On December 22nd Horizon announced that round C financing had been launched, which is expected to total more than $700 million. So far, it has completed the C1 round of US $150 million financing jointly led by Wuyuan Capital (formerly Morningside Capital), Hillhouse Venture Capital and Today Capital. Other institutions participating in this round of financing include Guotai Junan International and KTB.

On February 27th, 2019, Horizon completed a US $600 million financing, led by SK China, SK Hynix and several China first-tier automobile groups (with its funds).At the time, Horizon was valued at $3 billion, making it one of the most valuable and promising AI unicorns.

Part of the financing process of the horizon

Judging from the previous rounds of financing for the horizon, among investors, in addition to well-known investment institutions such as Hillhouse and Sequoia, two of the world's three largest semiconductor companies (Intel Corp and Hynix) have also become strategic shareholders of the horizon. This is the only one of the artificial intelligence chip companies.

So far, the only Chinese company to achieve mass production of automotive AI chips

Established in 2015, Horizon focuses on the research and development of edge artificial intelligence chips and solutions, and plans a complete research and development roadmap based on the innovative artificial intelligence dedicated computing architecture BPU (Brain Processing Unit).

The company has successfully mass-produced "Journey" series AI chips focused on intelligent driving and "Sunrise" series AI chips focused on AIoT, and achieved commercial scale:

In 2017, Horizon launched China's first edge artificial intelligence chip.

In 2019, Horizon successively launched China's first automotive specification-grade AI chip Expedition 2, a new generation of AIoT intelligent application acceleration engine Asahi 2.

In 2020, Horizon launched a new generation of AIoT edge AI chip Asahi 3 and a new generation of high-efficiency automotive gauge-level AI chip Expedition 3.

2020 is the first year of pre-installation and mass production of Horizon gauge-level AI chips. It is understood that Horizon Journey 2 has achieved zero breakthroughs in the mass production of domestic AI chips in the intelligent cockpit domain and high-level auxiliary driving domain in Changan UNI-T and Chery Ant models respectively.As of November 2020, Horizon Expedition 2 shipments have exceeded 100000. Interestingly, Horizon is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd's first AI chip customer in the world.

Won four firsts in five challenges, Horizon dominating Waymo Autopilot algorithm Challenge

On June 15, 2020, Waymo, a self-driving company owned by Alphabet (Google parent company), unveiled the results of the Waymo Open data set Challenge on CVPR 2020 self-driving Workshop, and Horizon, the leader of edge AI chips, won four of the five challenges.

The Waymo Open dataset Challenge includes five challenges, of which Horizon takes the lead in 2D tracking, 3D detection, 3D tracking and domain adaptation, second in 2D testing, and takes the lead in perceptual algorithm strength.

For this challenge, Waymo released more than 10 million miles of self-driving mileage data collected by its self-driving vehicles in 25 cities. Drago Anguelov, chief scientist and project leader at Waymo, said the dataset was one of the largest, most diverse and richest self-driving datasets ever.

The competition attracted BABA Dharma Institute, Berlin Technical University, Google brain team, University of California, Berkeley, Michigan State University, Shangtang Technology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tucson Future, University of Tubingen, Sun Yat-sen University.The world's top self-driving R & D teams, including academia and industry, are actively involved, as well as a considerable number of individual contestants from Waymo.

All three founders have worked for Baidu, Inc..

Horizon's founder, CEO Yu Kai, is a member of the New Generation artificial Intelligence Strategic Planning Committee of the Ministry of Science and Technology, a member of the Science and Technology Regulatory Committee of China Securities Regulatory Commission, a former vice president of Baidu, Inc. Research Institute, Baidu, Inc. IDL Research Institute and the founder of Baidu, Inc. self-driving team, and has rich experience in artificial intelligence academic research and technology research.

The company's co-founder and vice president of technology Huang Chang is a deep learning expert, former Baidu, Inc. IDL chief scientist and chief architect (T10), and co-founder & COO Tao Feiwen has worked in Alphabet Inc-CL C and Baidu, Inc. in the United States.

Dr. Yu Kai led the team to win the first place in the first ImageNet image recognition evaluation as early as 2010, and he was the first Chinese scholar to lead the team to win the crown in the international artificial intelligence algorithm competition.

Horizon team has also won KITTI, Pascal VOC, FDDB, LFW, TRECVID and other international authoritative evaluation of the first in the world.