ECARX-backed SiEngine bags roughly 1 billion yuan in Series A funding

Beijing (Gasgoo)- China’s automotive chip developer SiEngine announced the completion of its Series A financing round, raising nearly one billion yuan ($148.3 million).

Photo credit: SiEngine

The company plans to put the proceeds in the mass delivery of its current products as well as the next-step R&D and deployment of high computing power automotive chips.

The Series A round was led by Sequoia Capital China, and participated by Bosch’s Boyuan Capital, Neusoft’s capital, China Fortune-Tech Capital, Shanghai Guosheng Fund, and others.

The latest round came after SiEngine received a strategic investment from FAW Group in March this year.

SiEngine commented that this is so far the single largest investment round in the automotive chip design field in the first half of 2022.

SiEngine, the joint venture between Geely-backed ECARX and ARM China, celebrated the launch of the company’s self-developed 7-nanometer auto-grade SoC, the SE1000, in December last year.

The SE1000 adopts a multi-core heterogeneous architecture, with 8 CPU cores realizing 90K DMIPS of computing power, a 14 core GPU with 900GFLOPS computing power, and 8 TOPS NPU computing power. In order to support a robust perception system and infotainment experience onboard, the chip’s ISP has a 1.6Gpixel/s processing power, allowing 360° view, parking, ADAS, and DMS functions.

In June 2022, the company showcased the demonstration Geely vehicle equipped with the SE1000 7nm intelligent cockpit SoC. Test and validation work for production models have been successively completed. Vehicles mounted with the chip will be put into volume production in the second half of 2022.