Operator Finance Network Intern Yang Lin/Wen
Recently, Changan Automobile and Zhongmu Technology reached a strategic cooperation to jointly accelerate the "era of intelligent driving mass production", which is undoubtedly a good opportunity for Zongmu Technology, which has experienced the crisis of automotive chips after the epidemic. Today, Operator Finance is also trying to reveal the past history of Tang Rui, founder and CEO of Zhongmu Technology.
Tang Rui was born in 1976, American nationality, some articles also say that he is "Chinese American", in fact, he grew up in China, Ben Shuo graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University, or the Founder of the Meituan Wang Xing's Tsinghua brother, it is estimated that he later joined the United States.
After graduating in 1999, he came to Beijing as a software engineer at The Palm Microelectronics Company, probably because of his excellent work, worked for less than a year, and in February 2000, he worked for the Silicon Valley Palm Microelectronics Company in the United States, successively serving as a software engineer and software director.
From September 2009 to December 2012, he served as senior engineering director of CSR Semiconductor's Automotive Business Group, the world's fourth largest semiconductor company, managing the definition and development of more than $230 million per year in automotive semiconductor products, including in-vehicle multimedia master chips, GPS navigation and technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi.
During his tenure, he led the research and development of the CSR car navigation multimedia platform from the top and created a market of tens of millions of Chinese car navigation and entertainment systems shipped annually, and has a deep understanding of automotive ADAS.
It can be seen from Tang Rui's resume that he has always been rooted in the electronics industry, and has been serving as an engineering director, gaining 14 years of overseas electronic engineering industry work and management experience. He decided to return to China to set up his own company.
Zhongmu Technology was established in January 2013, with Tang Rui himself as CEO, and the actual controller of the company is Tang Rui's mother, Li Xiaoling. At present, Zhongmu Technology is the leader in China's ADAS front-loading market, and the company's ultimate development direction is the automotive automatic driving and smart travel service provider.
The company was founded in October 2014 and released the first version of the industry's most full-featured surround view ADAS system solution, and successfully completed the A round of financing the following year.
Curiously, in January 2017, Zhongmu Technology was listed on the New Third Board, but more than 11 months later, they announced their delisting in December 2017. According to this, the reason given by Tang Rui is only a simple sentence "required for the adjustment of the company's operation and development strategy".
Whether it is really a strategic need we do not know, according to the enterprise investigation, after this delisting, the top management has also undergone a major change of blood, except for Tang Rui, all 4 core executives have been replaced.
After that, Zhongmu Technology is still raising funds, and has completed 8 rounds of financing so far, with a financing amount of more than 240 million yuan. The most recent was in June 2021, which received a $190 million D3 round of financing led by Xiaomi Yangtze River Industry Fund and followed by Qualcomm, Legend Capital and other institutions.
Longitudinal Technology is also one of the first batch of investment enterprises after Xiaomi announced its entry into the field of intelligent electric vehicles, through this investment, Longitudinal Technology is expected to carry out multi-dimensional cooperation in the application field of Xiaomi's intelligent scene.
As a returnee, Tang Rui also hopes to make more contributions, and he said at the signing ceremony of the strategic cooperation agreement between Changan Automobile and Zhongmu Technology on December 28, 2021, "contributing to the development of China's intelligent vehicles".
According to gossip, self-driving startup Zhongmu Technology is considering listing on the Science and Technology Innovation Board. How to develop in the future, operator finance will continue to pay attention.
(Editor-in-Charge: Linghua Kang)