Black Sesame Technologies, a self-driving computing chip company, closed a Series C+ financing round led by Summit View Capital.
Black Sesame Technologies, a self-driving computing chip company, announced the closing of a Series C+ financing round, led by Summit View Capital and with participation by Industrial Bank, GF Xinde Investment, Hina Group, North Beta Capital, Xinding Capital, El Camino Capital, Yangzi Investment Group and other institutions. So far, Black Sesame Technologies has completed all Series C and C+ rounds of financing with a total size of over USD 500 million (CNY 3.38 billion).
After the completion of this round of financing, this chip maker will further enhance the core technology, chip product development and commercialization capabilities, and fully accelerate the mass production application of its self-driving chips, news portal lieyun.com reported.
Intelligent driving will usher in a period of rapid development in the next 3-5 years. This means in the era of intelligent driving, the demands for auto digital applications and digital experience will explode. The computing power will be one of the main points of competence and large computing power autonomous driving chips will become a rigid demand.
Besides, the trend of intelligence and electrification has led to the restructuring of the global automotive industry. Chinese independent brand car companies are among the leading positions and the local ecosystem including chip manufacturing is a strong guarantee for domestic auto companies to build competitiveness. Dr. Ping Wu from Summit View Capital said that chip hashing power has become an important part of the competition in the automotive industry.
Black Sesame Technologies, founded in 2016, has focused on image processing, perception algorithm, and SoC design. With its Al SoC computing platform, Black Sesame Technologies provides customized ADAS / AD solutions for 1st tier automobile companies such as Bosch, SAIC, SGM, BYD, etc. Its latest chip Haishan-2 A1000 Pro can provide multi-scene solutions for L3 and above level of autonomous driving. Its international competitors include AMD and Qualcomm and domestic ones include Allwinner (Chinese:全志科技), Rockchip (Chinese:瑞芯微) and Horizon Robotics(Chinese:地平线).