Horizon Robotics
The company will develop chips for autonomous vehicles. Credit: Erik Mclean on Unsplash.

Horizon Robotics, a Chinese developer of artificial intelligence (AI) chips for smart vehicles, has reportedly secured $400m in a Series C2 funding round to develop autonomous driving chips.

The funding was co-led by UK-based investment firm Baillie Gifford, private equity firm YF Capital, CITIC Private Equity Funds Management (CPE), and Chinese battery designer Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL).

The funding will be used by the company to develop and commercialise chips for autonomous vehicles and for creating a partner ecosystem in the industry.

The $400m funding is the second tranche of the company’s Series C funding round through which the Chinese start-up aims to raise $700m.

Last December, Horizon Robotics closed the first tranche of the Series C round, where it secured an investment of $150m from various investors, including Capital Today, 5Y Capital, and GL Ventures, a venture capital (VC) unit of Hillhouse Capital.

Based in Beijing, China, Horizon Robotics was established in 2015 by former Baidu’s autonomous driving unit head Kai Yu.

The company said that it intends to launch the Journey 5 chip, which will have capacity to compute 96 trillion operations per second to enable Level 3 and Level 4 autonomy.

Last October, Horizon Robotics signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the technology firm Continental to collaborate in the fields of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving applications for the Chinese market.

At the time of signing the MoU, Horizon Robotics founder and CEO Kai Yu said: “Continental is a world-leading automotive technology company with a long history of deep industry experience.

“It is of great importance for Horizon Robotics to form the cooperation with Continental to jointly promote AI solutions in the field of intelligent driving, which is conducive to jointly accelerating the development and mass production of forward-looking intelligent driving products, and further accelerating the advancement in the automotive industry.”