Deal focus: JingChi gases up with Qiming investment

To commit more than $50 million in pre-Series A round for a company less than six months after its founding, investors must be extremely confident that the start-up can deliver on its promises. But JingChi, a developer of technology for self-driving cars operating in Silicon Valley, always felt it had a killer app.

“Other start-ups show PowerPoint slides that say why their technology is better than somebody else’s on paper,” says Qing Lu, CFO of JingChi. “We are able to demonstrate our cars running around during rush hour here in Sunnyvale, where we’ve got all the bikers from Google, all the people walking around, buses from Google and the Apple campus. It’s very complex and a good place to demo our cars.”

The demonstrations paid off for the company, which recently bagged $54 million from Qiming Venture Partners and strategic investor Nvidia GPU Ventures. JingChi aims to use the new capital to become a leader in China’s self-driving car space.

Though based in California, JingChi’s focus on China runs in its founders’ blood. Its five senior managers are all from China, and three are local tech sector veterans. Both CEO Jing Wang and CTO Xu Han were members of Baidu’s autonomous driving unit, and Qingxiong Yang, the VP for engineering, was a senior director for the autonomous driving unit at Didi Chuxing. 

The remaining managers are also well-versed in self-driving technology: Chief Architect Yan Li headed the US-based autonomous driving engineering team of China’s Ucar, while Lu was CFO of Velodyne LiDAR, a developer of the laser-based navigation technology used by autonomous vehicles. This gave the team both connections in the US venture scene and an understanding of the China market.

Furthermore, the company has agreed to launch a fleet of self-driving cars in Anqing, a city in China’s Anhui province with a population of over five million. JingChi will initially deploy 50 test cars to map the city and collect data on its driving patterns, a vitally important step to launching a larger service that it dubs “Robotaxi.”

“Google’s cars drive really nicely in Mountanview, but it doesn’t mean they can drive in China, because the whole driving atmosphere is different,” Lu says. “We need to have deep learning from real data collected in China before we can commercialize, and that’s the real purpose of half the money we raised.”

The test fleet must also help familiarize Chinese pedestrians and drivers to the sight of driverless cars, as even in the US this can still be a shock outside of enclaves like Silicon Valley. Nevertheless, JingChi believes society could be transformed more quickly than anyone envisions today.

“If my daughter just takes Robotaxis to the school or to work, she will never learn how to drive, and if she doesn’t learn how, her daughter will not learn either,” says Lu. “In my view it only takes one generation: when the old drivers are gone, there’ll be just Robotaxi in the future.”  

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• Topics
• Early-stage
• Technology
• Greater China
• North America
• Qiming Venture Partners
• China
• USA
• automobiles
• Venture