In addition to Xiaomi, there are also a number of car companies to follow the investment.
Author | Cheng Xi
Edit | Wen Liang
The on-board lidar track is expanding from 2021 to 2022.
New Intelligent Driving learned that Sagitar Juchuang is in a new round of financing, the specific amount may exceed 2.4 billion yuan. Although the timing of the round of funding is unclear, once the amount is finalized, it will refresh the largest single round of financing in the in-vehicle lidar industry.
Previously, the record was held by Hesai Technology, which raised $370 million in Series D funding.
Not only that, people familiar with the matter also revealed to the new intelligent driving that sagitar Juchuang's current round of financing or will be led by Xiaomi, and other investors include a considerable number of car companies, such as Yutong Group, BYD, BAIC Group, which have been rumored before, and there will also be new car-making forces deeply involved.
In addition to car companies, a number of supply chain head enterprises will also participate in this round of investment, and Luxshare Precision, which has previously reached a strategic cooperation with Sagitar Juchuang, will also appear.
The ecological layout of the whole industry chain has begun to appear
In terms of time, the last financing news of the 8-year-old company was disclosed in 2018, when it received more than 300 million yuan of strategic financing from Alibaba Cainiao Network, SAIC Motor Group and BAIC Group.
From 2015 to 2018, angel rounds and A, B and C rounds of financing were completed, including investment institutions including but not limited to TCL Capital, Haitong Kaiyuan, Fosun Ruizheng Capital, Puhe Capital, Kunzhong Capital, Oriental Fuhai, Guangdong Min investment, etc.
If the new round of financing mentioned above is successfully completed, Sagitar will include Tier1, upstream supply chain, downstream passenger car and commercial vehicle companies, independent brand car giants and new car-making forces, industrial capital and professional investment institutions, to achieve a complete ecological layout of the whole industry chain.
This is very critical for the current stage of lidar companies - players who can achieve mass production earlier and obtain customer orders, who will get a greater first-mover advantage, and even very likely to further squeeze the development space of latecomers, the emergence of "strong hengqiang" situation. In contrast, if it is unable to mass-produce, it will gradually lose its market discourse.
A broad, high-quality "circle of friends" can more easily help players create word of mouth through large-scale orders, continue to increase demand, move towards a positive sales cycle, and achieve supply chain cost reduction.
In addition to actively cooperating with the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, Sagitar Juchuang also completed the first vehicle-based solid-state LiDAR production line in March 2021 in order to expand the scale of mass production and improve delivery capabilities.
It is understood that this production line is designed for the mass production of vehicle-level lidar, and the process specifications of the production line, the quality management system, etc. are designed in accordance with the vehicle regulation standards and passed the relevant certification, such as the M1 production line through the IATF 16949, ANSI/ESDS20.20-2014, ISO9001, ISO45001, ISO14001 and other certifications; at present, some production lines of non-vehicle-grade mechanical lidar are not in this category.
Although in the past two years, Sagitar Juchuang has not revealed much about the progress of financing, its business landing has continued to be successful.
It is understood that by the end of 2021, Sagitar Juchuang has held a total of more than 40 fixed-point orders for models at home and abroad, which is the enterprise with the largest number of fixed-point models in the domestic lidar front-loading market, covering Lucid, BYD, GAC Aean, WM Motor, Extreme Krypton, Lotus, Yingche Technology, Zhitu Technology and other enterprises.
Among them, based on the cooperation with Lucid, Sagitar Juchuang has achieved the world's first intelligent solid-state lidar to complete the mass production and delivery of vehicle rules for the first time, and it is also the first mass production and delivery of vehicle rules in the history of China's lidar development.
Due to the stable development of the company and the good business progress, there have been many rumors about Sagitar Juchuang recently.
According to foreign media, Sagitar Juchuang is preparing for a listing in Hong Kong and plans to raise US$1 billion. If it goes well, Sagitar Juchuang is expected to become the first listed lidar company in China.
In addition, it has been revealed that Sagitar Juchuang is developing a production line specifically for Huawei's vehicle-mounted lidar OEM, and Huawei has officially debunked the rumors.
Smart cars with inner rolls, fiery lidar
Some institutions predict that in 2035, the global market size of unmanned driving systems will reach 600 billion yuan, while the size of the Chinese market is close to 150 billion yuan. The huge market imagination space makes autonomous driving a must for automobile manufacturers.
The development of smart cars and autonomous driving has greatly promoted the application of lidar.
Industry insiders said that in 2021, the global shipments of front-loading models equipped with lidar will be in the order of thousands of units, while 2022-2023 will achieve an exponential increase of tens of thousands of units / year, and 2025 may be the next exponential jump, reaching hundreds of thousands of units / year.
The "inner volume" drama at the Guangzhou Auto Show last November was the most intuitive presentation.
Traditional car companies and new car-making forces have invariably taken the lidar model as a killer. The person in charge of the Great Wall's new energy vehicle brand, The Mech Dragon, directly shouted: "How many lidar do you have?" If you have less than 4 pieces, please do not talk. ”
Statistics show that there will be as many as 13 new energy models equipped with lidar on the market in 2022. Beiqi Polar Fox Alpha S, Xiaopeng P5, WEILAI ET7, SAIC RS33, Zhiji L7, etc. have all previewed the launch of lidar. It can be said that almost all known new energy vehicle brands have joined this huge competition.
Compared with the front-of-stage battle between auto manufacturers and me, although the competition between lidar manufacturers under the stage is less explosive, it is not inferior in intensity. At present, the main players of lidar in the world include Velodyne, Luminar, Aeva, Ouster, Innoviz and domestic Sagitar Juchuang, Huawei, DJI, Hesai Technology, Wanji Technology and other enterprises.
It is understood that among many lidar system manufacturers, Sagitar Juchuang has now laid out more than 700 lidar-related patents in the world. Among the 13 new front-loading lidar models unveiled at the Guangzhou Auto Show, as many as 6 are equipped with Sagitar Juchuang products, accounting for nearly 50%.
Through a series of patented technologies, Sagitar Juchuang ensures the safety and reliability of the point cloud data quality of its M1 products in driving scenarios such as complex distribution of high and low anti-objects, strong light illumination, multi-radar thru-beam, rain, snow and fog weather, etc., eliminating the industry's thorny problems from the product side.
In fact, although the front-loading application of lidar has only begun in the past two years, Sagitar Juchuang has been established for eight years.
As the founder and CEO of the company, Qiu Chunxin himself is a doctor of control science at Harbin Institute of Technology, an expert in mobile robot environmental perception technology, who has published many papers in top international robot journals such as JFR (Journal of Field Robotics), completed research and development work on a number of robot-related projects, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and was also a winner of MIT TR 35 (MIT Science and Technology Review Innovative Talent List).
Under the leadership of Qiu Chunxin, Sagitar Juchuang was the first to enter the game with mechanical lidar. Mechanical lidar needs to be stacked to meet the industry performance requirements, not only manufacturability and reliability are difficult to guarantee, but the cost is also high with the stacking of devices. At the end of 2016, in the face of the upcoming outbreak of the autonomous driving market, Sagitar Juchuang decided to adjust its strategy and tilt its focus to the MEMS (micro-motor system) technology solution, thus stepping into the air.
summary
In recent years, the dispute over the technical route of lidar has been an unavoidable topic, and the relevant discussions in the industry have always been the focus of attention. As far as the choice of fixed points for car companies is concerned, lidar based on MEMS routes has made remarkable progress in front-loading and mass production cooperation with major car companies around the world.
With the dust settling in the first year of mass production, the market's cognition and consensus on the lidar technology route has begun to appear.
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