Baidu and Geely increased their holdings, and Jidu received nearly $400 million in Series A financing

Reporter | Li Wenbo

Edit |

1

On January 26, Jidu announced the completion of nearly US$400 million Series A financing, which was jointly completed by Baidu and Geely.

In January 2021, Baidu announced its entry into the smart car manufacturing industry. In March of the same year, Jidu was established after receiving more than 300 million US dollars in start-up capital, with Xia Yiping as CEO. According to reports, Jidu is committed to creating automotive robots, rather than intelligent electric vehicles in the traditional sense. For the first time, it proposes an intelligent electronic and electrical architecture JET for L4. It is understood that in July last year, Jidu has completed the modeling design and entered the engineering development stage. Subsequently, the set degree SIMUCar entered the dynamic testing stage.

On January 18, 2022, Jidu JiDU officially released the brand logo "Pixel-J".

Compared with the new domestic car-making forces, Jidu is more willing to "invest" in intelligence. In terms of smart cockpit, Jidu chose Qualcomm's 4th generation Snapdragon digital cockpit platform 8295 with 5nm process process. The solution is the latest benchmark for digital cockpit solutions in the automotive industry.

In a video released in December last year, JIDU SIMICar tested traffic light recognition, straight, right turn, protected left turn, t-t-cross intersection, and up and down ramps on a 25-kilometer test route.

The test lasted 40 minutes, passing through 39 urban road intersections, 55 pedestrian crossings, 30 traffic lights, and achieved 4 left turns, 5 right turns and 4 up and down gates on 13 kilometers of urban roads and 12 kilometers of highways, running through all automatic driving scenarios.

According to the reporter's understanding, the funds raised by Jidu this A round will be mainly used for research and development and mass production, the first automobile robot concept car will be released at the Beijing Auto Show in April this year, and the mass production model will be listed in 2023.

At the Baidu AI Developer Conference held last year, Baidu Chairman and CEO Robin Li said that the automotive robot developed by Jidu will have L4-level automatic driving capabilities and run through the three major product concepts of "free movement", "natural communication" and "self-growth".