Super unicorn goes public in the United States with a valuation of over 60 billion!

On April 24, the China Securities Regulatory Commission issued a registration notice for overseas issuance and listing of Pony AI Inc., which plans to issue no more than 98.1495 million common shares and list on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange or the New York Stock Exchange in the United States.

Pony.ai, a super unicorn founded seven years ago with a valuation of US$8.5 billion, finally got the "entry ticket" to the U.S. stock market.

It should be noted that obtaining the registration is only the first step. The company needs to complete the overseas issuance and listing within 12 months after the issuance of the registration notice. Therefore, when Pony.ai will go public, whether it can go public smoothly, and how it will develop after the listing are still unknown.

Although the field of autonomous driving has shown signs of recovery, it has not yet completely emerged from the cold winter, and most companies are burning money while trying to survive.

WeRide, which is on the same track, completed its filing for listing in the United States on August 25 last year, but its progress is still stagnant; Ruqi Mobility also submitted its application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on March 25, 2024, and is once again striving for an IPO.

Pony.ai has also joined the "IPO army", and the competition for the "first Robotaxi stock" in China remains to be seen.

Intelligent driving company founded by a “genius”

Pony.ai was founded in Silicon Valley, the United States, in 2016. The company’s two co-founders are both technical experts and are both related to the “Whampoa Military Academy” in the field of autonomous driving.

Pony.ai co-founder and CEO Peng Jun graduated from Stansted University and worked at Google for seven years. In 2012, he became Baidu's "No. 1 employee" and pioneer in American research, investing technological research in more areas. In 2015, he joined the autonomous driving department as chief architect, leading the overall strategy and development of driverless cars. He is a Baidu T11-level employee.

Another co-founder and CTO of the company, Lou Tiancheng, graduated from Tsinghua University. When he was a student, he "sweeped thousands of troops" in various programming competitions, often fighting against a team alone. He was a genius in the "Yao Class" and was nicknamed "Lou Master". Before graduation, there were rumors about high-paying offers from bigwigs. In the end, Lou Tiancheng joined Google headquarters to engage in social network and machine learning research. He was praised by Google executives as "will influence the future"; in 2016, Lou Tiancheng joined Baidu American Research and became the youngest T10-level employee in Baidu's history. He is the technical soul of Baidu's driverless car project.

In 2016, Peng Jun and Lou Tiancheng left Baidu and started their own company, Pony.ai, with the dream of "letting artificial intelligence technology transform future transportation and travel services."

2016 was also the year when autonomous driving took off. In this year, Google split its autonomous driving project and founded the independent Robotaxi company Waymo, General Motors acquired Cruise, Uber acquired the driverless truck company Otto, and Intel and BMW jointly developed driverless cars...

Pony.ai was founded at a time when the trend was booming, and with two heavyweights at its helm, it was born a "chosen one" and has been on a roll ever since. It has also created a number of phenomenal financings, with top VCs vying to invest, and the company's valuation has also risen.

Super unicorn with a valuation of over 8.5 billion

According to Qichacha data, Pony.ai received seed round financing from Sequoia China and IDG Capital less than a month after its establishment. Since then, it has pressed the "accelerator" for financing, basically maintaining the frequency of 1-2 rounds of financing each year from 2018 to 2023. The company has raised 10 rounds of financing in 8 years since its establishment, and has disclosed 6 rounds of financing with an amount of more than 100 million yuan, with a total financing of more than 1.1 billion US dollars (about 7.971 billion yuan).

The shareholder lineup is also luxurious. In addition to Sequoia and IDG Capital, well-known VCs such as PwC Capital, Lenovo, and Fidelity Asia have also invested. And because of the "China-US" strategy, Pony.ai has also received a lot of foreign investment. Toyota of Japan, DCM Ventures of the United States, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan of Canada, Brunei Investment Authority, and China-UAE Joint Investment Fund are also among the shareholders.

On March 7, 2022, Pony.ai completed its Series D financing, with its valuation rising to US$8.5 billion. Its valuation soared by nearly 38% in a year and a half, making it the most valuable autonomous driving company in China. Last October, Pony.ai received a US$100 million Series D+ financing from an investment fund under the New Future City in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with its valuation remaining unchanged at US$8.5 billion.

