China Economic Network, Beijing, May 8 (reporter Guo Yue) recently, the artificial intelligence start-up Wave from the United Kingdom received a round C financing involving Nvidia, Microsoft and Softbank, with a financing amount of US $1.05 billion.
Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wave, said, "The capital injected this time is the greatest affirmation of the company's development mode of integrating artificial intelligence and automatic driving since 2017."
The autopilot system developed by Wave is based on the framework of artificial intelligence. Therefore, it is also compared to the car version of ChatGPT in the industry. Since 2018, Wave has started road testing on public roads in the UK, and cooperated with Asda and Ocado Group and other British freight companies. In this regard, Kentaro Matsui, an executive of Softbank, said, "This new technology is revolutionary." This financing will support Wave to accelerate the launch of AI automatic driving products based on mass production passenger vehicles.
At the same time, this financing is also the largest financing in the automatic driving industry this year. The last US $1 billion level financing in the industry was Softbank's investment in Stack, a driverless truck startup, last September. It is worth noting that recently, many companies in the autonomous driving industry have received capital injections. Last week, Hyundai Motor injected 475 million dollars into its autonomous taxi company Motorial; In April, the automatic driving company Applied Intuition raised $250 million. This may indicate that the automatic driving industry is becoming hot again.
It is worth noting that although automatic driving is considered to be one of the directions of automobile development, and related companies are also emerging rapidly, over the years, due to the constraints of laws and regulations, technology and other aspects, large-scale commercial operation of automatic driving is still far away. Not only the development of companies in the industry is limited, but also the overall development of the industry has encountered bottlenecks.
In 2022, Argo AI, an autonomous driving company invested by Ford and Volkswagen, will be completely closed; In 2023, Waymo, an autonomous car company under Alphabet, will carry out multiple rounds of layoffs; In the same year, Cruise, GM's autonomous car business, said it would cut 24% of its workforce to restructure its business; In 2024, Tucson, with the title of "the first stock of autonomous driving", will announce its delisting from NASDAQ in the future... The industrial environment can be seen.
In the Chinese market, the development of automatic driving industry is in full swing. In terms of policy, support has been increasing. For example, in 2023, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development, and the Ministry of Transport jointly issued the Notice on Carrying out Pilot Access and Road Access to Smart Connected Vehicles, officially launching the pilot access and road access to smart connected vehicles.
Auto enterprises are following up one after another. Many auto enterprises, such as BMW, Mercedes, Avita, Dark Blue, Mercedes, Jihu, BYD, Zhiji, and Celis, have obtained conditional automatic driving (L3) highway road test licenses in China. Domestic leading enterprises of automatic driving, such as Black Sesame Intelligence, Horizon, Zongmu Technology, Wenyuan Zhixing, Zhijia Technology, Momenta, also received widespread attention. In addition, many enterprises have successively pushed advanced intelligent driving functions such as urban NOA; The intelligent driving function has sunk to the market of 100000 yuan.
In September 2023, Guo Shougang, Deputy Director of the First Equipment Industry Division of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, revealed at the "2023 World Conference on Intelligent Connected Vehicles" that in the first half of 2023, the market penetration rate of China's intelligent connected passenger vehicles equipped with auxiliary automatic driving systems will reach 42.4%, and the country has opened more than 15000 kilometers of intelligent connected vehicle test roads.
