Over the past decade, China's electric vehicle (EV) industry has evolved from a niche experiment into a leading force in the global automotive landscape. In the first ten months of 2025, China exported over 2 million EVs, nearly double the year-earlier figure. From European city streets to Southeast Asian highways and Latin American urban centers, Chinese EVs have emerged as one of the most prominent symbols of a new era of “Made in China.”
The global automotive market is undergoing a corresponding transformation. From January to September 2025, global vehicle sales hit approximately 70.53 million units, with new energy vehicles (NEVs) making up over 22% of the total volume. More notably, nearly 70% of the global growth in NEV sales came from China. China's supply chain now holds a 70%–85% global market share in critical components such as batteries. Taken together, China is providing much of the momentum behind the global shift toward electrification.
This structural change extends beyond OEMs. It is also reshaping the supply chain. China has built systemic advantages across the battery supply chain, electric drive platforms, electronic and electrical architectures, and manufacturing efficiency, forming the foundation for the next phase of intelligent mobility.
Against this backdrop, chassis-level system solutions are shifting from mechanical components to core enablers of intelligent driving. Technologies such as brake-by-wire and steer-by-wire now determine whether an intelligent vehicle can carry out algorithmic decisions safely and reliably.
LeeKr Technology (利氪科技) is among a new generation of Tier 1 suppliers emerging at this turning point. By migrating and restructuring application software from actuators to a centralized controller, the company is dedicated to providing secure, efficient, and intelligent holistic chassis-level system solutions for the era of software-defined vehicle.
The global supply chain is being redefined, with the ability to build chassis-level system emerging as a new competitive frontier. The rise of companies like LeeKr is highlighting the profound strength of China's supply chain. Behind the globally successful EV brands, a cohort of new-generation Tier 1 suppliers, mastering core technologies, is rapidly emerging to form the new foundation of the future automotive industry.
The Capital Story
The restructuring of the automotive supply chain has reshaped not only technology architecture but also the direction of capital. This is where LeeKr's story begins.
In the four years since its founding in 2021, LeeKr has raised more than USD 284 million in total financing. In a sector that demands rigorous engineering, mature mass-production capabilities, and uncompromising safety standards, such a rapid funding pace is unusual.
2022: Tech Investors Who Saw the Shift Coming
LeeKr's earliest backers came from investors deeply rooted in China's technology and intelligent mobility sectors, many with prior experience at major internet companies such as Baidu and Alibaba. A representative figure is Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, founder of Sinovation Ventures, who previously held senior roles at Apple, Microsoft and Google. His earlier investments include companies such as Momenta and WeRide, reflecting a long-standing focus on the intersection of software, intelligence and mobility.
In 2022, LeeKr closed nearly USD 28.4 million in Series A and A+ financing from leading Chinese institutions. These investors brought long track records across China's internet, hardware, and early autonomous-driving sectors. What they valued was not short-term revenue, but the underlying trend itself.
Their investment reflected confidence in LeeKr's technical direction and team, as well as an early conviction about where the industry is heading.
2023: National and Industrial Capital Take Notice
In 2023, LeeKr secured USD 56.8 million in Series B financing. The significance of this round lay not in the size but in who participated: national research-linked institutions, local industrial investment platforms, and capital associated with major OEMs appeared together for the first time.
This marked a shift in how LeeKr was perceived. The company was no longer seen only as a promising technology startup, but as a participant with strategic value in China's intelligent EV ecosystem.
The closer alignment of capital and industry became an important milestone. It signaled a move from early-stage uncertainty toward greater supply-chain certainty, giving LeeKr the ability to integrate upstream and downstream resources and positioning it for future strategic orders.
2024: Integration into China's Core NEV Supply Chain
In 2024, LeeKr closed a Series C funding round of more than USD 142 million. Government-guided funds and the strategic investment platforms of major OEMs were the primary participants. Local industrial capital involved in intelligent NEV development also joined, along with investment platforms linked to OEMs that have performed strongly overseas, including Chery.
