On January 26, Baidu (09888. JIDU, a smart car brand owned by HK;BIDU.US, announced that it has completed nearly US$400 million of Series A financing, which was jointly increased by Baidu and strategic partner Geely Group.
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 was building a car. In March, Baidu and Geely jointly registered Jidu Automobile Co., Ltd. and received more than US$300 million in start-up capital. According to tianyancha APP information, the registered capital of Jidu Automobile is 2 billion yuan. Dazi County Bairuixiang Venture Capital Management Co., Ltd., which is 100% owned by Baidu, and Shanghai Huapu Automobile Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Geely Holding Group, hold 55% and 45% of the shares respectively.
This time, it has received a new round of financing, which is only 10 months after the last time. The parties in this round of financing are all from the original shareholders of Jidu Automobile, and there are no external new shareholders, and Jidu did not disclose the shareholding ratio of all parties after this round of financing.
Jidu previously expected to invest about 50 billion yuan in the next 5 years, in addition to Baidu's continuous support, Jidu also seeks external independent financing.
Jidu Automobile believes that automotive robots are the development direction of intelligent vehicles. On August 18, 2021, Baidu CEO Robin Li officially released the Apollo automotive robot at the Baidu World Congress. Judging from the demonstration video, the future of car robots may not have steering wheels, pedals, no human driving, and intelligent configurations such as smart consoles.
Baidu Apollo driverless taxi image according to IC photo
From the perspective of progress, Jidu Automobile completed the modeling design plan and entered the engineering development stage on the 128th day of its establishment, completed the wind tunnel experiment of the first model of the sludge model on the 180th day, and started the development of intelligent software related, intelligent auxiliary driving and intelligent cockpit function development on the 207th day. The company holds 3,472 automotive-related patents.
On January 6, 2022, during the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Baidu and Jidu jointly announced that Jidu's first mass-produced model will be equipped with NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoC (System-on-Chip) and will become an automotive robot capable of L4 level autonomous driving.
On January 19, Jidu announced some of the product design styles and brand logos of its automotive robot concept cars, and also released a brand visual system tailored for automotive robots, including the industry's first automotive robot brand logo "Pixel-J" and brand colors.
It is understood that jidu auto robot has three major functions: L4 level automatic driving capabilities; accurate recognition of human-vehicle interaction and speech semantics; self-learning and iteration according to user habits, and continuous optimization of automatic driving and intelligent cockpit experience to achieve "self-growth".
At present, the self-developed electronic and electrical architecture JET1.0, as well as SOA, automatic driving system, core computing power platform, and related sensors are iterating on 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.
Red Star News reporter Wu Danruo
Edited by Tao Yueyang
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![Jidu Automobile released the first concept car video and announced the product visual system[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)