If nothing else, this is one of the most powerful IPOs of the year.
The investment community - Daily IPO learned that Intel officially announced that its self-driving subsidiary Mobileye has secretly filed an IPO in the United States. According to Reuters, Mobileye's valuation is as high as $50 billion, or about 315.8 billion yuan, which is expected to become the largest IPO this year.
Born in Israel, Mobileye was founded in 1999 by the well-known professor Amnon Shashua, which can be called a traditional giant in the autonomous driving jianghu. What is talked about by the outside world is that Mobileye has been immersed in research and development in the first eight years after its establishment, and has not launched any products until 2007, when it released its first self-driving chip Eye Q1, and so far the chip products have sold a total of 100 million, and the BMW, Audi, Volvo and Weilai, Ideal, and Great Wall as we know it all have this chip.
Along the way, Mobileye has gone through twists and turns— first successfully landing on nasdaq in August 2014, and then being acquired by Intel for $15.3 billion in March 2017, shocking the global technology community and becoming a milestone for Intel in the field of autonomous driving.
Through Mobileye, behind it is the surging self-driving jianghu. There is no hottest, only more hot, in this super gold-absorbing track, it is possible to rush out of a unicorn at any time: the latest valuation of Xiaoma Zhixing is 8.5 billion US dollars, Yingche Technology completed 188 million US dollars B+ round of financing, yunji Zhixing angel round won hundreds of millions of yuan... VC/PE would rather vote wrong than miss, and the scene is amazing.
At the age of 62, Israeli professors started a part-time business and buried their heads in a valuation of 300 billion
Looking at mobileye's history, it is the story of an Israeli professor who started a business.
Mobileye's founder is named Amanon Shashua. Born in 1960, he graduated from Tel Aviv University and MIT. Since 1996, he has been teaching at the Department of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Israel, focusing on computer vision science.
In addition to her day-to-day teaching work, Amnon Shashua is a serial entrepreneur. In 1995, at the age of 35, he founded cogniTens, a 3D optics company that he sold to Swedish-listed Hexagon AB for $100 million in 2007.
The birth of Mobileye is also related to the first company he founded. As early as 1998, Toyota Motor, a customer of CogniTens, planned to strengthen the stereo vision technology of computer-assisted driving, and Professor Shashua pointed out at a meeting in Toyota that no stereoscopic lens is needed, a camera can detect objects, thereby improving the safety performance of the car, which triggered a discussion among Toyota engineers, and Toyota provided it with $100,000 for research.
The team originally formed by the professor focused on the industry's oldest problems in vehicle and pedestrian detection, but the parts supplier suggested that they break into the interior of the car first. Six months after the project began, they participated in a bid launched by General Motors to provide a plan to warn drivers that the vehicle had deviated from the lane. Due to the team's excellence and consciously supplemented the algorithm with vehicle monitoring and pedestrian detection functions, although there were errors in the algorithm, but made a low-cost guarantee, GM directly canceled the bid and promised to provide them with $200,000 in project funds.
Soon in 1999, the professor dragged his former investor, Ziv Aviram, to officially set up mobileye in Jerusalem to "be the eye of the car."
Mobileye released EyeQ1, the EyeQ series chip for the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) brain, in 2003 and raised $15 million in Series A funding in the same year. In 2007, the chips they designed were installed in the systems of bmw, GM, Volvo and other well-known car companies. That same year, Mobileye received a $130 million investment from Goldman Sachs.
2013 was also an important milestone for Mobileye, with more chips shipped in this year alone than in the previous five years combined. From 2007 to 2012, the cumulative shipment of the EyeQ series chips was 1 million units, compared with 1.3 million units in 2013. Soon, they launched a listing plan. In 2014, Mobileye raised $890 million to land on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of more than $8 billion, creating Israel's largest IPO, like the light of Israeli technology.
In 2016, the automotive industry chain staged a vigorous merger and acquisition, the largest automotive chip supplier NXP sold to Qualcomm for $47 billion, and in 2017, Mobileye was incorporated into The Innte for $15.3 billion, shaking the autonomous driving industry in one fell swoop.
After years of accumulation under Intel, Mobileye is going public again, with an estimated valuation of $50 billion. In other words, in just five years, the valuation of this super unicorn has more than tripled.
$1.4 billion a year, selling 100 million chips, maybe your car is still in use
At first glance Mobileye, an unfamiliar name and a distant Israeli company, is also a distant Israeli company, but as a leader in the self-driving industry, it is not far from our lives.
With a chip, a camera and a set of algorithms, Mobileye pioneered the implementation of many complex functions, such as lane departure warning, automatic emergency braking of pedestrians, forward collision warning, automatic cruise...
Its market share in the ADAS (Advanced Assisted Autonomous Driving) market is very high. According to Gartner Research, at the end of 2019, its share was around 70%. Even Shanghai Jinshan Bus has used Mobileye's monitoring system. At present, its new orders are also constantly flowing. In 2021, Mobileye received new orders for 41 models from more than 30 automakers around the world, involving about 50 million new cars.
Maybe your car, too, used its chips. There are both foreign brands here. BMW, for example, is its typical loyal customer. BMW 1 Series, X1, etc. all use EyeQ series chips. There are also Volvo and Audi, Volvo's last-generation XC60, Audi's fourth-generation A8 and other models are all equipped with EyeQ series chips, including Tesla's 2014 Model S.
Domestic brands have also kept up - WEILAI Automobile's EC6, ES6, EC6 models, Ideal Auto 2020 Ideal ONE, Great Wall Motor's third-generation Haval H6, AND WEY Mokatatong all use the fourth-generation chip of EyeQ.
