In the second half of automobile competition, intelligent network connection has become the key focus of attention, and its rapid development is inseparable from the joint efforts of the troika of technology, policy and capital.
For capital, how to find opportunities in the intelligent networked automobile industry chain? What excellent investment targets are worth choosing? We might as well take a look at several enterprise projects at the CICV2022 investment summit forum held on August 2, which may be enlightening.
Sinian Zhijia is a start-up company that provides port unmanned solutions and operation services. It takes pure L4 autonomous driving as the research and development object, takes the closed environment of the port as the landing scene, sets up an unmanned operation fleet, and conducts commercial operation in the way of AI drivers.
He Bei, CEO of Sinian Zhijia, thinks that this is a scene that can make L4 land quickly, which can be mainly attributed to three conditions: "the right time, the right place and the harmonious people":
"Timing" means that laws and regulations are maturing and security officers are allowed to be removed; "Human harmony" means that technology cannot be broken; "Geographical location" is the ability to allow over-regulation, over-production, and to enter the real operation. To sum up, the commercialization of port L4 needs to meet three requirements: legal permission, technical compliance and vehicle access.
Facing the port market with the order of 100 billion, Snian Intelligent Driving adopts the gradual L4 automatic driving mode, and the ten-year plan is completed in three years. The first three years are oriented to a purely closed environment, including containers, dry goods and bulk cargo in the port. The second three years are for ports and semi-closed environments such as factories, ports, parks and factories; Finally, it is the real trunk logistics and urban distribution.
At present, the commercialization speed and scale of SINIAN Intelligent Driving in the port have been at the forefront of the industry, including 16 cars in Ningbo, 20 cars in Tangshan and 10 cars in Zhuhai. It is expected that there will be a total of 200 car orders this year.
In terms of financing, Sky Eye Survey shows that Sinian Zhijia has completed four rounds of financing, the latest of which took place at the end of last year, and gained RMB 100 million in Series A financing, including ByteDance.
The predecessor of Yunkong Zhixing is Qidi Yunkong, which belongs to the smart car sector of Qidi Holdings. It was first founded for the basic platform of Yunkong. According to Xuan Zhiyuan, president of Yunkong Zhixing, in the process of building the platform, things on the road and on the car have been done one after another.
In 2020, Yunkong Zhixing defined the cloud control system, that is, the cloud control system composed of roadside infrastructure, smart cars and applications.
The core concept of the cloud control system is a system composed of "cloud intelligence+roadside intelligence+bicycle intelligence". The main products include the basic platform of cloud control system software, and the hardware includes roadside intelligent products and vehicle-mounted intelligent terminals, while the application is an open ecosystem with a large service increment in the whole market.
In terms of landing projects, Yunkong Zhixing will build a 500-square-kilometer cloud control system in Beijing this year. In addition, two high-speed projects in Xiong ‘an have achieved digital twinning, situational awareness, lane-level initiative control, lane-level navigation, etc. The lane-level initiative control can support the real-time dynamic control of all speeds of expressways with kilometers as nodes, and it can be adjusted once every 30 seconds.
In terms of cooperation with car companies, Yunkong Zhixing has been working with SAIC-GM-Wuling since 2019 to fully connect the cloud ADAS with the car. Later, it has also done many projects with SAIC, GM, Yutong and Weichai. Xuan Zhiyuan believes that the cloud control system of intelligent networked vehicles needs the deep participation of car companies in the future.
In terms of financing, Tianyancha shows that Yunkong Zhixing has completed two rounds of financing, the latest one occurred in April last year, and the investor is Yizhuang SDIC.
Shenxin Kechuang was established in 2019 under the incubation of Tsinghua Cross Information Core Technology Research Institute. The company mainly focuses on automotive software, especially intelligent software and industrial software.
Before entering the market, automatic driving or advanced assisted driving need to have enough simulation and closed road site testing requirements. Bao Shuai, co-CEO of Kechuang, believes that there are some problems in autopilot simulation at present, and there is a lot of room for improvement in both scientific direction and engineering direction. He thinks this is the real blue ocean market at present.
First of all, it faces the lack of high-fidelity sensor model; Secondly, the simple physical and sensor model itself needs a lot of calibration work and a very single use to meet the needs, so at present, another way is to meet the needs in the process of software in-the-loop testing through data-driven method. Finally, the scene generalization test system for the automatic driving system of ODD has not yet formed.
It is believed that Kechuang has built a set of Oasis system in automatic driving simulation test, which mainly includes three blocks: Oasis Data platform, including data acquisition, roadside data conversion and scene construction; Oasic Sim simulation platform, mainly for sensor simulation, dynamic simulation, intelligent simulation of traffic participants, and injection of some dynamic behaviors of confrontation; Oasis Juno, mainly doing middleware. At present, the whole test system includes roadside data refining, labeling, scene generation, injection into the whole simulation platform for testing, and finally quantitative evaluation.
Speaking of business model, Bao Shuai said that the scale of the whole autonomous driving simulation market is 20 billion to 30 billion per year. He is convinced that Kechuang mainly provides public cloud-based quantitative and subscription methods, as well as private cloud delivery. In terms of project cooperation and integrated technical services of simulation hardware and software, he is convinced that Kechuang currently has customers including Changan Automobile and Huawei.
In terms of financing, Tianyancha shows that it is believed that Kechuang has completed four rounds of financing, and the latest Pre-A+ round of financing took place in May this year. The investors are Beidou Capital and Langmafeng Venture Capital.
