peak hours and RMB 2.6/km during normal hours.

July.21st: The State Internet Information Office made the decision to impose administrative penalties related to network security review on Drip Global Co., Ltd. in accordance with the "Network Security Law", "Data Security Law", "Personal Information Protection Law", "Administrative Penalty Law" and other laws and regulations - a fine of RMB 8 billion was imposed on DiDi. A fine of RMB 1 million each was imposed on Cheng Wei, Chairman and CEO, and Liu Qing, President of DiDi. A total of 16 illegal facts were found to exist in DiDi operations.

July.21st: Baidu officially released the sixth generation of mass-produced autonomous driving vehicles - Apollo RT6, with the cost of the whole vehicle reduced to 250,000 RMB (37K $). The tech giant plans to use the vehicle in its “Radish Run” platform from 2023, while expecting to deploy tens of thousands of vehicles around the country in the near future.

July.26th: Zhidaohulian (蘑菇车联) and Sichuan Tianfu New Area signed a strategic cooperation, the two sides intend to cooperate in the construction of "vehicle-road-cloud integration" project, the total amount of about 3 billion yuan. The first phase of the project will cover 48 kilometers of roads, including vehicle-road collaboration, intelligent transportation AI cloud platform, autonomous driving system and other new infrastructure. After the completion of the construction, Zhidaohulian will operate autonomous driving sanitation vehicles, buses and patrol cars on a large scale to provide multi-scene autonomous driving urban public services.

July.28th: Pony.ai and Sany Heavy Truck announced that they will establish a joint venture company to develop, produce and sell L4 autonomous driving heavy truck products and jointly build a high-end autonomous driving heavy truck brand. The joint venture company plans to start small-scale mass production delivery in 2022 and mass production in 2024, with annual production expected to exceed 10,000 units in few years. At present, the first autonomous driving prototype vehicle built based on Sany platform has already started road test verification.

July.29th: Yuntu Semiconductor announced the completion of hundreds of millions of RMB Series A+ financing. Xiaomi Production Investment and Lianxin Capital continue to raise the investment, and new institutions such as Jinbang Capital, BAIC Production Investment and Yongxin Capital add to the investment. This round of financing funds will be used for R&D of next generation products and mass production capabilities of L and M series chips.

Sources: Baidu; Pateo; Gasgoo; Desay; NIO; Autowise; Tencent; EqualOcean; new.qq; Siengine; Pony.ai