MINIEYE, a Chinese developer of visual sensing solutions for intelligent and autonomous driving vehicles, has raised 800 million yuan ($120 million) across three tranches of its Series D funding round to accelerate the R&D and commercialisation of advanced self-driving products.
Shenzhen-based MINIEYE announced earlier this week the completion of the final tranche led by Cathay Capital, with participation from NIO Capital, which is founded by Chinese electric vehicle (EV) brand NIO, and securities firm Shenwan Hongyuan Group.
The Series D round also consists of a Series D2 round in February and a Series D1 round in July 2021. Investors in the previous two tranches included China’s Dongfeng Asset Management, Alibaba co-founder Eddie Wu’s Vision Plus Capital, and CICC Alpha, a direct investment unit of China International Capital Corporation (CICC).
Having delivered over 400,000 suites of intelligent driving products in 2021, MINIEYE works with more than 40 car manufacturers in China including EV upstarts NIO and Hozon Auto, as well as traditional auto companies like FAW Group, Geely, SAIC Motor, and BYD.
The company was grown out of a government-backed advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) project in Singapore, when its founder and chief executive officer Liu Guoqing was studying at the Nanyang Technological University. It was moved to China in 2013 after Liu saw a larger market for his intelligent and autonomous driving solutions.
Its offerings include Level 0 to Level 2 ADAS products, which assist drivers in detecting road environment, vehicle movement, and automatic parking to increase car and road safety. The firm also offers intelligent cabin solutions to help identify fatigue driving, distractive driving, and other dangerous behaviours through in-time monitoring of the driver’s facial expression, gazing direction, and body movement, in addition to high-definition (HD) map updating services.
“Autonomous driving continues to thrive in China driven by favourable factors including policy support and market prospects,” said Liu.
“Moving forward, MINIEYE will adhere to its strategy of pursuing incremental development, gradually elevating our autonomous driving solutions to higher levels. We seek to contribute to the high-quality development of the automotive industry by adopting a flexible business model and forging collaborations with more strategic partners,” he said.
In 2021, the market sizes of China’s urban ADAS, expressway ADAS, and intelligent parking solutions reached about 5.8 billion yuan ($868 million), 24.7 billion yuan ($3.7 billion), and 13.7 billion yuan ($2.1 billion), respectively, according to a report by iResearch Consulting Group.
The Shanghai-based market researcher estimated about 32% of the country’s new vehicles in 2020 were equipped with Level 1 or Level 2 ADAS functions. With the rising application of more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Vehicle (IoV) technologies, intelligent and connected vehicles will become more mainstream in passenger cars produced in the nation.
Before the new round, MINIEYE closed 270 million yuan ($40.4 million) in a Series C round in October 2020. Its early investors include NavInfo, a publicly-listed Chinese developer of ADAS auto chips, as well as HD mapping and high-accuracy positioning solutions.