Xiaomi invests in two rounds of Black Sesame financing

Beijing (Gasgoo)- Black Sesame Technologies has completed several hundred million dollars’ worth of strategic round and C-round of financing, the Shanghai headquartered AI company announced recently.

photo credit: Black Sesame Technologies

The strategic round investors include Xiaomi’s joint venture, Yangtze River Xiaomi Industry Fund, and FulScience Automotive Electronics, a FAW Group joint venture with FAWER Automotive Parts and Desay SV. The C-round was led by Yangtze River Xiaomi Industry Fund and participated by other major capital firms such as Lenovo Capital and Incubator.

The two rounds of financing provided substantial support to Black Sesame in developing high-performance, high computing power autonomous driving platform and expanding its business and team. After the investments, Black Sesame has a market value of nearly $2 billion, helping to accelerate the transformation of intelligent vehicles in China with chips from local companies.

Aside from the capital-level investments, the Yangtze River Xiaomi Industry Fund will also support Black Sesame via its reliable industry chain strategic resources. Notably, this marks the first investment in the automotive chip field made by Xiaomi after its automaking announcement.

FAW Group, parent company of FulScience, is also a long-term partner of Black Sesame Technologies.

In 2019, FAW Group and Black Sesame cooperated to develop autonomous vehicle chips, visual perception algorithms, and data, aiming to deploy autonomous driving technologies onto FAW’s products.

Black Sesame has been commercializing its L2-L3 ADAS and autonomous driving perceptual system solutions through numerous partners, such as FAW Group, Bosch, SAIC Group, Dongfeng Sharing. The company’s algorithm and image processing technologies have been implemented in consumer electronics sectors like smartphones, post-production vehicle use, and smart home systems.