Former Baidu vice president's startup Kuandeng completes RMB 100 million series A financing

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Recently, Kuandeng, a China's high definition map (HD map) startup, announced that the company has closed a RMB 100 million series A capital raising, which was led by IDG Capital and followed by Chengwei Capital and LanTing Capital.

According to relevant information, Kuandeng is a tech startup focusing on crowd-sourced HD map that provides the service of underlying data for the autonomous driving ecological chain. Many core members of its R&D team are from Google and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent).

The startup has made some of innovative technology breakthroughs in industry since its foundation. For instance, it utilizes pure visual mode instead of LiDAR to resolve the contradiction between high precision and low cost and make crowdsourcing a true business model of performability. Besides, its all-new map processing craftsmanship based on AI technology solves bottlenecks of large-scale map production.

Liu Jun, the founder and CEO of Kuandeng, stated that map service, as a basis of autonomous driving industry, has become one of pain points in industrial progress. After this capital raising, the company will continue to work on the R&D and large-scale production of intelligent HD map. Meanwhile, it will join hands with its partners to explore more cooperative modes.

Liu Jun is one of the talents who had served for Baidu. In September 2013, it was confirmed that Liu Jun, the founder of China's social search engine yunyun.com, had joined Baidu as vice president of technology and would be responsible for the operation of Baidu's Technology Strategy Board and directly reported to Robin Li, chairman and CEO of Baidu.  

Before Liu established yunyun.com, he had worked at Google China engineering institute as vice dean and director of global engineering technology, taking charge of Google's Chinese-language search service as well as the team building and R&D of the engineering team.