Leapmotor to complete Series A round in middle of 2018

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Leapmotor, a Hangzhou-based Chinese electric vehicle (EV) startup, plans to start IPO (initial public offerings) in the future, Zhu Jiangming, the startup's chairman revealed in an interview. Meanwhile, he also showed that it has not been decided yet whether the company will be listed on domestic market or overseas markets.

In addition, Leapmotor is striving to get national manufacturing qualification and plans to complete a Series A round financing in the middle of this year.  In January this year, the company just accomplished a Pre-A round that was led by Sequoia Capital China. Besides, there were already 3 to 4 automakers having the willingness to produce products for Leapmotor.

Leapmotor was founded in 2015 and has been backed by Dahua Technology Co., Ltd, a provider of video surveillance products and services. It aims to build fashionable intelligent electric vehicle (EV) brands using high scientific technologies with good tastes. 

Xu Wei, vice president of Leapmotor stated that the startup is positioned as a dedicated pure-electric intelligent vehicle maker. The company heretofore is building three vehicle platforms. The first is the S platform on which the sport sedan S01 bases. The second platform is dedicated to developing T-series models and the last one is C-class platform. Based on these three platforms, vehicles will be equipped with intelligent and connected driving systems.

The two-year-old startup's mature configurations are utilized in its LP-S01. The electric sport sedan carries panoramic and blind-spot-detection cameras as well as the in-house cameras with the functions of facial recognition and drowsiness detection. Additionally, various intelligent driving functions are integrated in the ADAS terminal. What's more, the LP-S01 is equipped with a complete IoV (Internet of vehicles) system, covering the front-end instruments, in-vehicle information system and the back-end big data platform.