On June 20th, the Intelligent Driving Solution Provider QCraft recently announced the completion of a multi-billion C round of financing. This round of financing was jointly invested by Zhongguancun Science City Company and Cuihu Fund.

It is reported that the funds will be used to continue to strengthen the intelligent driving function experience that has been mass-produced and delivered, and to build a platform-based product system and standardized delivery process. It will also be used to increase the research and development breakthroughs of cutting-edge autonomous driving technologies such as AI big models and end-to-end.

A QCraft spokesperson told reporters from "Star Daily" that the enterprise's investment and financing window is still open, and some other potential investors are still being contacted. According to business information, QCraft's previous round of financing was completed at the end of 2022, the B round of financing.

It is reported that the four co-founders of QCraft all come from Waymo, a self-driving car service provider under Google.

L4 and L2+ coexist.

QCraft was established in May 2019 and is an unmanned driving company. Based on a large-scale intelligent simulation system and a self-learning decision-making planning framework, it provides mass-produced unmanned driving solutions covering multiple application scenarios, from low speed to high speed, from logistics to travel, and from commercial vehicles to passenger vehicles.

As a company that entered the autonomous driving industry relatively late, QCraft has achieved preliminary development results. The above-mentioned person in charge stated that QCraft has a core technology team background from Google and its subsidiary Waymo, leading its peers in running high-end intelligent driving solutions on NVIDIA Orin & Horizon Journey 5 & 6.

"In May of this year, the company completed nearly 400,000 NOA production deliveries for the leading new energy vehicle manufacturer, and has the experience of large-scale production."

From vigorously developing L4 (where the vehicle completes all driving operations and the driver does not need to keep attention, but the road and environmental conditions are limited) to the current strategy of co-existing L4 and L2 + (advanced auxiliary driving system), the technological development and strategic target selection of QCraft also reflect the changes in the development of autonomous driving technology.

An engineer at a domestic autonomous driving start-up told "Star Daily" that L4 focuses on the technological peak of fully unmanned driving, such as Robotaxi, and is the ultimate goal of the current development of the intelligent driving industry. Meanwhile, it also has the support of the grand background of completely transforming and upgrading transportation and the industry. Therefore, L4 is easier to obtain capital favor at the beginning.

"However, with the slow opening of L4 policies, the bottleneck of implementing L4 appeared only by relying on L4 business, and it is difficult to support the scale effect of the autonomous driving supply chain. Therefore, the landing of L4 is blocked; With the urgent transformation and change of host manufacturers' intelligentization, and the means such as data-driven and end-to-end at the technical level, L2 + solved problems such as development efficiency and on-board experience, and achieved scale-level growth of L2+ intelligent driving. " The above engineer said.

It can be seen that many L4 companies have started transformation since 2022. QCraft has also chosen to cooperate with Horizon to promote the production of L2+ intelligent driving.

According to incomplete statistics by reporters from "Star Daily", domestic enterprises specializing in self-driving solutions also include Mushroom Car Alliance, Xiaoma Zhixing, Wenyuanzhixing, Heduo Technology, and Zongmukeji.

All four co-founders of QCraft come from Google's Waymo.

It is reported that the four co-founders of QCraft, Yu Qian, Hou Cong, Da Fang and Wang Kun, have all worked for Waymo. The other core team members come from world-renowned companies such as Tesla and NVIDIA.

QCraft's CEO Yu Qian is a core sensing algorithm and mapping expert. He graduated from the Computer Department of Tsinghua University and has over ten years of experience in computer vision and machine learning. Before founding QCraft, he was the Tech Lead of machine learning algorithms for key sensing modules at Waymo, with rich experience in unmanned driving landing and management.

Yu Qian previously determined that the embryonic form of fully unmanned driving will appear in certain areas from 2028 to 2030. Overseas markets such as the United States will achieve this earlier than China.

Regarding the development plan and trends in the future, the above-mentioned person in charge told "Star Daily" reporters that the first is to strengthen the intelligent driving function experience that has been mass-produced and delivered; second is to accelerate the delivery of mid-range intelligent driving solutions; The third is to directly deliver a new mid- to high-end intelligent driving solution to customers; In addition, it will gradually transform the experience of large-scale mass production deliveries into a platform-based product system and standardized delivery process to accelerate the large-scale production and delivery of mid-range intelligent driving solutions.

Up to now, Asia Vets has completed six rounds of financing, with investment from Cloud Walk Fund, China Merchants Venture Capital, Horizon Robotics, Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group, Meituan-Dianping's Longzhu Capital, and CICC Capital's CICC Huirong Fund.

One of the investors in this round is Beijing Centergate Technologies, which is funded by the Haidian District Committee and District Government. It is a market-oriented operation platform that supports the construction of the Zhongguancun Science City industrial ecology through services and investment.

Public information shows that Beijing Centergate Technologies has invested in 31 funds and made 71 publicly disclosed investment events. The companies invested in this year are mostly high-tech companies in Beijing. In addition to Asia Vets, they also include Lifeome Technology, Tendencysky, Qingcheng Ji Zhi, and Yunda Wisdom Manufacturing, among others.

In May of this year, Asia Vets announced that it had been awarded the intelligent networked passenger transport bus test license of Beijing's high-level autonomous driving demonstration zone, and fully accessed the 2.0 vehicle-road collaborative scenario application of Beijing's high-level autonomous driving demonstration zone.