Black Sesame Intelligence was invested by Boyuan Capital under Bosch, and domestic chip companies ushered in the development window period

On January 12, Black Sesame Intelligence, a self-driving chip company, received a strategic investment from Boyuan Capital, a subsidiary of Bosch Group. The two sides will deepen comprehensive cooperation in the field of autonomous driving, work together to create intelligent driving solutions, and further promote the commercialization of autonomous driving.

Founded in 2021, Boyuan Capital, the capital of this strategic investment, is a market-oriented investment platform focused on China's deep technology field established by Bosch, with the main investment directions including sustainable transportation, intelligent manufacturing and Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and carbon neutrality, and currently focuses on deep technology enterprises in the growth stage.

In September 2021, Black Sesame Intelligent announced the completion of the strategic round and C round of financing, of which the C round of financing was led by Xiaomi Yangtze River Industry Fund, and Wingtech Zhan Investment and China Automotive Chip Industry Innovation Strategic Alliance followed by investment. The post-investment valuation of strategic round and Series C financing is nearly US$2 billion. The successive investments of Xiaomi and Bosch have conveyed the important message that the industry's leading enterprises are optimistic about Black Sesame Intelligence.

At present, the new energy vehicle market is in the midst of rapid growth, intelligence has been deeply bound to new energy vehicles, computing power, chips, automatic driving, intelligent cockpit, etc. have become important elements for users to refer to when buying cars. Earlier, Yang Yuxin, CMO of Black Sesame Intelligent Technology, said in an interview with the media that the chip plays the brain of the car's intelligence and becomes the new core after the internal combustion engine. From power windows to driver assistance systems, smart cockpits, and the embedding of computing power and hardware required for software-defined cars, all of this requires the support of a core chip with high computing power.

According to the research report of the China Commercial Industry Research Institute, the size of China's automotive semiconductor market in 2020 is about 11.8 billion US dollars, and it is expected to reach 15.9 billion US dollars by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 5.40%. However, in the current domestic automotive market, autonomous driving and intelligent cockpit chips are still dominated by overseas manufacturers, of which Qualcomm and NVIDIA occupy the leading position. In the competitive landscape of AI chips, Mobileye started the earliest and had the highest market share; Qualcomm and Nvidia were in a leading position in the field of intelligent cockpit and automatic driving, respectively.

In the past 1-2 years, a number of "unicorn" chip companies have emerged in China. In addition to the black sesame intelligence that has just obtained the war investment, Horizon's journey series chips have achieved mass production and loading, and the company's financing amount in 2021 exceeds 2.25 billion US dollars; Xinchi Technology announced in July last year that it has completed nearly 1 billion yuan of B round financing, and CATL has participated in the investment through Chendao Capital.

Yang Yuxin believes that the semiconductor investment fever should continue for a long time, because the industry cycle of semiconductors themselves is relatively long, and the current time window is very good.