Suzhou driverless car company wins $100 million! Meituan and Baidu both invested!

On February 27, the urban distribution autonomous driving company Jiushi (Suzhou) Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Jiushi Intelligent") announced the completion of nearly US$100 million (approximately RMB 720 million) in Series A financing.

This round of financing was led by Meituan, followed by BV Baidu Ventures, Unicorn, Xianting Fund, and Cableway Fund. Old shareholders Blue Lake Capital and Jianfa Emerging Investment continued to make additional investments, and Guangyuan Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor.

At present, the field of intelligent driving has ushered in a new round of capital influx. Various companies are working hard to launch new products, tell stories, and grab investments. The scale of the autonomous driving commercial vehicle market seems to be just around the corner.

Gaining the support of two Internet giants, Meituan and Baidu, is undoubtedly a huge boost for start-ups like Jiushi Intelligence. With the completion of this round of financing, Jiushi Intelligence will take this as an opportunity to increase investment, focus on breakthroughs in key technologies in the commercial vehicle field, accelerate the iteration and large-scale delivery of autonomous driving commercial vehicle products, and improve its horizontal and vertical layout in the field of autonomous driving.

01 Real needs dominate the road

Founded in August 2021, Jiushi Intelligence is an emerging brand focusing on standardized pure unmanned driving products and large-scale applications. The company is committed to using L4 autonomous driving technology to provide low-cost and efficient products to multiple application customers such as express delivery, supermarket retail, brand logistics, and logistics group purchasing.

The founder, Kong Qi, graduated with a bachelor's and master's degree in computer software and theory from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He studied under AI expert Professor Lv Baoliang. He was a member of Baidu's Technical Committee and chief scientist of JD's autonomous driving. He is one of the earliest top experts in my country to study and engage in the field of autonomous driving.

Autonomous driving technology can be divided into levels L1 to L5, among which L4 autonomous driving means achieving highly autonomous driving in specific scenarios without any driver operation required throughout the process.

Currently, L4 technology is maturing rapidly, and compared with passenger cars, commercial vehicles are more suitable to become the pioneer field for the commercialization of L4 autonomous driving technology.

The reason is very simple. Compared with the variable usage scenarios of passenger cars, commercial vehicles used for logistics and transportation have relatively fixed daily driving routes and scenarios. This not only reduces the technical threshold, but also facilitates the training and optimization of the autonomous driving system . In addition, the benefits brought by commercial vehicles are simple and intuitive. ToB customers are much more receptive to autonomous driving than the general consumers.

Jiushi has successfully developed commercially applicable L4 autonomous driving technology and has strong vehicle R&D and product delivery capabilities.

In 2023, Jiushi Intelligent launched the world's first L4-level urban distribution mass-produced product - the Jiushi Z5 series. The vehicle's loading space, operating mileage and load weight all reached the industry-leading level.

With the debut and landing of Jiushi autonomous driving cars in multiple cities, it is clear that intelligent logistics has become a new market trend. Traditional human distribution costs are high, so autonomous driving technology is applied to logistics distribution with the mission of reducing costs and increasing efficiency. In the logistics industry, urban distribution is the logistics environment closest to end customers. Data shows that the current total scale of urban distribution has reached 1.5 trillion, and the number of transport vehicles has reached 20 million.

Jiushi Intelligent said that the company's unmanned city distribution vehicles have been put into use in more than 30 regions around the world, with a cumulative operating mileage of more than 300,000 kilometers. It is revealed that the company's order volume continues to grow, and the Z5 series of models can effectively reduce customers' operating costs by more than 50%.

This shows that the force driving the use of driverless cars on the road has shifted to market traction from actual business needs.

In the past, the deployment of driverless cars was mostly driven by local governments, with a top-down promotion path. However, as customers’ recognition of driverless cars increases, they will spontaneously increase their demand for cars.

02 Leading companies bet on accelerating the commercialization process

In the money-burning field of intelligent driving, technology is only the foundation. If any company wants to achieve scale and long-term operations, it cannot do without the "one mantra" - money.

