The team has reached 100 people, and it is necessary to do both trunk logistics, urban freight and passenger travel.
Author | Tetsu Ta
Edit | Wen Liang
The talents in the autonomous driving circle are still flowing rapidly.
Today, self-driving startup Yunji Zhixing announced that Wang Jing'ao, former vice president of Baidu and general manager of Apollo platform research and development, has joined and served as co-founder and CTO, who will focus on cutting-edge technological innovation and R&D team management.
This is not the first technology bull to join Yunji Zhixing, and Cao Guangzhi, former chief scientist of Tesla and former head of perception of Xiaopeng Automobile, also joined Yunji Zhixing in December 2021.
According to the data, Yunji Zhixing was established in Shanghai in November 2021. Compared with other early established autonomous driving companies, Yunji Zhixing's popularity is relatively insufficient, but it is curious why yunji Zhixing has gained a number of well-known experts in the industry to join in just 4 months after its establishment.
Yun Ji Zhixing, what is the ability?
The madman behind Yun Ji Zhixing
Unlike other self-driving startups that focused on one track when they were founded, Yunji Zhixing is extremely ambitious.
According to the official website of Yunji Zhixing, it is committed to creating a universal platform solution for L4-L5 level autonomous driving covering vehicles, roads and clouds, and providing cross-platform integrated solutions for the three major application scenarios of trunk logistics, urban freight and passenger travel.
At present, Yunji Zhixing has set up R&D centers in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Silicon Valley in the United States, and 70% of the company's team has been deeply engaged in the automotive field for more than 10 years, accounting for 80% of master's and doctoral degrees.
Not small ambitions, partly based on the rapid expansion of Yunji Zhixing's company size and crazy financing speed:
On January 4, 2021, two months after the establishment of Yunji Zhixing, Shanghai Yunchao Yuedong Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., a 100% holding subsidiary, was established with a registered capital of 10 million yuan;
Three months after its establishment, it completed an angel round of financing of hundreds of millions of yuan, setting a record for the financing scale and speed of China's autonomous driving industry, and the current financing scale has exceeded 2 billion yuan.
The reason for the rapid expansion of Yunji Zhixing is inseparable from the past experience of its founder Zhang Wen.
The founder of Yunji Zhixing is Zhang Wen, a continuous cross-bank entrepreneur, who also serves as the chairman and founder of Biling Technology.
According to the understanding of New Intelligent Driving, the size of the team of Yunji Zhixing has now reached 100 people, many of whom have followed Zhang Wen for many years.
He is well versed in business and law, with a J.D. from Harvard University and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Columbia.
In legal terms, Wen Zhang holds a New York bar license and is a fellow member of the Harvard Asian Law Society.
In the business sector, he has served as a senior lawyer and general manager of private equity funds on Wall Street, participating in a total of US$17.6 billion in private equity acquisitions, and is particularly familiar with mergers and acquisitions, mergers and listings in the fields of high-tech, oil, gas, green and new energy.
It is worth noting that Zhang Wen was the president of SenseTime, which was the beginning of his entry into the field of hard technology.
Thanks to Zhang Wen's background, biling technology, a chip company he founded and benchmarked against Nvidia, has also benefited.
At the beginning of the establishment of Biling Technology, Zhang Wen successfully invited Jiao Guofang, former chief scientist of GPU technology of Huawei's Futurewei department, Xu Lingjie, former chief architect of Ali Damo Academy, Hong Zhou, who was responsible for The HiSilicon's self-developed GPU team, and Zhang Linglan, former vice president of Haiguang's overseas GPU department, as senior executives. Since then, AMD executives Chen Wenzhong and Li Xinrong, and Yang Chaoyuan, general manager of NVIDIA Shanghai, have also joined.
Just over a year after its establishment, the cumulative financing amount of Biling Technology has exceeded 4.7 billion yuan, setting a record for the financing speed and scale of financing in this field.
It is reported that Yunji Zhixing has launched a full-stack self-developed technology including multi-sensor pre-fusion technology, multi-modal multi-task neural network, visual simulation system, multi-source fusion high-precision map and autonomous positioning. Recently, Yunji Zhixing reached a deep partnership with Nvidia, and its L4-level vehicle-level mass-production autonomous driving computing platform will be equipped with Nvidia DRIVE Hyperion.
It is difficult to accurately know the real reason why many technology giants join Yunji Zhixing, but the founder's past experience and network resources will largely add a lot of points to Yunji Zhixing in talent recruitment.
Aiming window: chip and autopilot
Few people have made such a choice to create technology companies from the business and legal circles, and Zhang Wen is one of the very few. In 2011, when he first started his business, Zhang Wen chose to develop LED chips, and when he started a business again in 2019, he still chose to develop chips.