Huixi Intelligent is a start-up enterprise just established this year, focusing on self-driving big computing chips and computing platforms. Its founder Xu Ningyi worked in Microsoft Research Asia for 10 years before joining Baidu and Shang Tang respectively to take charge of chip research and development.
If you are not familiar with the name Xu Ningyi, then Zhang Jianyong, another co-founder of Huixi Intelligent, should have heard of it. He previously served as the assistant vice president of autopilot in Weilai, and was an early member of Weilai autopilot R&D team, leading the research and development of NIO Pilot autopilot assistance system. He left his job in April this year to start a business. Today, as the co-founder of Huixi Intelligent, he is mainly responsible for the solution of intelligent driving system.
According to Xu Ningyi, Huixi Intelligent has built three capabilities: one is the chip and computing platform for autonomous driving, and the other is the world-leading algorithm project. Only by building a closed loop can we solve the problem of the platform for autonomous driving. The third is to build a capable team.
In terms of financing, Tianyancha shows that Huixi Intelligent has only completed one round of financing for Angel Wheel.
Established in August 2017, Kangzhi Integration mainly focuses on information interaction chips in smart vehicles, including video, digital audio and data interaction.
Liu Wenjun, the founder of Kangzhi Integration, said that the main function of his products is data interconnection, which is equivalent to a bridge, and all AI and sensor information are transmitted to the place where it should go in real time and fidelity through the company’s products.
In terms of market size, Liu Wenjun introduced that from some actual data and future expectations, by 2025, the global market will be between 3.5 billion and 3.8 billion US dollars, and the China market will account for 35% to 40%.
The first generation of products integrated by Kangzhi completed certification and entered mass production in early 2020, and the current shipment volume exceeded 700,000 pieces; The second generation products have been put on the market since March this year.
Liu Wenjun admits that the current products are mainly practical, meet the needs of customers, and pay attention to reliability, stability and dependability. However, he also revealed that there will probably be six or seven chips next year. In a sense, those chips will pursue "being tall" and are the benchmark of technology.
In terms of financing, Tianyancha shows that Kangzhi Integration has completed five rounds of financing. In March of this year, it obtained investment from Xiaomi and others, and had previously obtained the B round of financing from BAIC.
Laser radar enterprise Yijing Technology was established in November 2017, and launched its first product in 2019. At present, it has made a lot of progress in mass production of low-speed logistics cars, commercial vehicles and passenger cars, and its customers include JD.COM, Winch, Yutong and Sanyi.
Since the establishment of the company, Yijing has focused on the research and development of MEMS solid-state lidar. From the first generation of products in 2019 to now, it has developed 250-meter lidar products including forward-facing ultra-long distance.
Tuo Shi, the founder of Yijing Technology, said that the biggest advantage of MEMS technology route is that it can realize biaxial vibration and high integration, and at the same time, it can guarantee better reliability in vibration, impact, high and low temperature and so on by using small mirror MEMS chips. Through the self-developed transmitting and receiving scheme, Yijing Technology realizes ultra-high resolution, ultra-long visiting distance of 200 meters, 250 meters or even as high as 300 meters, and at the same time, it is very reliable in the stability of vehicle regulations.
In terms of production capacity, the first factory of Yijing Technology was completed in July 2020, and the second factory production line was completed in July this year, and will be put into use at the end of this year. It is estimated that the whole factory investment will bring a laser radar production line with an annual capacity of 200,000.
In terms of financing, Sky Eye shows that Yijing Technology has completed seven rounds of financing, attracting the favor of Intel, innovation works, SAIC, Dongfeng, Tucki, etc. In March this year, it also obtained equity financing from Baidu and State Automobile Investment.
Founded in September, 2020, Core Micro Electronics has a team of about 70 people, and it is an enterprise focusing on mixed digital and analog chips.
According to Zhang Jianliang, the founder of Core Micro-electronics, there are digital films, analog films and even power films integrated in the digital-analog mixed chip. In the view of core geno, this chip is defined as an organic whole with digital control or digital signal processing as the core and analog circuit and power circuit as its indispensable key components.
In terms of application, the common display driver in TV, notebook and mobile phone, and the control driver of the backlight of the back light source are very typical mixed-signal chips. The digital circuit inside needs to precisely control the light intensity and the current inside, and analog circuits and power circuits will be used to generate specific current information. This is a very typical mixed-signal chip. In addition, the charge and discharge management protection of electric vehicle battery is also a chip based on digital-analog mixing.
At present, core micro-electronics has made three product lines, the first one is to drive Mini-LED backlight; The second is to control the brushless motor; Finally, it is a digital power supply, which can be applied to industries, communications and other fields.
In terms of financing, Tianyancha shows that Xingeno Microelectronics has completed three rounds of financing, IDG Capital and Meituan are its angel investors, and Xiaomi is its pre-A round investor. Last month, Xingeno Microelectronics just completed a round of financing of nearly 100 million yuan.
Looking at the above enterprises, they basically cover the hot direction of the intelligent networked automobile industry chain, including integrated circuit chip enterprises, laser radar hardware enterprises, software enterprises and solution enterprises. Some of these start-ups have just been established, and only received angel round financing, and a large amount of funds will be injected later. These excellent projects provide a good model for investors. It is expected that with the help of capital, China’s intelligent networked cars will usher in rapid development.