The luxurious lineup of investors in this round also indirectly reflects the capital's optimism about Jiushi's commercialization prospects.

Meituan: Creating a new era of unmanned delivery

Meituan, the lead investor in this round, is a pioneer in the early stages of autonomous driving and smart delivery in China.

As early as 2016, Meituan established an unmanned delivery team and released an unmanned delivery open platform. Three years later, it launched the first generation of automatic delivery vehicles developed independently.

According to Meituan’s official account, on November 12, 2023, its automatic delivery vehicles deployed in Shenzhen completed 249 single-vehicle deliveries, and its automatic delivery vehicles deployed in Beijing completed 212 single-vehicle deliveries, setting a new historical best.

Meituan plans to use autonomous driving technology and vehicles to reshape urban delivery methods. In addition to unmanned vehicles on land, it has also launched a low-altitude drone delivery solution. As of 2023, Meituan's food delivery drones have delivered more than 170,000 orders.

Based on the judgment that automation will improve efficiency in the field of logistics and distribution, Meituan is building future logistics solutions covering new technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing through self-research and investment.

With labor costs remaining high, using autonomous driving technology to reduce manual labor and achieve fast delivery has become a general trend. As a local life service platform, Meituan can accelerate the commercialization of unmanned delivery through investment and layout, and seize the initiative in industrial transformation.

The investment in Jiushi Intelligence can be said to be "just in time".

Jiushi’s unmanned delivery vehicles can provide Meituan with more mature technical solutions. Relying on Meituan’s rich scenarios and customer resources in the catering and other fields, it also provides Jiushi with an excellent growth soil, which is conducive to accelerating the commercial process of the “last mile” of unmanned delivery.

Baidu: Ten years of planning, all in AI

Baidu, which followed the investment this time, is one of the earliest companies in China to enter the field of smart driving and is also the "old employer" of Jiushi's founder.

As early as 2013, Baidu established a special team to develop driverless technology. After nearly a decade of continuous investment, Baidu has formed a closed-loop autonomous driving technology system and has a large-scale patent storage.

Its subsidiary brand Apollo intelligent driving platform brings together resources from all parties to jointly promote technological innovation and is regarded as an important force in promoting the industrialization of autonomous driving. Apollo L4 autonomous driving has completed safe operation tests for a total of more than 80 million kilometers, and Luobo Kuaipao has provided autonomous driving services more than 4 million times in many cities.

Today, Baidu's autonomous driving platform Luobokuaipao has begun commercial operation.

Users can use the app to call unmanned vehicles to complete their trips. Robin Li once revealed that as the scale of operations continues to expand, Turnip Run is expected to get closer to commercial profitability. In the future, Baidu, which relies on large models to empower autonomous driving technology, will have the ability to make intelligent decisions to handle more complex scenarios.

03 Conclusion

At present, autonomous driving has become one of the key technologies leading the future travel revolution and is a hot development in industrial transformation. As far as the current status of the industry is concerned, the field of autonomous driving is currently undergoing an important transformation from technological innovation to commercial application.

In the field of logistics, driverless vehicles can significantly reduce business operating costs, improve transportation efficiency, and solve the problems of human resource shortage and high costs in traditional distribution. A number of leading companies such as Jiushi Intelligence are expected to promote the large-scale application of autonomous driving technology in this field through product and service innovation.

In the field of travel, the accelerated layout of companies such as Meituan and Baidu is expected to form a new form of point-to-point intelligent travel based on apps and dispatching unmanned vehicles. The integration of travel and logistics will further enrich the application scenarios of autonomous driving technology.

However, in the context of the strong demand for autonomous driving in the capital market, we must also realize that the autonomous driving industry still has a long way to go before it can grow into a "towering giant tree". Today, as industrial resources are further concentrated, only companies that overcome bottlenecks and truly master core technologies and operational strengths can break through the siege in the wave of intelligent driving.