Yuanrong Qihang raises $100 million in C1 financing to expand global production and Robotaxi operations

On November 5, 2024, SenseAuto announced that it had completed a strategic financing of US$100 million in C1 round, which was exclusively invested by a leading domestic car manufacturer. The financing will be used to strengthen its domestic production projects, expand overseas business, and provide financial support for exploring the commercial operation of Robotaxi and other cutting-edge technologies such as VLA models (Vision-Language-Action Model, a visual-language-action model).CEO Zhou Guang of SenseAuto said: "The completion of this financing represents that our technical strength and engineering capabilities have been deeply recognized by the automotive industry chain. In the next step, SenseAuto will combine the advantages of the investors and partners to achieve general artificial intelligence through intelligent driving, which will give AI the ability to think and judge like humans. I believe that in the era of general artificial intelligence, AI will become an infrastructure, and I firmly believe that SenseAuto will be a major player in the AI 3.0 era."The core R&D team of SenseAuto is one of the earliest teams in the industry to engage in the research and application of artificial intelligence. From the first to launch the "mapless" solution to the release of the end-to-end intelligent driving model DeepRoute IO, SenseAuto has always been at the forefront of AI exploration. In the next stage, SenseAuto will strengthen its computing power, supplement high-precision and high-tech core talents, and accelerate the layout of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies.As a senior partner of NVIDIA, SenseAuto is one of the first enterprises to obtain the Thor chip. SenseAuto will base its research on this chip to develop VLA models, which are expected to be officially launched in 2025. Through VLA models, the intelligent driving system will have higher-level thinking capabilities, be able to understand complex interactive events and hidden semantic information in traffic scenarios, and perform logical reasoning.At present, SenseAuto has successfully deployed the end-to-end model on vehicles and has cooperated with several mainstream car manufacturers to jointly promote the production of more than ten models. It is expected that three models equipped with SenseAuto's intelligent driving system will be launched to consumers by the end of this year. Meanwhile, SenseAuto will use its production experience in China to empower the business development of overseas car manufacturers.In addition, SenseAuto is exploring a new commercialization route - using production vehicles to achieve the commercial operation of Robotaxi on a large scale. Unlike traditional Robotaxi, SenseAuto's Robotaxi is not limited by operating areas, which has advantages in terms of time and economic costs, helping to accelerate the Robotaxi's landing process. With the mass production of smart driving cars and the large-scale operation of Robotaxi, SenseAuto's intelligent driving system will better understand the objective laws of the physical world, have higher-level thinking capabilities, and evolve into general artificial intelligence in the physical world, thus empowering various industries.