Autonomous Driving Startup Hyperview Secures Round B Financing

Hyperview, an autonomous driving startup in China, announced on November 28 that it had completed the B round of financing worth several hundred million yuan. The investment round was led by Goldstone Investment, followed by Bojiang Capital, CCB Capital, TEDA Venture Capital, Chunxin Hongtu Investment, Decent Investment, and Guolian Securities.

This is the second financing obtained by Hyperview this year after obtaining over 100 million yuan ($14 million) from Aramco’s venture fund Prosperity7 in February, and it is also the largest financing for the company so far.

Hyperview, established in 2018, is a vehicle-level automatic driving system solution service provider integrating software and hardware. Team members come from North American OEMs such as General Motors and Aptiv, and technology companies such as Baidu, Tencent and Huawei. At present, the company has a team of about 500 people, with R&D personnel accounting for more than 85%.

At present, intelligent-assisted driving has become an indispensable selling point for electric vehicle companies. They either develop their own systems or jointly develop with suppliers. When Hyperview was first established, it aimed at L4 automatic driving, which was regarded as a track with great potential, but the technical challenges and commercial implementation proved difficult.

Liu Feilong, founder and CEO of Hyperview, said that, after a year of vehicle testing, he realized that there are still many places to be polished up for the mass production of L4 autonomous driving technology, and it is difficult to generate profits in the short term. Since then, Hyperview has gradually adjusted its business strategy.

Starting from hardware such as domain controllers, after more than three years of development, Hyperview has reserved a series of intelligent auxiliary driving system solutions for passenger cars and commercial vehicles.

At present, software algorithms have become the largest portion of Hyperview’s investment. For example, HyperPilot 1.0, based on Horizon Robotics’ J2 and J3 chips, can provide the basic functions of intelligent high-speed pilot, automatic parking, remote parking and so on. Electric vehicles based on this scheme were launched earlier this year in July.

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In 2022, the global capital market has continued to be depressed with self-driving field in particular facing many up and downs. The bankruptcy of Argo AI, an autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Pennsylvania, shook the entire industry. Some EV makers in China are also researching automatic driving systems. However, Liu believed that not every company should imitate Tesla’s path, adding that autonomous driving will develop in a more standardized direction in the future, and EV makers should focus more on technology accumulation and R&D.