Jidu completed nearly $400 million series A financing and launched a mass-produced model in 2023

On January 26, Baidu's smart car brand Jidu announced that it has completed nearly $400 million of Series A financing, which was jointly increased by Baidu and strategic partner Geely. After the financing is completed, Jidu will continue to accelerate the process of R&D and mass production, the first automotive robot concept car will be released at the Beijing Auto Show in April 2022, and the mass production model will be launched in 2023.

In January 2021, Baidu announced that it would build a car and reload it to form a smart car company. In March, Jidu was established and received more than $300 million in start-up capital. After only 10 months, Jidu has once again received a new round of financing, and its innovative product development process and "car-making" speed beyond the industry level have been recognized by the industry.

With the software integration Mule Car R&D model of the first analog prototype car, Jidu has realized the multi-threaded and efficient development of software and hardware parallels. In just 9 months, Jidu has successfully integrated the automatic driving functions of the urban domain and the high-speed domain, and verified its safe and reliable mass production L4 level automatic driving capability in advance. At present, jidu's self-developed electronic and electrical architecture JET1.0, as well as SOA, automatic driving system, core computing power platform, and related sensors are further iterating towards the mass production state. In addition, the interior and exterior trim of Jidu's first automotive robot mass production vehicle, as well as the design of all parts, have gradually entered the stage of mass production mold development.