"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" (researcher Wang Feng, intern researcher Ou Xu), recently, autonomous driving company Guangzhou Wenyuan Zhixing Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Wenyuan Zhixing") completed a new round of equity financing of more than 400 million US dollars, with a post-investment valuation of 4.4 billion US dollars. According to the late Late Post report, this round of investors includes GUANGZHOU AUTOMOBILE Group, Bosch Venture Capital, Sino-Arab Industrial Investment Fund, and Carlyle Investment Group. Except for GAC Group, the remaining investors are new shareholders of Wenyuan Zhixing.
According to the public information of Tianyancha, since its establishment in 2017, Wenyuan Zhixing has completed 9 rounds of financing, and has reached strategic partnerships with a number of top global OEMs, including Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, Yutong Group, GUANGZHOU Automobile Group, etc., especially since December 2020, it has completed 5 rounds of financing in succession, with a total disclosed financing amount of more than 1 billion US dollars. The continuous acceleration of financing is closely related to the return of the enthusiasm of autonomous driving investment and financing in the past two years.
Patent applications are increasing year by year, and the R&D team is highly active
Wenyuan Zhixing is an L4 level autonomous driving technology company, the world's first startup to conduct driverless testing in both China and the United States. The company has a wealth of autonomous driving technology reserves, set multi-wavelength sensor cross-verification, 360-degree coverage of sensor modules (including lidar, millimeter wave radar, camera), 250 meters detection distance forward lidar in one, and at the same time cooperate with NVIDIA, with the help of NVIDIA DRIVE platform to achieve efficient synchronization of daily TB of huge data, to create a leading full-stack automatic driving software and hardware solution.
According to the Wisdom Bud Global Patent Database, Wenyuan Zhixing has applied for 291 patents and authorized 69 patents, with an average authorization period of 1.52 years. Among the patent applications, invention patents accounted for 83.16%, utility models accounted for 10.65%, and patent research and development technology was outstanding. From the perspective of patent trends, the number of patent applications since its inception has increased year by year, and the number of public applications in 2021 is as high as 177, which is nearly 3 times the number of applications in 2020, and the trend of invention patent applications is consistent with the general trend; the company's patents under review account for more than 69%, reflecting the recent high innovation vitality and continuous research and development accumulation. According to the innovation word cloud, the company mainly focuses on computer equipment, automatic driving, sensors, obstacles, detection methods, lidar and other fields for patent layout.
Chart 1: Patent Application and Licensing Trends of Wenyuan Zhixing (Data Source: Wisdom Bud)
Figure 2: Wenyuan Zhixing's Patent Innovation Word Cloud (Data Source: Wisdom Bud)
According to public information, the company has R&D and operation branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Anqing and Silicon Valley in the United States, and more than 70% of the team members are R&D engineers, and a high proportion of R&D engineers bring technical guarantees. The company has also established a 5G joint laboratory with China Unicom, and has made leading progress in application research and development fields such as remote control, edge computing, and vehicle-road collaboration.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are very important technological foundations in the field of autonomous driving research and development, and the supply of excellent talents in this field is in short supply worldwide. Wisdom Bud data shows that the company's R & D team has strong technical strength. Among the main invention applicants, Han Xu is the founder and CEO of Wenyuan Zhixing, former chief scientist of Baidu's autonomous driving business unit, head of the American Research Institute of the autonomous driving department, tenured professor of the University of Missouri, director of the computer vision and machine learning laboratory; Another major invention applicant, Hua Zhong, is a senior vice president of Wenyuan Zhixing, a Ph.D. graduate of carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science under the tutelage of takeo Kanade, a global computer vision giant, and one of the earliest members of Microsoft Research Asia, responsible for the research and development of computer vision, graphics and machine learning algorithms.
Chart 3: Patent filing trends of major inventors of Wenyuan Zhixing (Data source: Wisdom Bud)
L4 level automatic driving is not yet mature, and many companies have laid out in advance
Unlike the L2 level intelligent driving bias assist system and the product is more mature, the L4/L5 level intelligent driving is the real sense of unmanned automatic driving, which is still in the experimental research stage, and in the face of complex open road conditions, its technical maturity is far from meeting the requirements of full commercialization. Gartner said in its 2019 report that L4-level autonomous driving technology will take more than 10 years to fully mature, and McKinsey previously predicted that the penetration rate of L4 autonomous driving will only be 10% by 2030. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) pointed out in the "China Intelligent Connected Vehicle Development Roadmap 2.0" that by 2030, the sales of new cars equipped with L4 autonomous driving functions in China will account for 20%.
