Chinese autonomous driving startup Momenta said on Friday it has received $500 million from SAIC Motor, Toyota Motor and auto parts supplier Bosch, as the global auto industry pursues the autonomous future.
Other investors in the funding round include Daimler AG, Temasek, Yunfeng Capital and Tencent, Momenta said in a statement. It did not disclose the valuation.
The four-year-old firm, led by Cao Xudong, a former Microsoft executive, is testing autonomous cars in Beijing and China’s eastern city of Suzhou, and has a research centre in Germany’s Stuttgart.
Momenta is working with automakers to develop mass-production vehicles with self-driving functions to gather real-time data for the fully autonomous driving technologies for future products. Data is a key part of the self-driving industry which enables companies to improve their technologies in different environments.
Momenta will expand its workforce and gather more data to improve future technologies, it said.
Toyota last year partnered with Momenta to develop a high definition (HD) mapping platform in China for autonomous driving vehicles, a key to allowing such vehicles to locate themselves.