Pony.ai raises an additional $ 100 million to advance its autonomous vehicle technology
Self-driving car startup Pony.ai announced today that it has raised $ 100 million in an extension of its C-series round
The funds raise the company’s total. raised to date to more than $ 1 billion in an after-money valuation of $ 5.3 billion, compared to $ 3 billion in February 2020.
Some experts predict that the pandemic will accelerate the adoption of autonomous transportation technologies.
Despite needing disinfection, self-driving cars can potentially minimize the risk of disease spread. For example, Pony .ai says it delivered more than 15,000 food packages and health kits in California during the COVID-19 health crisis.
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Former Baidu Chief Architect James Peng co-founded Pony. ai in 2016 with Tiancheng Lou, who worked on Google X’s autonomous car project before it became Waymo.
The two aim to build Level 4 autonomous cars – cars capable of operating without human supervision under select conditions, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers – for “predictable” environments like industrial parks, college campuses, and small towns, with a tentative deployment window several years from now. Pony’s full-stack hardware platform.
PonyAlpha, leverages lidars, radars, and cameras to control PonyAlpha is the foundation of the company’s fully autonomous truck and cargo delivery solution, which began testing in April 2019 and is rolling out in test cars within the city limits of Fremont and Beijing, in addition to Guangzhou.
Pony.ai, which has offices in Guangzhou, China, and Fremont, California is one of the few companies that has obtained a test license from Autonomous Vehicles In California, you have obtained a Robo-Taxi operating permit from the California Public Utilities Commission. The only other companies that have been licensed in California are Cruise, AutoX, Aurora, Voyage, Waymo, and Zoox.
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, Pony.ai partnered with Via and Hyundai to launch BotRide, Pony. as the second public Robo-taxi service after a pilot program (PonyPilot) in Nansha, China. BotRide allowed drivers and passengers to call autonomous Hyundai Kona electric SUVs through apps developed with Via, taken from a fleet of 10 cars with drivers for human safety Rad.
In August, Pony.ai signed an agreement with Bosch that “the Explore the future of vehicle maintenance and repair for autonomous fleets ”. The Automotive Aftermarket division of Pony.ai and Bosch in North America plans to develop and test fleet maintenance solutions for commercial Robo-taxi programs. Pony.ai began piloting a maintenance program with Bosch in the San Francisco Bay Area at the beginning of July.
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Among other Potential Benefits: Autonomous driving promises the continuous operation of fleets and the reduction of downtime. According to a 2017 McKinsey report, Robo-taxis could reduce the total cost of ownership of a fleet operator by 30% to 50% compared to owning private vehicles and by around 70% compared to shared mobility, which disrupts the market significantly.
But Robo-taxis will need a very different maintenance infrastructure than cars, in part, because they may lack regular monitoring, have only minutes between passengers, and have expensive, sensitive, and unconventional parts like lidar sensors.
Pony.ai It has competition from Daimler, which in summer 2018 obtained a permit from the Chinese government allowing it to test autonomous cars powered by Baidu’s Apollo platform on Beijing’s public roads, and startup Optimus Ride built a small fleet of driverless ferries. in Brooklyn, Waymo, which has accumulated more than 20 million real-world miles in more than 25 U.S. cities and billions of simulated miles, in November 2018 became the first company to earn a California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) driverless vehicle test permit. Tesla, Aptiv, May Mobility, Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, Pronto.ai, and Nuro.
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However, only Nuro, Waymo, Cruise, and Argo rival the Pony.ai fundraiser. With the exception of Argo, all have raised more than $ 3 billion in venture capital with valuations between $ 7.5 billion (Argo) and $ 175 billion (Waymo).
Luckily for Pony.ai, they are partnering with the Chinese state-owned auto group FAW and the GAC Group, a Guangzhou-based automaker, which is developing level 4 Robo-taxi vehicles.
They also work with On Semiconductor to prototype image recognition and develop processing technologies for image processing. And Pony.ai had driven over 1.5 million autonomous kilometers (or roughly 932,056 miles) by the end of 2019, so it’s within striking distance of Yandex (2 million miles) and Baidu (1.8 million miles).
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Brunei Investment Agency, Brunei’s sovereign wealth fund, and CITIC Private Equity Funds Management participated in the C series extension. Past and existing investors in Pony.ai include Toyota, video game publisher Beijing Kunlun Wanwei, Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, and Legend Capital The Ontario Teacher Pension Plan Board’s Teacher Innovation Platform led this latest round, with participation from Fidelity China Special Situations PLC, 5Y Capital, ClearVue Partners, Eight Roads, and others.
“The Technological innovation is constantly transforming traditional industries and driving will change traditional forms of transportation in the near future, “a CPE spokesperson told VentureBeat via email.” CPE believes that Pony.ai will lead this trend and help you seize the opportunity for faster growth.
Venutrebeat / TechConflict.Com