Just now, an online ride-hailing platform invested by Tencent and Didi has announced financing, but this time it may be because of a "new story".
On April 26, Ruqi Travel announced that it had completed a round of financing of more than 1 billion yuan, which was led by GAC Group, with the participation of Xiaoma Zhixing and Wenyuan Zhixing.
Launched in mid-2019, backed by the major shareholder GAC Group, based on the Greater Bay Area, it has just been established with 1 billion yuan of financing from Tencent, Didi, etc. Ruqi Travel can be described as the peak of its debut. However, with the loss of the scenery of online ride-hailing in the capital market and the impact of the epidemic on the online ride-hailing industry, Ruqi Travel is also facing transformation problems.
On the one hand, Ruqi Travel is based on stabilizing the basic disk of online ride-hailing in the Greater Bay Area; on the other hand, it has begun to make efforts towards the new market of self-driving taxis.
2021 is the climax of investment and financing in the autonomous driving industry in China. Since last year, there have been more than 100 financing incidents in the autonomous driving track, and the amount of financing disclosed alone is nearly 60 billion yuan. Judging by the trend, the industry has the opportunity to reach new highs in financing this year.
In the trillion-level market, there is a huge room for commercial interests behind autonomous driving. Before the large-scale commercial application of autonomous driving, it seems that self-driving taxis have become one of the most likely scenarios to be commercialized. This may also be the reason why players with data advantages such as Kei can once again gain the favor of capital.
But no one can give an accurate timeline for when Robotaxi will be truly commercialized, and when autonomous driving products will enter the lives of ordinary people.
Ride-hailing was transferred to robotaxi operation platform
On April 26, Ruqi Travel announced the completion of a round of financing of more than 1 billion yuan, which was led by GAC Group, and participated in the investment of Xiaoma Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing, SPARX, Ruisheng Asia, Guangzhou Production and Investment Group, Lingnan Commercial Travel Group, Industrial Control Capital and other institutions.
It is interesting to note that this is the first financing of the domestic intelligent network travel industry in 2022, in addition to the investment led by the major shareholder GAC Group, the participants also appeared in the L4 level autonomous driving enterprises such as Xiaoma Zhixing and Wenyuan Zhixing.
In fact, in the impression of many people, Ruqi is more of an online car company. Ruqi Travel belongs to Guangzhou Chenqi Travel Technology Co., Ltd., with a registered capital of 116.8988 million US dollars, is an Internet travel product under the GAC Group, on June 26, 2019, Ruqi Travel was officially launched for trial operation in Guangzhou, with the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as the core to promote the whole country.
At the beginning of the launch, Ruqi received joint investment from GAC Group, Tencent, Guangzhou Bus Group, Didi Chuxing, etc. According to media reports, the investment amount is 1 billion yuan.
For a long time, the core area of Ruqi Travel has been the Greater Bay Area such as Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao. The company is backed by the GAC Group, strictly checking the basic personnel and vehicle facilities, and in order to target the development of the region, Ruqi Travel has targeted users as locals. In order to ensure the professional standards of drivers, the company has also set up a Ruqi Academy to conduct all-round training and road tests for drivers. Since 2021, the compliance rate of Ruqi Travel's orders has ranked first in the country four times, and has ranked first for three consecutive months in June, July and August.
The reason for shifting from an online ride-hailing platform to an autonomous travel data platform is actually twofold:
First, the online ride-hailing industry has changed over time. If 3 years ago, the traditional car companies entered the online car or added icing on the cake, now it is very different, due to urban planning, regulatory policies, epidemics and other reasons, the financing scale of the sharing industry is also shrinking.
The second is the impact of the entire market environment. Although the background of a strong state-owned enterprise is the most obvious advantage of Ruqi Travel, it is impossible to go too smoothly under the law of conservation of energy. In 2020, the advent of the new crown epidemic has brought new challenges to the newly established Ruqi Travel. In 2020 and 2021, the financing that Ruqi Travel has not publicly reported has occurred, and the coldness of the market can be seen.
In the past two years, Ruqi Travel has also done two things to solve these two problems.
On the one hand, the basic disk of the healthy travel business is restored and stabilized to the greatest extent. After the epidemic, Ruqi Travel quickly released an intelligent data system platform - Qi Cube and upgraded its epidemic prevention measures. The rapid response of Ruqi Travel has allowed orders to recover quickly during the epidemic. At the end of February 2020, Ruqi Travel has returned to 90% of its daily level.
Local orders were restored, and Ruqi Travel began to adopt a ripple model, which began to spread outward from the Greater Bay Area. Through the "Ripple Model", guangzhou, Foshan, Zhuhai, Shenzhen, Dongguan and other cities have been opened to operate services, and the user penetration rate in the core cities of the Greater Bay Area has exceeded 30%.
On the other hand, a new "story" is told in the field of autonomous mobility. In November last year, Ruqi Chuxing and Robotaxi launched by autonomous driving technology companies appeared at this year's Guangzhou Auto Show. Ruqi Chuxing began to exert efforts towards the entire new market of Robotaxi, and will launch the first truly open Robotaxi operation platform in the domestic travel industry, providing Robotaxi commercial operation solutions and Robotaxi vehicle operation infrastructure for industry partners, and helping the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain to jointly accelerate the commercial operation of Robotaxi.
