China's Horizon Robotics raises $400m

Other participants include Aspex Management, CloudAlpha Capital, Hermitage Capital, Neumann Advisors, Orix Group, an investment unit of Shandong Expressway, Elite CCI Capital, Yuantai Evergreen Fund, and CITIC Construction Investment. The first tranche of the Series C closed at $150 million last December and was led by 5Y Capital, GL Ventures. Additional contributions came from Guotai Junan International and KTB Investment Management.

The valuation was not disclosed. When Horizon completed its Series B in early 2019 – led by South Korean semiconductor manufacturer SK Hynix and its Chinese subsidiary – the valuation was $3 billion.

The new capital will go towards the development and commercialization of smart chips for use in autonomous driving. Horizon claims to be the only company in China to achieve mass production in this area. It has already released products for level-two (L2) and level-three (L3) autonomy and plans to launch a L3/4 solution in the first half of this year. An L5 chip is currently under development.

At L3 and L4, a vehicle has the environmental detection and decision-making skills to operate independently, and may do so in certain situations, but there is still a human override and a driver in the seat. L5 constitutes full autonomy with no steering wheel or acceleration and brake pedals.

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.

Five products are listed on the company’s website, including AI vision processors, an autonomous driving computing platform, a toolkit to support deployment of AI processors, a mapping and navigation solution, and a smart-cockpit platform intended to improve driving safety and user experience.

Early collaboration with Intel on an advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) product, 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 5Y, Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia Capital China, GSR Ventures, Linear Venture, Sinovation Ventures, and ZhenFund. They re-upped a year later alongside Wu Capital, Tsing Capital, and Vertex China. Yuri Milner invested around the same time.

The Series B also featured CMBC Capital, Oceanpine Capital, Oceanwide Capital, and One Belt One Road fund managed by CLSA on behalf of CITIC Securities.

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