Shunwei, Xiaomi lead round for China automotive chip maker

The round - which exceeded USD 50m in size according to a database maintained by 36Kr - was led by Shunwei Capital and local smart phone maker Xiaomi. Other investors include GSR Ventures, Cathay Capital, SenseTime's Sense Capital, accelerator MiraclePlus, Grit Ventures, Z&Y Capital, and Tsari Capital, which is backed by a Chongqing government guidance fund.

The company, which was established in April 2022, closed an angel round last year led by Genesis Capital and Nio Capital, with participation from ZhenFund, See Fund, and Sky9 Capital. Several of these investors re-upped in the latest round, but they were not named in a statement released by GSR.

Rhino has three co-founders: Ningyi Xu, formerly head of the hardware computing group at the Microsoft Asia Research Institute and the chief architect of Baidu’s smart chip division; Jianyong Zhang, who led the development of Nio's autonomous driving systems; and Guanghui He, a professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University specialising in chip interconnection research.

Rhino focuses on system-on-chip (SoC), a single integrated circuit that brings together all or most components of a computer. The company is looking to develop a data-loop-defined silicon - a chip that creates a self-enhancing closed loop, enabling stronger computation power, faster algorithm iterations, and greater data processing capacity.

Rhino believes data-loop-defined silicon can become an industry standard, given the demand for increased power and functionality that has accompanied the rise of software-defined cars and data-driven intelligence. The company has an R&D team of around 200 based in Beijing, Shanghai, Hefei, and Hangzhou.

Numerous Chinese start-ups are building chips specifically for use in smart cars. They include Indiemicro, which closed a CNY 300m (USD 43m) round last December, and SiEngine Technology, which raised CNY 1bn last July. SiEngine is also an SoC specialist looking to cover all three major automotive chip application fields: smart cockpit multimedia SoC, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and in-vehicle central computing chips.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Shunwei Capital Partners
• Xiaomi
• GSR Ventures
• Cathay Capital Private Equity
• semiconductor
• automobiles
• autonomous driving