Zhang Wen once explained in an interview with The Paper that he believes that China's semiconductor industry is ushering in a historic inflection point in development, and China's advantages in data and scenarios will help Chinese smart chips catch up with the international leading level.
Comparing China's chip industry at that time with the current development of autonomous driving, it is not difficult to find that the industrial environment of the two has more similarities - a wide range of cheap data and diversified scenarios are the huge advantages of the development of the two industries.
Perhaps shortly after the establishment of Biling Technology, Zhang Wen intended to enter the autonomous driving industry.
He once judged that smart cars will be the most demanded smart terminals in the future, and automatic driving at L3 and above needs the support of 500 or even 1000 TOPS or more computing chips. He further believes that chips are one of the basic conditions for autonomous driving.
Now, the wave of autonomous driving entrepreneurship is one of the biggest wind directions for China's science and technology entrepreneurship, and autonomous driving is also one of the technologies that China is expected to lead the international level.
The development of automatic driving is inseparable from the support of high-performance chips, and many companies will not hesitate to purchase and even self-research chips to find chips that meet their automatic driving systems. Zhang Wen's two companies happen to work together to complement each other's strengths.
At present, Biling Technology mainly develops GPUs that can serve artificial intelligence, cloud computing, graphic rendering, big data and other fields, and automatic driving also belongs to its service scope. If the two sides cooperate, Biling Technology can develop a GPU suitable for Yunji Zhixing's automatic driving technology, and while improving Yunji Zhixing technology, Biling Technology will further understand the needs of automatic driving, thereby accelerating product iteration.
Therefore, compared with other companies in the same field, Biling Technology and Yunji Zhixing may have a greater resource advantage.
In fact, Zhang Wen has revealed that the two companies will cooperate.
When Zhang Wen was elected as the chairman of the board of directors of Yunji Zhixing, he said: "As the natural application scenario of the domestic high-end general GPU chip of Biji Zhixing, as the founder, chairman and CEO of Biji Zhixing Technology, I will do my best to help and support the entrepreneurial team of Biji Zhixing while fully promoting the rapid development of Biji Zhixing. ”
The birth of a star cast
Whether it is Yunji Zhixing or Biling Technology, most of the top executives of the two companies have been working in well-known global companies for decades, which is not common among similar startups.
In a short period of time, it attracted a number of industry experts from all over the world to join, partly because of the founder Zhang Wen, and partly from Zhang Wen's requirements.
Zhang Wen once told the media that his requirements for recruiting talents are simple and difficult, and only the best experts in the industry are needed, and the values are highly consistent with the company's core values.
Wang Jing'ao, who joined Yunji Zhixing today, is one of the candidates who meets his criteria.
Looking at Wang Jing'ao's personal resume, it is not difficult to find that he has worked in automotive software, information communications, automatic driving and other industries, and has a lot of personal achievements.
Wang Jing'ao was admitted to Peking University in 1990, majoring in electronics and information systems. He then went to the United States for further studies, where he received a master's degree in computer engineering from the University of Cincinnati and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley.
After that, Wang Jing'ao worked at the Silicon Valley Research Center of the Bosch Group, responsible for the system research and development of mobile and car navigation software and hardware, and participated in the formulation of the European BOSCH navigation standard.
In 2006, Wang Jing'ao joined the Google Android team and was one of the founding employees of Android 1.0, responsible for the research and development of Android system communication protocols and telephones. Under his leadership, the R&D team realized the first wireless function in the history of Android, the first 3G module and other functions, and released the world's first Android mobile phone in 2008.
After achieving some results, he participated in the development of several of Google's internal mobile products as an Android system expert, such as Google Latitude and Google Now.
In 2010, Wang Jing'ao won the Google Founder Award, the highest award within Google. Previously, the award winners included Gmail, Google Maps, Adsense and other teams that created great influence for Google, which shows Wang Jing's proud technical strength.
As Baidu stepped up its efforts to recruit top talent around the world, Wang Jing'ao joined Baidu in 2012 as the head of Baidu's mobile search.
After Baidu launched the research and development of automatic driving, Wang Jing'ao successfully became one of the founders of Baidu's automatic driving open platform, responsible for the overall research and development, planning and operation of Baidu Apollo open platform, and led the development and iteration of all versions of the Apollo platform from 1.0 to 7.0.
Rich work experience, so that Wang Jing'ao in the automatic driving, automotive software and other aspects of a certain precipitation, is one of the experts needed by Yunji Zhixing.
Although the idea that autonomous driving has entered the "second half" has been circulating for a long time, and the news that a number of automatic driving has been acquired or closed has also rendered the pessimism in the industry, the recent establishment of a number of autonomous driving companies has added more vitality and uncertainty to the automatic driving industry.
Looking forward to the autonomous driving industry, more new stories will be told.
END
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