Looking back at the company's financing history, Pony.ai does not seem to have suffered much from the issue of "money" and has always been a "hot commodity" in the eyes of investors since its establishment. But is this really the case?

In fact, in the field of intelligent driving, no company is free from worries about money. Frequent financing is precisely because the company is "too short of money". Just when it fills its stomach, it falls into the next hole.

Data shows that the scale of global autonomous driving financing in 2022 fell by nearly 60% month-on-month; the financing scale of the entire industry in China in 2021 was as high as 93.2 billion yuan, but by 2022, this figure had dropped sharply to 24 billion yuan, a decline of nearly 75%.

As early as 2021, there were rumors that Pony.ai would go public in the United States. Some media reported that the company had been preparing for the listing for nearly a year. However, due to changes in the regulatory environment and the delay in its own commercialization process, the IPO plan was delayed again and again. Until this year, in a more severe capital environment, this listing may be Pony.ai's final sprint to the capital market.

Three Horsemen Breakout

Robotaxi

Pony.ai has currently deployed its business in three major areas: robotaxis (Robotaxi), robot trucks (Robotruck), and intelligent passenger car driving (POV), and has built a roadmap for the multi-dimensional advancement of autonomous driving technology, which is in stark contrast to the strategy of most companies at the time who focused on a single track.

As early as 2018, Pony.ai became the first company to launch regular Robotaxi services in China, thus starting its exploration of the commercialization of Robotaxi.

In the three years since then, Robotaxi has achieved steady upgrades in hardware and mass production capabilities. In early 2021, Pony.ai's fifth-generation autonomous driving system mass-produced more than 100 vehicles, and the sixth-generation system, which was first unveiled in 2022, introduced automotive-grade design concepts.

Today, Pony.ai has deployed autonomous driving fleets in first-tier cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and has officially launched charging operations in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

On April 25, Pony.ai announced the establishment of a tripartite joint venture with Toyota China and GAC Toyota. In the future, it will launch nearly 1,000 autonomous driving vehicles in the Chinese market and seamlessly connect with Pony.ai's Robotaxi operating platform.

Although the industry generally believes that Robotaxi is only in the demonstration operation stage and is still some distance away from large-scale implementation, the launch of paid operation has given the entire industry chain a real commercial input-output ratio. Through continuous updating and iterative technology, it is expected to further adjust and optimize the route, and implementation will be closer and closer.

Data shows that as of December 2023, Pony.ai has accumulated more than 28 million kilometers of autonomous driving road tests on complex urban roads. It can be said that the Robotaxi business has now become the "ballast stone" of Pony.ai.

Pony Intelligence

Among the many application scenarios of autonomous driving, because the scenarios have relatively low requirements on the complexity of the road environment, the industry generally recognizes that the "first landing" is urban logistics and long-distance road transportation.

At the end of 2021, Pony.ai completed its first unmanned operation test on the Beijing-Taipei Expressway. Afterwards, it established a joint venture with industry giants such as Sinotrans Logistics and Sany Heavy Truck, forming a closed loop of "technology + vehicle + scenario", and was approved to carry out the first batch of demonstration applications of intelligent connected heavy trucks in Beijing.

Passenger car intelligent driving

In addition, Pony.ai also announced the independent expansion of its intelligent driving business for passenger cars. Although it has just started, it can be regarded as the company's first step from L4 to L2.

At present, most mainstream passenger car intelligent driving assistance systems are positioned at the L2 level, with obvious safety restrictions and limited assistance range. L4 autonomous driving technology will undoubtedly break through the leverage point of this technology. From the dimensionality reduction of the autonomous driving system to the intelligent driving assistance system, the use of the high-performance computing, decision-making and planning capabilities of L4 technology will hopefully greatly improve the intelligent driving function.

The company has launched products such as the intelligent driving software "Xiao Ma Shi Tu", the domain controller "Fang Zai" customized for passenger car scenarios, and the autonomous driving data closed-loop tool chain "Cang Qiong", aiming to provide software and hardware solutions for mass production of automobile companies.