China's Horizon Robotics hits $3b valuation with Series B

The round was led by South Korean semiconductor manufacturer SK Hynix and its Chinese subsidiary, as well as the investment arms of several unnamed automotive groups, according to a statement. Other new investors include CMBC Capital, Oceanpine Capital, Oceanwide Capital, and One Belt One Road fund managed by CLSA on behalf of CITIC Securities. CMBC Capital is controlled by China Minsheng Banking Corporation, while Oceanwide Capital is a unit of China Oceanwide Holdings Group, best known for acquiring IDG’s operating businesses in 2017.

Several existing backers also re-upped, among them Morningside Venture Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Linear Venture, and V Fund Management, a Beijing-based PE firm founded by a group of former Goldman Sachs bankers.

Horizon was founded in 2015 by Kai Yu, who previously led the autonomous driving project at Baidu as head of the company’s institute of deep learning. Another member of the leadership group was a founding member of Facebook AI Research, the US technology giant’s own AI institute. The team has leveraged its experience in computer vision and image recognition technology to develop embedded AI solutions for autonomous vehicles, surveillance cameras, and other smart devices.

An advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) prototype was released in 2016 and a full ADAS product followed a year later in conjunction with Intel. In 2017, Horizon and Intel also exhibited a high-performance surveillance video analytics solution. The company established an autonomous driving R&D center in Shanghai the same year and participated in the road test of China’s first smart valet parking project.

Horizon lists four products on its website, each of which has been launched in the last two years. Sunrise and Journey are AI vision processors for smart cameras and smart mobility, respectively, while Horizon Matrix is an advanced AI computing platform for level-three and level-four autonomous driving. In addition, the company has released its own AI surveillance camera based on the Sunrise vision processor. It can track and analyze information from a front-end database of up to 50,000 faces.

The collaboration with Intel led to Intel Capital leading a Series A round of more than $100 million that closed in late 2017. Horizon’s initial seed round came in 2015 with commitments from Morningside, Hillhouse, Sequoia Capital China, GSR Ventures, Linear, Sinovation Ventures, and ZhenFund. They re-upped a year later alongside Wu Capital, Tsing Capital, and Vertex China. Yuri Milner invested in the company around the same time.

There has been a considerable amount of private investment in Chinese AI start-ups, most of which are working on facial recognition technologies for use in autonomous driving, surveillance, and identity verification. SenseTime is the best-known and most well-funded example, having closed its Series C-plus round last year at a valuation of more than $4.5 billion. The company has supplied AI chips to the likes of China Mobile and Xiaomi.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Expansion
• Technology
• China
• CITIC Securities
• Oceanpine Capital
• Morningside Technologies
• Hillhouse Capital Management
• Growth capital
• TMT