Chinese LiDAR maker Hesai closes $300 million plus Series D financing

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Hesai Technology (Hesai), a Shanghai-based LiDAR manufacturer, announced on June 8 the completion of its Series D funding with over $300 million raised. The latest financing round was led by GL Ventures, Xiaomi, Meituan, and CITICPE.

Hesai PandarXT LiDAR; photo credit: Hesai

According to Hesai, proceeds from the newly-closed funding round will be used to support the volume production and scale delivery of the factory-installed hybrid solid-state LiDAR, the construction of its smart manufacturing center, and the R&D of automotive-grade high-performance LiDAR chips.

Upon completion of the Series D round, Hesai has raised hundreds of millions of USD dollars from a host of globally renowned tech firms and investment institutes, such as Bosch, Baidu, Xiaomi, Meituan, ON Semiconductor, Qiming Venture Partners, and CPE.

With a team of over 500 staff members, Hesai has accumulated some expertise in in-house-developed photoelectric chips, automotive-grade design process, automated production, functional safety performance, active anti-interference technology, and deep-learning-based perception capability.

In recent years, Hesai rolled out many LiDAR products of the Pandar series, such as the Pandar40, Pandar40P, Pandar64, PandarQT, and Pandar 128 for self-driving cars, the all-in-one sensing kit Pandora, the PandarGT for advanced driver assistance system, the PandarMind for IoV (Internet of Vehicles) applications, as well as the robot-focused PandarXT.

The company has also finished the development of the V1.0 chip LiDAR architecture.

Hesai has formed partnerships with Baidu, Meituan, Aurora, Pony.ai, Nuro, WeRide.ai, and Zoox on Robotaxi service.