By the first three quarters of 2025, Chery exported 936,000 vehicles, up 12.9% year-on-year, maintaining its position as China's number-one passenger-vehicle exporter. As one of the earliest Chinese OEMs to achieve global scale, Chery consistently ranks among the top in markets such as Brazil and the Middle East. Its selection criteria for supply-chain partners are widely considered among the most demanding in the industry.
Against this backdrop, Chery's decision to invest in LeeKr carries weight. At this stage, capital is no longer simply fueling the growth of a fast-moving startup. It is integrating LeeKr into the core of China's NEV supply-chain system.
As vehicles move rapidly toward electrification and software-driven architectures, mastery of the underlying execution system is becoming a foundational capability for both industrial security and long-term global competitiveness.
LeeKr's funding history reveals its most distinctive feature: the transformation of its client identity. This further demonstrates that the most powerful validation often comes from the market itself: multiple core OEMs, including China FAW Group, BAIC, and Chery Group, having successively taken stakes in LeeKr.
This signifies not only trust but also a long-term commitment to collaboration and a flywheel effect where one plus one becomes greater than two.
Today, LeeKr serves more than ten automaker customers, and its One-box products are deployed across over thirty vehicle models. Technical validation, industry trust, and strategic capital now reinforce one another and accelerate the company's growth.
Looking back over the past four years, this is more than a financing history. It is a snapshot of the industry's shift from the supplier logic of the fuel era to the emerging supply-chain architecture of the intelligent electric era.
A New Generation of Suppliers
The global automotive industry is now undergoing a disruptive transformation driven by electrification and intelligence. The long-established order of the internal combustion engine era is being reshaped, with new players and multinational giants now competing on the same stage.
The dominant capability in the supply chain is shifting from mechanical manufacturing to electronic control, software, and system integration. With strengths in batteries, electric drive systems, manufacturing efficiency and engineering ecosystems, China has, for the first time, moved to the center of this global restructuring.
As the industry transitions, a new generation of suppliers is emerging. Rather than simply replacing traditional giants, they are working with OEMs to co-develop the architecture of intelligent electric vehicles and are becoming the new Tier 1. LeeKr is one of the most representative examples. As competition among electric vehicle makers expands from China to global markets, the role of these new suppliers is evolving as well.
Internally, LeeKr describes its globalization path as "going abroad with the ship," a strategy of expanding overseas alongside its automotive customers. In its early stage, LeeKr follows clients into overseas markets to meet mass production demands for global vehicle models. It then works alongside OEMs to establish overseas factories, achieving localized manufacturing of critical components. The longer-term goal involves preemptively deploying R&D and production systems in key regions to build capabilities serving the global market.
This is not only LeeKr's development path. It also reflects the broader movement of China's new energy vehicle supply chain toward higher positions in the global value chain.
The Road Forward
Megatrends such as the software-defined vehicle, electric mobility, and autonomous driving are accelerating the need for more advanced chassis technology. From a longer-term perspective, the true constraints on industry expansion no longer lie in perception or computing power itself, but rather in the maturity, reliability, and cross-vehicle/cross-market replicability of holistic chassis-level system solutions. The technical solutions LeeKr focuses on directly address this bottleneck.
Based on this assessment, it suggests that LeeKr is addressing not merely the question of “feasibility,” but rather the challenges of “sustainable operation, scalable delivery, and cross-market adaptability.” This positions it to evolve from a supporting role within the smart EV supply chain into a key provider of foundational capabilities.
The same logic extends to LeeKr's global expansion. Whether following clients into overseas markets or participating in localized development, its consistent goal is ensuring the chassis-level system maintains uniform safety and reliability across diverse regulations and operating environments.
The recent cooperation between LeeKr and the Geleximco Group illustrates how this approach is beginning to take shape. Over time, we believe companies like LeeKr may increasingly serve global automakers directly, translating China's engineering depth and supply chain capacity into universally applicable industrial capabilities.