On July 26, SemiDrive announced the completion of a Series B financing round of nearly RMB 1 billion. This round of financing was co-led by V Fund and Guokai Equipment Manufacturing Industial Investment Fund Co., Ltd. of Pro Capital, followed by BOC International, Shanghai Sci-Tech Innovation Center Capital and Zhangjiang Haoheng. Old shareholders such as HR Tech China, CTC Capital and Vertex Ventures continue to add to the round, and CATL continues to take a heavy position through CD Capital.
This round of financing will be mainly used for the research and development of more advanced process chips. The trend of intelligent, electric, connected and shared vehicles has accelerated in recent years and is gaining momentum. "More advanced process chip development can achieve better performance and power consumption performance while ensuring reliability is the first priority, and promote faster landing of smart driving commercial application." SemiDrive Chairman Zhang Qiang said.
As a co-leader of this round, Xiong Yanpin, founding partner of V Fund, said, "With the trend of smart cars, the importance of in-vehicle chips is self-evident. SemiDrive stands out with its outstanding technical strength and forward-looking strategic layout, and has built a number of flagship automotive chips in just three years. Automotive semiconductor is a time-consuming and difficult field to explore, yet V Fund is firmly optimistic about SemiDrive's growth prospects and hopes to accompany SemiDrive to become a leading company in the global automotive semiconductor industry."
As a co-leader of this round, Chenhao Xu, Managing Partner of Pro Capital, said, "Investing in SemiDrive is our new layout strategy in the automotive intelligent industry chain. Smart chips used in cars are an important part of the development of smart car industry that goes hand in hand with autonomous driving algorithm. SemiDrive has extensive mass production experience and R&D strength in the field of automotive grade chips, and we fully recognize SemiDrive's planning and layout for future smart driving business. Pro Capital will actively integrate multiple resources to support SemiDrive to become a leading global automotive chip company."
Wang Huadong, a partner of HR Tech China, a long-time shareholder who continued to raise this round of financing, said, "The development of intelligence has brought the automotive industry to a hundred-year unprecedented change, and the chip is the core digital engine that drives its transformation from quantitative change to qualitative change. SemiDrive has become an industry benchmark leading the local automotive chip industry with its forward-looking layout and thinking, as well as its stability and reliability in product development and customer delivery in the context of the overall automotive intelligence industry reorganization. We are very optimistic about SemiDrive's long-term development."
SemiDrive, as a local automotive chip company, has always been committed to providing highly reliable and high performance automotive chips for the automotive industry. Its business covers intelligent cockpit, central gateway, autonomous driving, and high reliability MCU. As one of the few integrated teams in the industry with rich experience in mass production, SemiDrive brings together senior R&D talents from various fields such as automotive chips, Internet and consumer electronics, and automotive electronic electrical architecture to create automotive processors for future electronic and electrical architectures. In 2019, SemiDrive became the first semiconductor company in China to receive the ISO 26262 safety certification from Rheinland, which is known for its stringent standards in the industry.
"Do-it-yourselfers" has been SemiDrive's most prominent tagline in the automotive semiconductor industry for the past three years. From product development to mass production, SemiDrive's development speed is remarkable in the industry. The company was established in 2018 and officially released 9 series of large domain control automotive chips in 2020. In March 2021, the company achieved the order of one million chips per year in the context of "chip shortage", and in April 2021, the company issued the upgraded version of the whole series of automotive chips to further improve the performance. In the past World Artificial Intelligence Conference, SemiDrive launched UniDrive, a fully open autonomous driving platform. It can help customers and partners quickly import full system design based on V9 series chips and agile iterations. It provides a good platform support for the implementation of intelligent driving business scenarios one by one.
Up to now, SemiDrive has cooperated with many mainstream local car companies, joint venture car companies and Tier1 in China, including dozens of mass production projects, including FAW and CAIC, as previously disclosed.
It is noteworthy that SemiDrive always upholds the cooperation concept of "born with openness" at the time of the strong trend of intelligent network connectivity in the automotive industry and the reshaping of the industry structure. SemiDrive has joined hands with nearly 200 partners, including QNX and EB, to build an eco-alliance that integrates the industry value chain, including algorithms, software, hardware, protocol stacks, and so on. It supports customers to freely choose partners based on their respective differentiated product needs to achieve the synergy effect of 1+1>2, and helps customers to realize rapid mass production landing in the new map of smart driving.