SenseTime backs China autonomous driving start-up WeRide

ABC International, an investment arm of Agricultural Bank of China Limited, also participated.

Founded in April 2017 by Jin Wang, a former executive at Baidu’s autonomous driving unit, WeRide wants to develop level-four autonomous vehicles for the Chinese market. At level four, the system is responsible for controlling the vehicle and monitoring the driving environment and there is no human intervention – but vehicles are set up so they can be manually driven if necessary.

The company - which is headquartered in Guangzhou and has offices in the US - will use the fresh capital to accomplish its plan of transforming 500 automobiles into autonomous driving vehicles and accumulating more than 5 million kilometers in driving experience.

"What players in the autonomous industry are now competing for is not only technological advancement but also the ability to apply those technologies commercially,” said Tony Han, WeRide's CEO.

China’s autonomous vehicle market could be worth more than $500 billion by 2030, according to McKinsey & Company. The country's first road tests for self-driving vehicles were conducted in June of last year, while Baidu announced in July that it was ready to put its Apolong self-driving bus into mass production.

Numerous autonomous driving specialists have received private funding, notably Momenta, which closed a round last October at a valuation of $1 billion. Other prominent names include Roadstar.ai, Pony.ai, and Yihang.

WeRide received $30 million in angel funding from China Growth Capital and later raised $52 million in a pre-Series A round led by Qiming Venture Partners in 2017. Last October, it raised a Series A round from the likes of Alliance Ventures, the corporate venture capital fund of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, the world’s largest automotive group by unit sales.

Baidu sued WeRide in December 2017, accusing it and Wang of stealing business secrets. Wang left the start-up in March last year, while at the same time the company joined Baidu’s Apollo initiative, an open driving ecosystem that connects partners in the automotive and autonomous driving industry. Han, who was chief scientist of Baidu’s autonomous driving unit, then replaced Wang as the CEO of WeRide.

SenseTime has also raised substantial private funding. The company closed its Series C-plus round at $620 million in May 2018 - its second capital injection in as many months. The investment valued the business at over $4.5 billion.

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