From 2017 to 2021, Moblieye shipped 12.4 million, 17.5 million, 19.3 million and 28.1 million chips, respectively, while in 2021, its EyeQ series of system integration chips has sold a total of 100 million.
We can get a glimpse into the secrets of revenue – from 2017 to 2021, it generated about $200 million, $700 million, $900 million, $1 billion, and $1.4 billion, respectively. Operating profits are also growing. Operating profit was $465 million in 2021, up 90.9% year-over-year.
Market expectations for Mobileye are also high, with an estimated valuation of $50 billion, a figure that is much higher than the rising stars of the autonomous driving industry under several giants, such as the unlisted Google Waymo and general purpose Cruise, which are valued at about $30 billion.
But Mobliey is not without hidden worries. At present, many car companies have begun to abandon the use of Moblieye's chips, first Tesla, and now even the most loyal customer BMW has announced that qualcomm chips will be used in the future. The domestic car companies have also changed suppliers, ideally using the Horizon Journey 3 chip in 2021, while Weilai and other car companies have selected NVIDIA Orin chips for new models. In the territory of L4-L5 level autonomous driving chips, there are more competitors.
Mobileye also has new moves. At CES 2022, Mobileye announced that it has partnered with the Geely Krypton brand to create the first consumer-grade L4 self-driving car, which is expected to come into production in 2024.
Now the richest track Investors kill crazy: it is better to make a mistake than to miss it
The mobileye listing is fierce, just a microcosm of the fiery scene of autonomous driving.
In 2022, the autonomous driving jianghu is still bustling. According to incomplete statistics from the investment community, since January this year, there have been more than 20 financing events in the autonomous driving industry, including many large financings of 100 million yuan, and behind them are a number of well-known VCs/PE.
Just on March 7, a blockbuster financing was just born - self-driving unicorn Xiaoma Zhixing announced the completion of the first delivery of the D round of financing, and the company's overall valuation reached US$8.5 billion (about 53.6 billion yuan), an increase of about 65% over the previous round of financing, and nearly US$1 billion in cash. So far, Xiaoma Zhixing, which has only been established for more than five years, has completed 8 rounds of financing totaling more than 1.1 billion US dollars, which can be called the most valuable self-driving startup in China.
Coincidentally, Wincher Technology also announced that it has received $188 million in Series B+ financing. This round of financing was jointly led by Sequoia China and Legend Capital, and the investors included Chow Tai Fook Enterprises Co., Ltd., Hubai Capital and an internationally renowned equity fund, as well as the industrial investment of Zhongda Property Group, and the existing shareholders Meituan, NIO Capital, Sitao Capital, Andrwha Capital continued to invest.
Commenting on this round of financing, Sequoia China said: "For a long time, safety, cost and efficiency have been the main pain points plaguing the trunk logistics industry, and the gradual maturity of autonomous driving technology has provided feasible solutions to solve these pain points, forming a market with great growth potential. In the trunk logistics scenario, Yinche Technology has the ability to develop its own technology, mass production experience and commercial operation of the whole chain, and has built a long-term competitive advantage by taking the lead in mass production. ”
At the end of February this year, Yunji Zhixing completed a multi-hundreds of millions of yuan angel round of financing, led by Hillhouse Venture Capital, and jointly participated in investment institutions such as Walden International, Yunhui Capital, Songhe Capital, and Country Garden Venture Capital. It is worth mentioning that the chairman of the board is Zhang Wen, the founder of the domestic GPU chip company Biling Technology.
We push the timeline forward: at the end of December last year, another new unicorn of autonomous driving was born - Zhixing completed nearly 1 billion yuan of A round financing, and the investors were Meituan, Hillhouse Venture Capital, Qualcomm Venture Capital, First Trip Holdings, Jiuzhi Capital, etc., with a post-investment valuation of more than $1 billion.
In the same month, Wenyuan Zhixing also received strategic investment from GAC Group, and the two sides also planned to gradually build a fleet of tens of thousands of Robotaxi vehicles. As a star enterprise of autonomous driving, Wenyuan Zhixing has reached a valuation of $3.3 billion after the Series C financing in June last year.
Wenyuan Zhixing C round joint lead investor National Investigation Fund once said: "Accelerating the development of a new generation of artificial intelligence is an important strategy of the mainland, automatic driving is an important application field of artificial intelligence, but also the 'crown jewel' of artificial intelligence, the national adjustment fund hopes to strengthen investment in the field of artificial intelligence and promote the development of the national artificial intelligence field." ”
Why is almost everyone flocking to the self-driving track? According to the timeline formulated in the "New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan (2021-2035)", by 2025, highly autonomous vehicles should achieve commercial applications in limited areas and specific scenarios; by 2035, highly autonomous vehicles should achieve large-scale applications.
It is clear that this super track is on the eve of a big explosion. In the view of a well-known early institution, this is an exciting track, "autonomous driving requires a lot of AI, and self-driving cars are also four-wheeled automated robots, so autonomous driving is the intersection of AI and robotics, which represent the future trend, and the strategic value is self-evident." ”
A well-known US dollar VC in Beijing also told the investment community that smart cars are about to start the second round of competition in 2025, the core is automatic driving, "who can take the lead in delivering mature automatic driving products, who can break through with the main engine factory." "Because of this, many investors are crazy about the principle of preferring to make mistakes and not miss them."
The wheels of self-driving history are rolling in, and it also brings an anxiety that has swept through the entire VC/PE circle: if you don't get on the car, I'm afraid it will be too late.