Japanese autonomous driving player Tier IV raises $300m

The Series B was provided by Sompo Holdings, Yamaha Motor, and Bridgestone Corporation. The grant, to be distributed over a nine-year period, came from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), an independently managed government body.

It follows a USD 100m Series A led by Sompo in 2019 with support from Yamaha, Jafco, KDDI Corporation, and Aisan Technology, a company that specializes in digital mapping. Jafco, KDDI, Sony Corporation, and the University of Tokyo’s Edge Capital provided USD 28m in seed funding in 2018, according to AVCJ Research.

NEDO said it wants to improve energy efficiency in autonomous vehicles by 100x, although the timeframe for this goal is not clear. It is investing via the USD 1.5bn Green Innovation Fund, which has a broader goal of reducing Japan’s overall greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

Tier IV was brought into the fund on the strength of its “microautonomy” concept, which involves creating collectively scalable autonomous driving system. The idea is to allow for open technology components to be combined adaptively under certain timing constraints to build affordable autonomous vehicles in a dependable manner.

"Our platform is enabling our customers to develop their own autonomous driving components or build their own autonomous vehicles by extending our reference design so that they can save cost, optimize risk, and minimize time to market for their production,” Shinpei Kato, founder and chief technology officer at Tier IV, said in a statement.

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• Topics
• North Asia
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Cleantech
• Japan
• automobiles
• autonomous driving