Although there is still a period of time before the L4 automatic driving is fully mature, with the market's high attention to the field of automatic driving in recent years, coupled with the requirements of automatic driving for test mileage and technological development, more and more companies have laid out in advance in this field and strive to occupy a first-mover advantage in the future competition. In addition to startups such as Wenyuan Zhixing, Xiaoma Zhixing, AutoX, Tucson Future, And Zhijia Technology that focus on the research and development of L4 autonomous driving technology, there are also Internet technology giants (such as Google's Waymo, Amazon's acquisition of Zoox, Baidu's Apollo), traditional car manufacturers (such as General Motors' Cruise) and so on through a variety of ways to increase autonomous driving.
Wenyuan Zhixing's technical strength in start-up enterprises is worthy of recognition; in terms of patent layout, although there is a slight gap with a number of autonomous driving entrepreneurial companies (the average number of patent applications is about 500), patents have grown rapidly in recent years, and the gap with similar companies will gradually narrow in a few years with the support of funds. The Internet and automotive industry manufacturers have strong financial and technical backgrounds, and it is still difficult to catch up. Take Google's Waymo as an example, the company has been studying related to it since 2009, investing the most in the field, accumulating the most data, and applying it most comprehensively. Wisdom Bud data shows that Waymo's patent applications have reached 5999, far more than any autonomous driving company in the industry, zoox and Baidu Apollo have also exceeded 1,000 patent applications.
In terms of test mileage, according to the RAND think tank in the United States, the mass production of a set of autonomous driving systems needs to accumulate more than 17 billion kilometers of data to optimize its autonomous driving system. According to the official website, Waymo currently travels more than 32 billion miles in the real world and simulation environment, of which the cumulative real-world travel exceeds 32 million kilometers and the simulation test exceeds 32 billion kilometers. As of January 2022, Wenyuan Zhixing's fleet has exceeded 300 vehicles, and it has accumulated 10 million kilometers on public roads and a simulation test mileage of more than 8 billion kilometers, although there is still a gap with the head company, but it has also achieved a very good accumulation.
Vehicle-road coordination and scene win
The layout route, scenario selection, industrial organization and coordination ability of different enterprises on autonomous driving technology will affect their commercialization process and future industry pattern.
The United States' AI technology and basic scientific research strength are leading the world, with significant advantages in integrated circuits and high-end chips, plus infrastructure construction is market-led, and the people pay attention to personal privacy, so they mainly use bicycle intelligence to lay out autonomous driving solutions. While China's 5G technology is world-leading, the base station coverage is wide, and the government vigorously guides the implementation of new infrastructure construction such as 5G and the Internet of Things, domestic autonomous driving companies are more likely to achieve transcendence through the layout form of combining vehicle-road collaboration and bicycle intelligence.
In addition, under the pressure of current technology and core component costs, L4 level autonomous driving technology products often need to be developed based on scenarios to achieve commercialization faster. In this regard, on the one hand, Wenyuan Zhixing follows the strategic layout of the "Iron Triangle" city, and through the strategic synergy with car companies/Tier 1 and travel/freight platforms, establishes a joint venture company to accelerate the landing of autonomous driving by relying on local resources; on the other hand, accelerates the application development of autonomous driving scenarios, in addition to the first self-driving taxi (Robotaxi) service open to the public, from 2020 onwards, it will begin to lay out autonomous minibuses (Robobus) and autonomous city freight vehicles (Robovan) To accelerate the process of commercial application by expanding new services and scenarios.
Since L4 autonomous driving is difficult to achieve profitability in the short term, it is necessary to have multiple conditions to stay in the market for a long time, and it remains to be seen which companies can really stand out in the future.
"Enterprise Innovation Evaluation Room": The primary market and the authoritative media of the Science and Technology Innovation Board, The Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, jointly initiated by Wisdom Bud, aims to study the company's scientific and technological innovation strength, and rely on the evaluation model of enterprise science and technology innovation to excavate the most scientific and technological strength from the dimensions of technical quality, patent layout, technical influence, company competitiveness, research and development scale and stability.