Start-up Roadstar.ai gets record US$128 million funding as autonomous car race with Baidu heats up
The investment raised by the Shenzhen-based self-driving tech company surpassed the US$112 million initial funding round of rival Pony.ai
Self-driving technology start-up Roadstar.ai has raised US$128 million in its Series A funding round, marking the single biggest investment made in an autonomous driving company in China.
The record funding, which was led by Shenzhen Capital Group and Wu Capital, has come at a time when open-road tests of driverless cars have intensified in the world’s second largest economy.
Zhou Guang, the chief scientist at Roadstar.ai, said on Tuesday that the new investment “will be used to bankroll operations of our self-driving fleet and data collection”.
Besides that funding round, Roadstar.ai has launched a software suite called Aries, which enables an autonomous vehicle to drive in the rain or at night with a maximum distance for error of five centimetres, according to a separate WeChat post by the company on Tuesday.
Shenzhen-based Roadstar.ai was founded by three engineers who had previously led the development of autonomous driving technologies at Google, Tesla, Apple, Nvidia and Baidu in California’s Silicon Valley.