Jidu completed a $400 million Series A financing, and the mass production model will be launched in 2023

After 10 months, Jidu once again obtained a new round of financing. On January 26, Baidu's smart car brand Jidu announced that it has completed nearly $400 million in 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 research and development and mass production, the first automotive robot concept car will be released at the Beijing Auto Show in April this year, and the mass production model will be launched in 2023.

Jidu said that the successful completion of the new round of financing will help accelerate the research and development and mass production process of automotive robots. In the future, Jidu will increase the introduction and training of cutting-edge talents in related fields such as high-level automatic driving, smart cockpit, and intelligent manufacturing; accelerate the construction of the system for the development and operation of users in the intelligent automobile market, and ensure that the first automotive robot products of Jidu will be presented to the market and consumers in 2023.

Xia Yiping, CEO of Jidu, said that just 10 months after the start of Jidu, under the blessing of cutting-edge AI technology and high-quality vehicle platform and manufacturing process, Jidu's efficient automotive robot development process has been successfully verified. The brain, nerves and trunk of the automotive robot developed by Jidu are developing efficiently, and when the product is delivered, it will definitely be a benchmark mass production product.

What is a "car robot"? Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li once introduced at the Baidu AI Developer Conference: Jidu's auto robot runs through the three product concepts of "free movement, natural communication and self-growth". First, the car robot has the L4 level of automatic driving ability, can move freely; second, the accurate recognition of human-vehicle interaction and speech semantics, so that the car and people can "naturally communicate", understand user emotions, and respond to user needs in real time; third, the car robot can continuously optimize automatic driving and intelligent cockpit experience according to the user's habits of self-learning and iteration, and achieve "self-growth".

It is understood that at present, the electronic and electrical architecture JET1.0, SOA, automatic driving system, core computing power platform, and related sensors developed by Jidu 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.

In the past year, the process of building cars in Jidu has been accelerating. In January 2021, Baidu announced the establishment of a smart car company to enter the automotive industry as a vehicle manufacturer; In March of the same year, Jidu Automobile was established and received more than 300 million US dollars of start-up capital, and the progress of Baidu car manufacturing accelerated; At the end of November of the same year, Jidu, Baidu and Qualcomm jointly announced that Jidu would work with Baidu and Qualcomm to create the first mass production model in China to adopt the 8295, a digital cockpit platform for 4th-generation Snapdragon Automobile.

On January 6, 2022, during the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show, Jidu announced that Jidu's first production model will be equipped with NVIDIA DRIVEOrinSoC (System-on-Chip) and will become an automotive robot capable of L4 level autonomous driving.

Producer: Nandu Intelligent Automobile Industry Ecology Research Group

Written by: Nandu reporter Chen Peijun