Titanium Media News | December 14th news:Titanium media learned that the self-driving startup Heduo Technology has completed the A round of tens of millions of dollars financing, with sequoia capital china leading the investment and Oceanwide Investment following the investment. The original investors Siweituxin, IDG Capital and BAI (Bertelsmann Asia Investment Fund) continue to increase their holdings.
Ni Kai, founder and CEO of Heduo Technology, said that Heduo Technology is committed to building an autonomous driving scheme based on cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology and automobile industry technology, and promoting the application of autonomous driving as soon as possible. This round of financing will be mainly used to increase investment in technology research and development, and accelerate the landing of the self-driving mass production solution independently developed by the company.
Compared with ordinary self-driving entrepreneurs, as a "veteran", Ni Kai obviously has a more clear and pragmatic plan for the company’s research and development direction and development path. At the beginning of the establishment of Heduo Technology, Ni Kai announced a clear and unique development route: at this stage, the company aims to realize the industrialization of autonomous driving technology, focusing on two major application scenarios: expressway and parking service.
Established more than a year ago, the team developed HoloPilot, an expressway autopilot solution, and HoloParking, an intelligent parking service autopilot solution, and reached in-depth cooperation with many host manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers. Among them, the landing plan of HoloParking has been put on the agenda:
It is expected that from 2019, the "last mile" demonstration operation project will be carried out in cooperation with Shanghai Automobile City; By 2020, HoloParking will land in at least 400 parking lots in 20 cities by joining hands with partners such as Parking Simple and Velodyne.
According to Ni Kai, the founder of Heduo Technology, unlike most parking assistance functions on the market, HoloParking does not require the driver to drive the vehicle next to the parking space. The driver can get off at the gate of the parking lot, and the vehicle can find the parking space and park independently, without being watched. When picking up the car, the owner can also remotely start the HoloParking system, so that the vehicle can park itself and drive to the boarding place. In other words, the owner can complete the whole process of parking and picking up the car without entering the parking lot.
Ni Kai believes that the value of this product is that it can really save time and energy for car owners in all weather and all scenes, which requires the support of three major capabilities: intelligence, robustness and landing.
According to Ni Kai, the conventional thinking of the industry is to take the car as the only carrier to realize autonomous driving, but the pure car-end solution can not meet the three requirements of intelligence, robustness and landing at the same time. The method of Heduo Technology is to introduce the field terminal and high-precision map terminal into HoloParking system, and form a set of "three-terminal integration" scheme together with the vehicle terminal.
The application scenarios of autonomous driving include urban self-driving taxis, high-speed trunk transportation, terminal transportation and transportation in special scenes such as mining areas and ports, etc. Among them, Level4 self-driving taxis are considered to have the largest market space, but they are limited by regulations and technologies, and the landing period is long. Therefore, many autonomous driving projects locate the landing direction in other limited scenarios.
Heduo Technology’s trunk transportation and parking service are the popular landing scenes. In trunk transportation, players such as Tucson Future, Zhijia Technology, Yinche Technology and Shiqiao Logistics have flooded into the scene. In parking service, Yushi Technology, which was established earlier, has also reached a cooperation with Gofun, a shared travel project owned by Shouqi Car.
The real landing of autonomous driving in a limited scene requires not only the stability of technology, but also strict cost control. The lidar required by Level 4 is undoubtedly the key factor. Ni Kai said that in terms of sensors, Hedo has reached a strategic cooperation with laser radar supplier Velodyne, which will provide Hedo with priority procurement rights.
"We will work together to reduce costs. Heduo’s goal is to realize the cost of single parking space renovation of 2020 yuan." Ni Kai said.
It is understood that Ni Kai worked in Microsoft and Baidu Deep Learning Research Institute, founded Baidu driverless team from scratch, and led the team to complete the first road test of Baidu unmanned vehicle. In June 2017, Ni Kai founded Heduo Technology, which attracted wide attention from the industry at that time. Only one month after its establishment, Heduo Technology announced that it had obtained tens of millions of dollars of angel round financing.
In addition, the comprehensive strength of Heduo technology team is also outstanding. This team is one of the few teams in the industry with full-stack autonomous driving research and development capabilities. The number of doctors and masters is over 90%, and most of them have worked in autonomous driving technology companies or automobile manufacturing enterprises such as Baidu, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch and Garmin.
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