Startup AutoX closes over $10 million Series A3 financing led by Dongfeng Motor

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Autonomous vehicle startup Auto X announced on April 10 that it has closed a Series A3 financing worth tens of millions of dollars several months ago.

This round is led by Chinese automaker Dongfeng Motor. After the funding round, the automaker investor and the startup plan to mass produce the commercial vehicles equipped with factory-installed L4 autonomous driving system.

Reportedly, this is so far the biggest value of fundraising in L4 autonomous driving domain invested by Chinese mainstream automakers. Apart from Dongfeng Motor, another state-owned carmaker SAIC Motor also injected capital in Auto X.

Forming partnership with automakers is one of major strategies for AutoX to quickly reap market shares. The startup has been designated by BYD as its first official self-driving partner. At the end of March, BYD showcased the Qin Pro, which features AutoX's sensor kit integrating the 360-degree LiDAR and camera.

What's more, AutoX announced on March 18 it had selected the NVIDIA DRIVE™ AGX Pegasus AI supercomputing platform for its L4 autonomous driving technology — designed to be the standard for enabling L4 autonomy across any mobility platform.

Founded at Silicon Valley in September, 2016, Auto X is dedicated to developing full-stack Level 4/Level 5 autonomous driving solutions. Its founder and CEO, Dr. Xiao Jianxiong, is a founding director of Princeton's Computer Vision & Robotics Lab. In addition, he is also a pioneer in the fields of 3D Deep Learning, RGB-D Recognition and Mapping, Big Data, Large-scale Crowdsourcing, and Deep Learning for Robotics.

At the end of January, 2019, the startup officially opened its Chinese R&D headquarters in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province being attracted by China's huge market potential.

According to relevant record, other investors of Auto X include Capital Today, MediaTek, and so on.