36Kr's first | Lingjun Technology received tens of millions of yuan of PreA+ round of financing, and is expected to receive 100 million yuan of orders next year

Text | Angel Lee

Edit | Su Jianxun

36Kr was informed that recently the autonomous driving company Lingjun Technology announced that it has completed tens of millions of yuan of Pre A+ round of financing in January this year, and this round of financing is invested by a logistics group strategically, Ledge Capital participates in the investment, and the old shareholder Zhenxin Capital additionally invests.

It is understood that this round of financing will be used for the large-scale expansion of the technical team and the promotion of the commercialization process of autonomous passenger and freight transport.

Previously, Lingjun Technology completed a multi-million yuan PreA round of financing in September 2021. Earlier, in April 2021, Lingjun Technology completed a strategic round of financing invested by Ganzhou Financial Holding Group and Ganzhou Economic Development Zone Gongfa Group. This is the third funding round the company has received in a 12-month streak, and currently Series A funding is also underway.

Founded in 2016, Ceo and founder Yang Wenli is a master's degree in the Department of Automation of Tsinghua University, a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University, and later served as the chief architect of Western Digital, a senior R&D engineer of Baidu Deep Learning Research Institute, and the chief architect of Baidu's autonomous driving business unit.

At the beginning of the company's establishment, like other L4 level autonomous driving companies, Lingjun Technology also aimed at the field of autonomous passenger cars with open roads. However, the commercialization of the field of autonomous passenger cars has not progressed as smoothly as expected, and in 2021, the international leader Google Waymo has left one after another, and its valuation has fallen from $180 billion in previous years to $30 billion.

Yang Wenli, CEO of Lingjun Technology, told 36Kr: The company has been focusing on technology research and development since its inception, and there has not been much expansion in terms of commercial scale. The main reason is that in the past few years, the autonomous driving industry (including wire control chassis, lidar and other technologies) has not yet matured to the stage where it can be landed on a large scale. Each car costs about two or three million yuan, and if it is rapidly deployed on a large scale, it may generate a large number of ineffective research and development and ineffective input costs.

"The industry's head companies that can be seen in previous years are only the heads of capital. But the real head is not to see how much money is spent, but to see if it can make money. That is to say, it depends on the company's market share and penetration rate. At present, the market share of the head company is very small, and everyone has just begun to commercialize, basically on the same starting line. Yang Wenli said.

With the rapid development of the new energy automobile industry in the past two years and the favorable policies introduced by government departments, Lingjun Technology believes that from 2021, some subdivisions of autonomous driving will usher in a certain scale of commercialization.

Image source: Lingjun Technology

Yang Wenli told 36Kr that in the second half of last year, Lingjun Technology has completed its strategic transformation and chosen the field of autonomous buses and urban logistics with a clearer commercialization scenario.

Yang Wenli frankly said that the process of choosing the direction of strategic transformation is relatively difficult. In 2019-2020, Yang Wenli led the team to investigate the nine major scenarios of automatic driving landing: going down to mines, going to ports, also inspecting sanitation companies, and had a lot of exchanges with industry insiders.

For the choice of scenes, Lingjun Technology follows a principle: the landing of the new scene is high enough with the technical reuse of the original passenger car, but it is easier to land than the autonomous passenger car. The two major areas of autonomous buses and urban regional logistics just meet this principle.

After the scene is determined, the business model of Lingjun Technology is also clear. It is understood that at present, there are three main business paths of Lingjun Technology in the field of autonomous buses and urban logistics:

First, as the main body of operation, it provides people and cargo transportation services, covering scenarios mainly including bus lines, shuttle bus connections, special line operations (close city-county, county-village), closed scenes (parks, parks, universities, etc.), RoboBus (development zones, cities with suitable population density, county seats), and autonomous transportation of goods for urban transportation;

Second, provide the overall solution of L4 level automatic driving (turnkey project), the scope of customers includes bus groups, closed scenes (parks, parks, universities, hospitals, etc.), logistics companies, government demonstration projects, demonstration project connections, etc.;

Third, as Tire1/Tire2 to provide autonomous driving technology solutions, the customer range includes car manufacturers, such as Jinlong, Dongfeng, Kaiwo, FAW, Shaanxi Automobile, Geely, etc., as well as industry partners, including Horizon, Black Sesame, Qingzhi and so on.

Yang Wenli told 36Kr: "The self-driving bus is actually to change the dynamic route of the passenger car to a fixed route, and then do some model adaptation work, and its operating speed is also the operating speed of urban roads, so the degree of reuse is very high, which can reach 95%. ”

In April 2021, after Lingjun Technology obtained a financing from Ganzhou Financial Holding Group and Ganzhou Economic Development Zone Gongfa Group, its bus has been issued a self-driving car city operation license by Ganzhou Municipal Government Development Zone.

At present, Lingjun Technology's self-driving buses have two models, including park buses without steering wheels, and intelligent networked buses operating on urban roads, and the vehicle scale of the two buses can reach 60 units during the year. Together with the logistics model and the existing passenger car development model, the total fleet size is about 100 units.

In addition to Ganzhou, the next self-driving bus of Lingjun Technology will also land in Suzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, Xi'an and other cities. In terms of profitability, "Lingjun Technology is expected to have revenue of 30 million to 50 million yuan this year, and will receive 100 million yuan of orders next year." ”

Similarly, the city's feeder logistics routes are generally more fixed, from logistics distribution centers to regional warehouses. The essential difference between self-driving buses is whether to transport people or goods.

Yang Wenli said that the company's final game still hopes to become the most shining pearl in the crown of the autonomous driving industry, and after the self-driving bus and urban logistics business matures, it will eventually return to the passenger car track.