Sequoia Capital China has co-led a Series A investment of $32 million in Baraja Pty, an Australian LiDAR technology developer for autonomous vehicle applications, according to an announcement.
Other investors including CSIRO Innovation Fund, managed by Main Sequence Ventures, and Blackbird Ventures also participated in the round.
Steven Ji, Partner, Sequoia China, has joined Baraja’s board of directors as part of the deal.
The company will use the funds for scaling up production and expand its team, it said. “Baraja’s Spectrum-Scan LiDAR solution is a completely new category of LiDAR technology that dispenses with expensive, spinning lasers,” Ji said.
“Everyone understands the challenges for traditional LiDAR. They’re prohibitively expensive, difficult to manufacture at scale, and need to be incredibly robust. These problems need to be solved for the fully-autonomous vehicle to become a reality, which is why we’re so excited to be working with Baraja,” he added.
Baraja was established by its current chief executive officer Federico Collarte in 2015, who began operations out of his garage.
Sequoia China, founded in 2005 by Neil Shen, has been diversifying its focus to include pre-IPO funding while retaining its traditional focus on early-stage investments.
It is close to raising 15 billion yuan in its fifth yuan-denominated China-focused fund, the largest of its kind, while parent Sequoia Capital is raising an $8-billion global fund in its largest-ever fundraising.
Recently, Sequoia Capital China co-participated to invest $30 million in Hong Kong-based blockchain startup AERGO.
The firm was said to be teaming up with state-owned venture capital (VC) fund and e-commerce powerhouse JD.com to raise up to 40 billion yuan ($5.81 billion) for a new investment firm to focus on late-stage tech investments.
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