Baidu Apollo's founding member joins local autonomous driving startup Pegasus

Beijing (Gasgoo)- On March 30th, China’s young autonomous driving startup, Pegasus, announced that the former vice president of Baidu, Wang Jing’ao joined the company as its co-founder and CTO. 

Photo credit: Pegasus

During Wang’s time in Baidu, he was the vice president and the platform R&D manager of the tech giant’s autonomous driving arm, Apollo. In fact, he was one of the founding members of Apollo, in charge of the R&D, planning, and operation of the autonomous platform. 

Wang led the development and iteration of Apollo 1.0 to Apollo 7.0, upgrading numerous important functions. Wang has helped push the Apollo platform to become the largest and most active open autonomous driving platform worldwide. 

Before Baidu, Wang Jing’ao has served at Google and was one of the founding members of the Android1.0 team. The expert led his R&D team into the successful realization of the first 3G function in Android history and introduced the first Android cellphone. 

Pegasus is a months-old startup founded in November 2021. The company is devoted to developing L4 and L5 autonomous driving solutions that cover the logistics and mobility fields. The company’s technologies revolve around the car, road, and the cloud, providing integrated cross-platform solutions under middle-mile logistics, urban freight services, and passenger vehicle mobility scenarios. 

In February 2022, Pegasus has completed its Angel investment round, raising hundreds of millions of yuan. The round was led by Hillhouse Investments and participated by Walden International, V Fund, Pine VC, CGVC, and others.