In the early stage of transformation, Jiang Hua, CEO of Ruqi Travel, told the media, "Robotaxi wants to land, it is impossible to fight alone, there is no commercial capacity for operation, it is only 'flowering and not fruitful', as an intelligent networked travel platform backed by the world-class automobile industry cluster in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Ruqi's next challenge will be to plug in sustainable and commercial 'wings' for automatic driving."
Whether Robotaxi can achieve commercialization is important to the operational capabilities of the platform, and Ruqi is backed by GAC, with massive data and excellent operating platforms are its advantages. Ruqi's transformation has obviously gained the strong interest of players in the field of automatic driving, and Xiaoma Zhixing and Wenyuan Zhixing will appear on the list of investors in series A financing. Judging from the news reports, in addition to the financial investment, all parties have also carried out in-depth cooperation with Ruqi.
Absorbing 60 billion yuan a year, has automatic driving started to make money?
Autonomous driving is undoubtedly a gold-devouring monster.
In this industry, money is really just a number, and the financing of the head enterprises in the industry is basically based on hundreds of millions of yuan and billions of yuan, and no matter how small it is, it cannot make a splash.
According to the incomplete statistics of Pencil Road, in recent years, around the autonomous driving industry, overseas capital has invested at least tens of billions of dollars, and there are more than 100 billion yuan of capital invested in this unstable technology in China.
△ Image source: IT orange
2021 is the climax of investment and financing in this industry, and since 2021, there have been more than 100 financing incidents on the autonomous driving track, and the amount of financing disclosed alone is nearly 60 billion yuan. And from the trend point of view, the industry has the opportunity to reach a new high in financing this year.
The current situation of the autonomous driving industry is that if you burn money but are not short of money, there will always be people who are willing to pay for the "future tickets".
"In the trillion-level market, there is a huge space for commercial interests behind autonomous driving." Most entrepreneurs and investors say this.
But even after burning hundreds of billions, "leave the steering wheel with both hands" and "drive on the highway, you don't have to care, you can eat hot pot and sing songs" These wishes have not been realized.
L4 and even higher level of autonomous driving is not only hugely invested, but also difficult to mass-produce in the short term. But at the same time, this technology is also an area that has to be invested and takes time to accumulate. Today's autonomous driving scenarios are still more stuck in the park and want to go on the road, but the technology and data are not enough to provide support.
Burning money will never burn out the future of autonomous driving. If we say that in 2020, the necessary core competitiveness of autonomous driving companies is financing. In 2021, practitioners emphasized technology, making AI chips, vehicle-grade sensors, etc. present multiple milestones. So what is this competitiveness in 2022?
A group of practitioners and investors said: it is commercialization.
Although there are still various deficiencies in automatic driving in terms of automated computing power, AI chip on the car, lidar, etc., in 2022, major autonomous driving companies are focusing on technological upgrading while concentrating on commercialization.
In the business ecosystem, a "good technology" can be transformed into a "good business". The application of real-world scenarios is the weapon that makes autonomous driving prove itself. The real-life scenario here includes being able to successfully complete transportation/mobility work and being able to build a complete commercial closed loop. But automatic driving has not yet achieved financing and hematopoiesis "two legs" to walk, all L4/L5 autonomous driving companies are looking for high-frequency, just-needed, mass-produced scenarios, but no company runs through.
"There are three main development models in the autopilot industry: one is the technology company model represented by Google Waymo, taking the one-step Robotaxi (self-driving taxi) route; the other is the model represented by Tesla, where electric vehicle manufacturers independently develop autonomous driving technology and produce and sell their own business models; the third is the model represented by General Motors Cruise, where OEMs cooperate with the autonomous driving team." Earlier, Gu Weihao, CEO of Zhixing, said in an interview with the media.
In fact, before the large-scale commercial application of autonomous driving, self-driving taxis became one of the most likely scenarios to be commercialized.
There are already many practitioners in China.
One of them is Xiaoma Zhixing, which has just invested in Ruqi Travel, and the company has been allowed to invest 100 self-driving cars in Nansha, Guangzhou, to provide taxi services for a period of five years. This is the first taxi operating license issued to an autonomous driving enterprise in China.
Wenyuan Zhixing, another shareholder of Ruqi Travel mentioned above, formed a joint venture with Guangzhou's Baiyun Rental Group in 2018, Wenyuan Yuexing, which operates Robotaxi services.
There is also Baidu, which has obtained a commercial charging license for self-driving travel. Nowadays, when passengers use the "radish run" inside Beijing Yizhuang or Shougang Park to call for a car, their self-driving taxis will drive in front of passengers within 3 to 5 minutes. Some users told Pencil Road that in the Shougang Park, there have been seen turnip run taxis without safety officers in the driver's seat (the co-pilot still has staff).
……
It's a good idea to start with mass transit to promote and popularize self-driving technology or products, but obviously, such a speed may still be too slow for capital and entrepreneurs to expect. Today, major players still have a lot of money in their hands to continue to burn, but no one can give an accurate timetable for when Robotaxi will be commercialized, and when the real sense of self-driving products will enter the homes of ordinary people.