700 million in financing in half a year! Is the turning point of the 100 billion track coming?

Mines have become the first scene to achieve commercialization in the L4 autonomous driving ecosystem

Autonomous driving was once regarded as the ultimate scenario for artificial intelligence. However, with its implementation on public roads nowhere in sight, closed mines have quietly become a new battlefield for the commercial use of autonomous driving.

According to the clear regulations of the state, open-pit coal mines will realize intelligent continuous operation and unmanned transportation by 2025. Driven by the policy, a "unmanned frenzy" has been set off around "mining trucks", which will also change the current traditional transportation mode and release hundreds of billions of market potential.

Recently, Beijing Yikong Intelligent Driving Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Yikong Intelligent Driving"), a domestic mining unmanned driving company, officially announced the completion of a C++ round of financing of over 300 million yuan. Combined with the previously completed C and C+ rounds of financing, the company has completed more than 700 million yuan in equity financing within half a year.

With the continued recognition of the capital market, the unmanned driving license for mines is accelerating towards large-scale commercialization. The turning point that has been expected for many years may really be coming...

Another victory, billions upon billions

Founded in 2018, Easy Control Intelligent Driving is committed to providing unmanned driving technology and transportation operation services for mining areas. After more than five years of development, Easy Control Intelligent Driving has become a national-level specialized "little giant" and has become the leader in the field, becoming the first mining unmanned driving company in the industry to enter real scenarios and achieve large-scale operations.

In terms of financing, Easycontrol Intelligent Driving has completed seven rounds of financing since its establishment, and has now entered the C+ round with a valuation of nearly 4 billion.

In November last year, the company completed equity financing of approximately RMB 400 million, led by Xingfu Capital, followed by Shenwan Hongyuan, Xinghang Guotou, and Chentao Capital.

On March 12, just five months after the last round of financing, EasyControl Intelligent Driving completed a C+ round of financing of over RMB 300 million. Old shareholders Xinghang Guotou and Zijin Mining once again led the investment, and Zhengzhou High-tech Industry Guidance Fund followed suit. It is reported that the funds raised in this round will be used for technology product research and development and unmanned driving operation management.

By obtaining two consecutive rounds of financing exceeding 100 million yuan in a short period of time, Yikong Intelligent Driving's commercialization capabilities have been verified once again, in addition to further confirming that the title of driverless cars as a "money-eating beast" is not groundless.

Significant technological advantages and frequent favorable policies

As early as the 1980s, unmanned mining technology had already taken root. Caterpillar, an American heavy equipment giant, took the lead in research and development and launched the world's first unmanned mining truck in 1996. After entering the new century, Japan, Australia and other countries have successively launched small-scale application trials.

Open-pit mines are one of the most promising scenarios for the implementation of driverless cars. Their environment is relatively closed and the traffic conditions are relatively simple, which reduces the difficulty for technicians to deal with abnormal situations.

In addition, the vehicle operation modes and transportation routes within the mining area are relatively fixed and predictable, which is conducive to the training and implementation of unmanned driving algorithms. Once a technical solution is maturely applied in a certain mining area, it can be quickly copied to other similar mining areas, greatly reducing the implementation cost and cycle.

Take Yikong Intelligent Driving as an example. Its latest unmanned mining truck solution "Zhuoshan" has the characteristics of scalability and replicability. After multiple rounds of product iterations, Yikong Intelligent Driving has shortened the time from unmanned mining trucks going down to production operations to about 5 days, that is, it can achieve large-scale operation in about a week, which fully proves its leading advantage in replicating mining scene.

The mining environment is often harsh and dangerous. Faced with extreme environments such as high temperature, high cold, and high salt fog, manual operations are not only inefficient, but also have great safety risks. Any small mistake may bring significant economic losses and threaten life. Traditional manual driving inevitably has the risk of errors. The introduction of unmanned driving technology is a "safety lock" to ensure the stable operation of mining operations.

Driven by multiple factors such as safety and production, the country has issued relevant policies to encourage mining areas to promote unmanned and intelligent transformation.

In 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission and eight other ministries jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Development of Intelligent Coal Mines", which clearly proposed that "open-pit coal mines will achieve intelligent continuous operation and unmanned transportation by 2025", making unmanned mining vehicles the only subdivided scenario in the autonomous driving track with clear time node requirements.

In 2022, the Ministry of Emergency Management and the State Administration of Mine Safety issued the "14th Five-Year Plan for Mine Safety Production", emphasizing the need to strengthen the research and development of intelligent mining technologies, promote key technological breakthroughs including unmanned driving, and build demonstration mines.

At the same time, various regions have also actively responded to the national call to promote the development of unmanned driving in local mines. The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has proposed that the number of operators within 300 kilometers of the mining area should not exceed 29, indirectly requiring the mining area to achieve unmanned indicators.

Under the guidance and support of policies, unmanned driving in my country's mining areas has made great progress in recent years. As the "vanguard", Yikong Intelligent Driving has realized large-scale operation of unmanned mining trucks, and has reached in-depth cooperation with central state-owned enterprises including the State Energy Group and the State Power Investment Corporation, and successfully created a number of smart mining benchmark projects.

The 203 unmanned mines it deployed in a super-large open-pit coal mine in Xinjiang have an annual production capacity of tens of millions of cubic meters, with operating efficiency close to that of manual operations, and have successfully helped transportation projects achieve profitability.

Last words

With favorable policies and scenario advantages, coupled with the rising labor costs, the prospect of the unmanned driving market in mining areas is bright. It is predicted that by 2025, the scale of the unmanned driving market in my country's mining areas will exceed 20 billion yuan, and may even exceed 100 billion yuan in the future.

However, looking at the development history of the industry, although domestic companies have explored technology and business models to varying degrees and accumulated rich experience, there are still many challenges to fully realize "becoming bigger and stronger" and achieving economies of scale.

The first is the problem of path dependence. The differences in mining scenarios highlight the personalized needs of mining operations, which often requires companies to "tailor-make" personalized solutions for specific mining areas. However, this is actually contrary to the platform concept of unmanned driving, and is extremely labor-intensive and resource-intensive, affecting the efficiency of solution replication.

Secondly, at the current stage, many companies are focusing on the model of "selling driverless solutions", which requires them to achieve profitability through small-volume, high-priced sales. However, in the long run, they may also need an "entity + operation + service" operation model to further extend the service radius and reduce labor costs in order to further expand profit margins and achieve sustainable profitability.

Moreover, as the domestic mining area share continues to increase and the incremental market space decreases, in the face of considerable cost advantages, going overseas will become an inevitable development path for unmanned mining truck manufacturers.

In short, from scratch, from storytelling to actual implementation, from facing challenges to seeking continuous breakthroughs, autonomous driving companies that rely on scenario advantages and technical genes and hit the pain points of mining companies have seized the track window full of opportunities. The high capital investment and prospective prospects have also boosted confidence in the future of companies.

The current financing boom is not accidental, but a high recognition of the industry's future by capital, as can be seen from the financing scale of over 700 million yuan of Easy Control Intelligent Driving. If driverless companies can continuously break through the bottlenecks of technology and business models at the current stage and continue to enhance their own capabilities, they may really be able to open the door to a track with a scale of hundreds of billions in the future.

This opportunity not only indicates that unmanned driving in mines has ushered in a spring of rapid development, but also indicates that the entire unmanned driving industry ecosystem may make breakthroughs in mining scenarios, and then radiate to other sub-sectors, triggering greater industrial energy.