Self-driving tech company Pony.ai, backed by Toyota Motor Corp, has raised the first tranche of its Series D round of financing to reach a valuation of $8.5 billion, the startup announced on Monday.
While it did not disclose the investors or financial details of the first tranche, Pony.ai said that the fresh capital brought its balance sheet liquidity to almost $1 billion. It plans to reveal details of the Series D round upon the completion of the full funding round.
Pony.ai “has always been well funded,” said the startup’s CFO Lawrence Steyn in a statement. The Series D round will fund Pony.ai’s development “several years into the future – in fact, we believe, up to the window of our anticipated launch of mass commercialisation.”
At $8.5 billion, the startup’s current valuation increased by about 60.4% from the level of the previous rounds. The Fremont, US-based startup was valued at $5.3 billion when it closed $267 million in the initial phase of a Series C round in November 2020. The deal was led by the Teachers’ Innovation Platform of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (OTPP), Canada’s third-largest pension fund.
In February 2021, it secured another $100 million in an extended Series C round from investors such as Brunei’s sovereign wealth fund Brunei Investment Agency and China’s CITIC Private Equity (CPE).
Pony.ai, which is testing its self-driving system in both the US and China, plans to use the financing to step up its efforts in talent recruitment, R&D investment, global road tests of robotaxis and robotrucks, formation of strategic partnerships, mass production, as well as mass commercial deployment.
Pony.ai was founded in late 2016 by former Google and Baidu engineers Lou Tiancheng and James Peng. It launched the robotaxi service in December 2018, allowing passengers to hail self-driving taxis through a mobile app. Its robotaxi service is now available in Guangzhou, Beijing in China and Irvine, Fremont in the US.
“A key part of our story for our investors is our tech development path. From 2020 to the end of 2021, our key safety metrics increased tremendously, such that in most circumstances Pony.ai’s virtual driver is now equal to or superior to a human driver,” said Lou, now Pony.ai’s co-founder and CTO. “We’re confident in our autonomous vehicle tech readiness as we rapidly scale toward robotaxi and robotruck commercialisation and mass production.”
Pony.ai, which works with automakers like Toyota, FAW Group, and GAC Group, was reportedly considering an initial public offering (IPO) in the US in early 2021. It later shelved the plan of going public through a merger with a blank cheque company at a $12-billion valuation due to Beijing’s tightened scrutiny of foreign listings by China’s tech firms, Reuters reported in August 2021, citing sources.